CHAP. X.

COMPULSORY EDUCATION.

211

be done without stopping to count the cost. The people are not immoveably attached to any particular theories, and when they are convinced that a reform is necessary they will adopt it.

The fundamental principle of the present system in Massachusetts is that the authorities must make

education compulsory. Children are forced to attend the schools, without regard to the wishes of their parents. There is no choice left either to the pupils or their natural guardians. Officers are appointed to go about the streets and look out for idle or vagrant children, and "compel them to come in." They carry the terrors of the law in their hands. Little by little the penal measures against children who will not go to school have been made more formidable. The opposition to these coercive steps at first was very great. As a superintendent once said to me, "Our people had to be brought up to the idea. They thought that pressure of this kind was not in harmony with a Republican government." I remember that on one of the mornings when I visited the schools the same idea struck a gentleman who was of the party. He was attached to a foreign mission, and seemed startled at finding laws of such a character carried out under a government which asserts itself to be the very embodiment of liberty. "This method," he said to me, a little diffidently, for he was new to the country, "may be a beneficial one in the end to the children, but it is not freedom." I could not forbear telling him that when he had tra

velled further and seen more, he would dicsover that it was possible in a Republic to place the social life of the people under rules and regulations, and to step into their houses and dictate what they should or should not do, and generally to manage their affairs for them, to an extent which the old despotisms of the world would pause before they attempted.

The compulsory principle is thus set forth by the Superintendent in his report for 1862:-"To secure universal education it is not enough to provide schools at public expense; care must be taken that all children are taught in these schools or elsewhere." In the report of the School Committee for 1847, it is urged that unless the children "are made inmates of our schools many of them will become inmates of our prisons, and it is vastly more economical to educate them in the former than to support them in the latter." Here the system is recommended for its economical merit alone; but this is a consideration which has had the least weight with the people, in inducing them to assent to the recommendations made by the school committees.

In order to carry out the compulsory method, a school police force, as it may be called, is indispensable. In Boston this force is small but efficient. The officers arrest children who have never been to schools, or truants, and carry them before a magistrate, who sits privately as a school commissioner, and thus the disgrace and mischief of dragging the juvenile culprits into an open court-room are avoided.

CHAP. X.

THE PRISON FOR TRUANTS.

213

Should the child refuse to attend school, or run away from his teachers a second time, he is sentenced to two years' imprisonment at a Reformatory, which is situated on an island at the mouth of the harbour. I went out to see this institution. It seemed to be conducted with care and attention, but it is to all intents and purposes what it is designed to be-a prison. The children—there were several hundreds there- were dressed in a coarse uniform, and looked like other delinquents in more disgraceful places of punishment. The superintendent assured me that the severity of the punishment "had a very good effect." He meant, of course, that it made parents afraid to refuse to send their children to school, for otherwise they would lose them altogether, under circumstances not usually accounted meritorious or agreeable, for two years.

3

A member of Parliament in addressing his constituency 3 assured them that the law of compulsory education, even in New England, was a "dead letter,' and no one knew enough of the facts to contradict him. It is thus that the government and the institutions of America are conveniently adapted to the views of speculative politicians. One of the truantofficers gives an account of the working of the plan.

3 Mr. Forster, at Bradford, Sept. 1867.

4 No fewer than seventy-seven towns and cities in New England appointed truant-officers and enforced the compulsory system. (See 'Report of the Board of Education for 1866,' p. 63.)

He says, "A day seldom passes in which I do not find children out of school. These I send or take into school, hundreds of them every quarter." This is the first step. Another officer describes the second step in the following manner:

"In cases where I fail to check the habit of truancy and the child becomes an habitual truant, I make a complaint before one of the justices of a police-court; and a warrant is granted me, made returnable at the justice's private room in the Courthouse; I arrest the child, and summon the teacher to appear at the time and place named in the warrant. I likewise notify the parents that they may be present and be heard. If the child is found guilty by the Court, a sentence of one or two years in the House of Reformation is passed, and in other instances the cases are continued from time to time in order that the truants may have an opportunity to reform. In these cases they give surety for their appearance at the time specified by the Court. If they are sentenced, I take them directly from the Court to the steamer Henry Morrison,' and leave them in charge of the officer of the boat, who delivers them into the custody of the officers of the House of Reformation at Deer Island."

One of these scholastic policemen-not an unimportant officer in the work of education-tells us that he had charge of 1191 cases during a single year (1862), recorded the names of 321 truants, and obtained proof of 2091 truancies. This was the

CHAP. X.

EFFECTS OF THE COMPULSORY SYSTEM.

215

record of one district only in the city of Boston.5 There is a general law in the State of Massachusetts under which similar proceedings might be taken everywhere, but it is at the discretion of each town whether it shall be put in force or not. In most communities it is left to lie idle, principally on account of the expense involved in its rigorous execution. A special corps of inspectors has to be paid, and a separate place of punishment built, before such a law can be carried into effect. That education is so generally diffused in Boston need not, then, be a subject of astonishment.

The city deserves the greatest credit for the sacrifices it constantly makes to support its schools, but it is not to the credit of the poor that they send their children to them. They dare not send them anywhere else. Prevent parents from despatching their boys or girls to work, and force them instead to support them while at school, and the first and greatest obstacle to the education of the very poor— namely, the impossibility of securing the regular attendance of the pupils-is disposed of at a stroke. The end doubtless justifies the means, but the Boston process scarcely recommended itself formerly to nations which, although living under "tyrannical monarchies " and "cruel despotisms," were accustomed to consider their children their own, and their homes sacred.

The arrangement of the schools is the same in

5 According to the Annual Report of 1866, the total number of truant cases in ten years was 2741.