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“Chanting Choristers”: Simultaneous Recitation in Baltimore's Nineteenth-Century Primary Schools

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

William R. Johnson
William R. Johnson*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland Baltimore County
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Extract

In 1892 J. M. Rice reported in The Forum his observations of American urban public schools. The first article in the series was subtitled: “Evils in Baltimore.” The article began with a recounting of an arithmetic lesson in an “advanced first grade.” This lesson, Rice wrote, “will indicate… in what a soul-inspiring manner from one-fourth to one-third of the time is spent in the average primary school of the city during the first two years of school life.”

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , Spring 1994 , pp. 1 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 Rice, J. M. “Our Public-School System: Evils in Baltimore,“ The Forum (Oct. 1892), 152–53. The articles ran in nine consecutive issues from October 1892 through June 1893. They were subsequently republished as The Public-School System of the United States (New York, 1893).Google Scholar

2 Rice, The Public-School System of the United States, 71 84–88, 127, 129, 140, 151. The four school systems that had advanced in part beyond the “mechanical approach” were those of Indianapolis, Minneapolis, St. Paul, and La Porte, Indiana.Google Scholar

3 Baltimore City School Commissioners’ 8th Annual Report (1836), 3, hereafter BCSC. Google Scholar

4 Kaestle, Carl F. ed., Joseph Lancaster and the Monitorial School Movement: A Documentary History (New York, 1973), 37, 40.Google Scholar

5 Ibid., 6–7.Google Scholar

6 David Hamilton's book, Towards a Theory of Schooling (London, 1989), is perhaps the lone exception. Hamilton devotes two chapters to simultaneous instruction, class teaching, and recitation. But his is a history of a pedagogic idea, not classroom practice. He makes no claims “about the uptake of these ideas; nor that their prominence in the minds of influential people matched their prevalence in the schoolroom.” Ibid., 139.Google Scholar

7 Hogan, David “The Market Revolution and Disciplinary Power: Joseph Lancaster and the Psychology of the Early Classroom System,“ History of Education Quarterly 90 (Fall 1989): 386. He refers to simultaneous instruction as a feature of the Lancasterian system elsewhere, on pages 405 and 413.Google Scholar

8 Kaestle, ed., Lancaster and the Monitorial School Movement, 7.Google Scholar

9 Finkelstein, Barbara “Dollars and Dreams: Classrooms as Fictitious Message Systems, 1790–1930,“ History of Education Quarterly 31 (Winter 1991): 472.Google Scholar

10 The lower apartments for the girls were quite a different matter. They occupied about two-thirds of the first floor with the other third used as a cellar to store fuel. “The ceilings… were about eight feet in height and furnished in the plainest manner. They were nothing more than tolerably well-lighted cellars plastered and furnished. It is only as cellars that it can be said the apartments were tolerably well lighted. As school rooms… they were dark, gloomy, and repulsive.” BCSC 38th Annual Report (1866), 78.Google Scholar

11 BCSC 3rd Annual Report (1831), 5–6. For the role of monitors general, see “Introduction” and “Reminiscence of a Lancasterian School in Detroit” (c. 1818), in Lancaster and the Monitorial School Movement, ed. Kaestle, 38 168.Google Scholar

12 BCSC 3rd Annual Report (1831), 5–6. By way of comparison, current Maryland state regulations for group day-care centers require at least “35 square feet of usable floor space… for each child.” Code of Maryland Regulations: 10.05.01: Group Day Care Centers, Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Sep. 1983, 7.Google Scholar

13 “Address of Governor DeWitt Clinton,” in Lancaster and the Monitorial School Movement, ed. Kaestle, 160–61.Google Scholar

14 BCSC 3rd Annual Report (1831), 6.Google Scholar

15 Figures adapted from Vavrina, Vernon S. “The History of Public Education in the City of Baltimore“ (Ph.D. diss., The Catholic University of America, 1958), Table I, 18.Google Scholar

16 BCSC 8th Annual Report (1836), 8.Google Scholar

17 Ibid., 1–3.Google Scholar

18 Lancaster, Joseph The Lancasterian System of Education (1821) in Lancaster and the Monitorial School Movement, ed. Kaestle, 94–95; BCSC 8th Annual Report (1836), 2.Google Scholar

19 BCSC 1st Annual Report (1829), 16, 13; BCSC 3rd Annual Report (1831), 14–15.Google Scholar

20 BCSC 8th Annual Report (1836), 5; Baltimore City School Commissioners, Minutes, 28 Sep. and 19 and 26 Oct. 1837.Google Scholar

