Secondary education was still left to voluntary and private enterprise. Attention was focused on the “public” schools (independent secondary schools such as Eton and Harrow, usually for boarders from upper- and well-to-do middle-class homes), which under the leadership of outstanding headmasters such as Thomas Arnold were thoroughly reformed. As headmaster of Rugby School (1828–42), Arnold is credited with changing the face of public education in England by instilling a spirit of moral responsibility and intellectual integrity grounded in Christian ethics. Arnold’s aims of school life—religious and moral principles, gentlemanly conduct, and intellectual ability—were to have an enduring influence on the English public school system.
Several new universities were founded during the 19th century, and the latter half of it saw the founding of a number of girls’ high schools and boarding schools offering an education that was comparable to that available in boys’ public schools and grammar schools. Several training colleges for teachers were established by voluntary agencies, and universities and university colleges toward the end of the century undertook the training of postgraduates as teachers in departments of education created for this purpose. Russia
At the beginning of the 19th century, Alexander I" class="md-crosslink">Tsar Alexander I—influenced by the disintegration of the serf system, the trend toward industrialization and modernization, and the democratic ideas of the French Revolution—tried to institute new educational reforms. The statutes of 1803 and 1804 followed the pattern set by Peter I (the Great) and Catherine II (the Great) in the 18th century for utilitarian, scientific, and secular education. The old Catherinian schools were remodeled and new schools founded. Schools were to be free and under state control. Rural peasants were to be taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and elements of agriculture at the parochial schools (prikhodskiye uchilishcha); pupils in the district schools of urban areas (uyezdnye uchilishcha) and the provincial schools (gimnazii) were to be prepared for careers as civil servants or for other white-collar occupations (law, political economy, technology, and commerce). The elementary and secondary schools were integrated with the universities.
Nicholas I, coming to the throne in 1825, considered this democratic trend harmful and decreed that:
It is necessary that in every school the subjects of instruction and the very methods of teaching should be in accordance with the future destination of pupils, that nobody should aim to rise above that position in which it is his lot to remain.
A new statute of 1828 decreed that parochial schools were intended for the peasants, the district schools for merchants and other townspeople, and gimnazii for children of the gentry and civil servants. Instruction in the gimnazii in Latin and Greek was increased. Although the legislation of Nicholas I established a class system, the utilitarian character of the whole system remained.
The Russian radical intelligentsia was fiercely opposed to the privileged schools for the gentry and demanded the reestablishment of a democratic system with a more modern curriculum in secondary schools. This was coupled with the demand for the emancipation of the serfs and the equality of women in education. The new tsar in 1855, Alexander II, inaugurated a period of liberal reforms. The serfs were emancipated in 1861, and thus all social restrictions were removed. A new system of local government in rural areas (zemstvo) was enacted with a right to found schools for the peasantry, which were now free. Combined efforts of the government, zemstvos, and peasant communities produced a growth of schools in the rural areas. The utilitarian trend was evident in the establishment of technical schools with vocational differentiation. The education of women was promoted, and the first higher courses for women were founded in main cities.
The reign of Alexander II, which was later marked by reactionary measures and political oppression, ended in his assassination in 1881 by the terrorist branch of the Narodniki revolutionary organization. A period of reaction followed under his successor, Alexander III. All reforms were suspended, and the growth of educational institutions was interrupted. The chief procurator of the Holy Synod attempted to build up a rival system of parochial schools under the control of the Orthodox clergy, and the minister of public instruction tried to return to the class system of Nicholas I. These reactionary measures set back the growth of education. Four-fifths of all children were deprived of education. The result was that at the turn of the century nearly 70 percent of Russia’s male population and 90 percent of its female population were illiterate (1897 census). The aboriginal dwellers of Russia’s national outskirts (more than one-half of the country’s population) were almost totally illiterate. J.J. Chambliss The United States
Administered locally everywhere, schooling of the United States’ masses in the republic’s younger days was immensely diverse. In New England, primary schooling enjoyed public support. In the South, apart from supplying a meagre learning to pauper children, the states abstained from educational responsibility. In the middle states, elementary schools were sometimes public; more often they were parochial or philanthropic. Only beyond the Alleghenies was there any federal provision for education. There, under the Articles of Confederation, the Ordinance of 1787 reserved a plot of land in every prospective township for the support of education. The measure not only laid the groundwork for education in the states of the Ohio valley and the Great Lakes, it also became a precedent for national educational aid. Thus, in 1862 the Morrill Act granted every state establishing a public agricultural college 30,000 acres (12,000 hectares) of public land for each of its lawmakers in Congress.
Several of the Founding Fathers expressed belief in the necessity of public education, but only Thomas Jefferson undertook to translate his conviction into actuality. Convinced that democracy could be effective only in the hands of an enlightened people, he offered Virginia’s lawgivers a plan in 1779 to educate schoolchildren at public cost for three years and a few gifted boys beyond that. The proposal encountered resistance from both the ruling classes and the clergy, who regarded instruction as a private or an ecclesiastical prerogative. Jefferson’s initial plan was rejected, as was another plan he submitted some 40 years later. Although his ideas enlightened educational thought throughout the country, only one of Jefferson’s dreams reached actuality in his lifetime: the University of Virginia, which opened in 1825 and was the most up-to-date institution of its sort, the first frankly secular university in America, and the closest to a modern-day conception of a state university. The educational awakening
When Jefferson died in 1826, the nation stood on the threshold of a stupendous transformation. During the ensuing quarter century it expanded enormously in space and population. Old cities grew larger and new ones more numerous. The era saw the coming of the steamboat and the railroad. Commerce flourished and so did agriculture. The age witnessed the rise of the common man with the right to vote and hold office. It was a time of overflowing optimism, of dreams of perpetual progress, moral uplift, and social betterment.
Such was the climate that engendered the common school. Open freely to every child and upheld by public funds, it was to be a lay institution under the sovereignty of the state, the archetype of the present-day American public school. Bringing the common school into being was not easy. Against it bulked the doctrine that any education that excluded religious instruction—as all state-maintained schools were legally compelled to do—was godless. Nor had there been any great recession of the contention that education was not a proper governmental function and for a state to engage therein was an intrusion into parental privilege. Still more distasteful was the fact that public schooling would occasion a rise in taxes.