21 BCSC 10th Annual Report (1838), 39; BCSC 12th Annual Report (1840), 1.Google Scholar

22 BCSC 10th Annual Report (1838), 38–39.Google Scholar

23 BCSC 3rd Annual Report (1831), 15.Google Scholar

24 BCSC 1st Annual Report (1829), 8; BCSC 10th Annual Report (1838), 39.Google Scholar

25 BCSC 8th Annual Report (1836), 6.Google Scholar

26 During the early 1850s the commissioners recorded the number of admissions to the schools in the Minutes of their weekly meetings. Although the school year ran from September through the end of July, I used the first week in October and the last week in June as attendance benchmarks. Admission and attendance reports from the principals may be inaccurate for September and July. The school commissioners themselves complained in the minutes about principals not submitting attendance reports in a timely fashion for September; and the attendance figures for July are also suspect because students (and some teachers) simply stopped attending due to Baltimore's summer heat.Google Scholar

27 Weekly reports of admissions in BCSC Minutes, 13 September to 29 November 1853. For the sake of visual clarity, three students admitted to the male grammar schools at the ages of fifteen, sixteen, and eighteen have been omitted. The totals admitted are 302 to the primary schools, 60 to the female grammar schools, and 137 to the male grammar schools. Detailed information on admissions to the Baltimore public schools were no longer recorded in the Minutes after 3 April 1855. Age grading did not become common in urban school systems until the 1920s and 1930s. See Angus, David L. Mirel, Jeffrey E. and Vinovskis, Maris A. “Historical Development of Age Stratification in Schooling,” Teachers College Record 90 (Winter 1988): 211–36.Google Scholar

28 BCSC 3rd Annual Report (1831), 14.Google Scholar

29 BCSC 8th Annual Report (1836), 2.Google Scholar

30 BCSC 10th Annual Report (1838), 41; BCSC 8th Annual Report (1836), 3.Google Scholar

31 BCSC 8th Annual Report (1836), 3.Google Scholar

32 Vavrina, “The History of Public Education in the City of Baltimore,“ 93.Google Scholar

33 BCSC 35th Annual Report (1863), 37–38 Google Scholar

34 BCSC 36th Annual Report (1864), 66.Google Scholar

35 BCSC 31st Annual Report (1859), 102; BCSC 36th Annual Report (1864), 66.Google Scholar

36 BCSC 38th Annual Report (1866), 156.Google Scholar

37 BCSC 57th Annual Report (1885), xxiii.Google Scholar

38 BCSC 60th Annual Report (1888), 94; BCSC 66th Annual Report (1894), 67.Google Scholar

39 BCSC 51st Annual Report (1879), xxi; BCSC 63rd Annual Report (1891), xiv.Google Scholar

40 BCSC 57th Annual Report (1885), 64.Google Scholar

41 BCSC 62nd Annual Report (1890), 50–51.Google Scholar

42 BCSC 3rd Annual Report (1831), 11.Google Scholar

43 Finkelstein, “Dollars and Dreams,“ 471 472.Google Scholar

44 Rice, “Evils in Baltimore,“ 153.Google Scholar

45 BCSC 38th Annual Report (1866), 135; BCSC 31st Annual Report (1859), 74–75. Alternately, simultaneous recitation might invade slumber. M'Jilton reported a case in which the parents of a “smart intelligent lad were obliged to discontinue his attendance upon the school in consequence of his almost nightly repetition, while asleep, of his multiplication tables, as if in concert with his class and in the usual noisy manner of its performance.” Ibid., 139.Google Scholar

46 Kaestle, Carl F. Evolution of an Urban School System: New York City, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973); Schultz, Stanley K. The Culture Factory: Boston Public Schools, 1789–1860 (New York, 1973); Lazerson, Marvin Origins of the Urban School: Public Education in Massachusetts, 1870–1915 (Cambridge, Mass., 1971); Hogan, David J. Class and Reform: School and Society in Chicago, 1880–1930 (Philadelphia, 1985); Troen, Selwyn K. The Public and the Schools: Shaping the St. Louis School System, 1838–1920 (Columbia, Mo., 1975), 150.Google Scholar

47 Cohen, David K. “Practice and Policy: Notes on the History of Instruction,“ in American Teachers: Histories of a Profession at Work, ed. Warren, Donald (New York, 1989), 398; Tyack, David “The Future of the Past: What Do We Need to Know about the History of Teaching?” in ibid., 409. Two major exceptions are Larry Cuban, How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms, 1890–1980 (New York, 1984); and Finkelstein, Barbara Governing the Young: Teacher Behavior in Popular Primary Schools in Nineteenth-Century United States (New York, 1989).Google Scholar