Chapter VI: The Soul of the School

The post for the May family one September morning in 1838 held a fat circular bristling with capital letters, italics, question marks and redolent prose.

Horace Mann, new secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, was using this circular to summon the people of the commonwealth to a series of popular conventions on the condition o f the public schools. Sam had moved his family to South Scituate, Massachusetts, just two years before, and deeply involved himself in Bay State education. As he opened the circular, his thoughts might have gone back to the nation's first popular convention on the common schools he, himself, had called a decade earlier. Any such reminiscences must have faded rapidly as he glimpsed the imperious message scrawled on the back of the circular.

The words raced across the page, handwriting slanted eagerly forward as if to infuse the reader with the same passionate energy driving the one who signed it, "Yours with great regard, Horace Mann."

"Rev. S. J. May, Dear Sir:" the letter began: "Allow me in great haste to request you to be prepared specially on Monday . . . " and Mann clattered on, telling May precisely what part he wanted him to play in the convention scheduled for nearby Hanover, Massachusetts, on the coming Monday, September 3.(1)

Mann's tone was peremptory but May did not resent it. May had helped prepare this convention. He had arranged for the Hanover church to house the gathering and had personally invited Daniel Webster. Besides, if May could take instructions he could also give them. The Hanover convention, he had told Mann two weeks before, should be used primarily to promote Mann's proposal for a "normal school,"(2) a state seminary devoted exclusively to teacher training, outlandish as this ides seemed to some hard-headed Bay Staters.

Strange ideas were afloat about the school, May advised Mann. People said only the daughters of the rich would be able to attend, and that the public could compel the services of graduates only at exorbitant wages. "I give you these hints," May coached Mann, "so that you will be prepared to meet objections."(3)

May and Mann had begun to enjoy this felicitous give-and-take relationship a year after May assumed the pastorate of the "South Parish" in the town of Scituate in 1836. May and his family, now including his wife, Lucretia, and three children, found their new home ideally situated. The coastal community lay in country rural enough to encourage all the countryman's arts Sam had learned during his thirteen years in Brooklyn, yet close enough to Boston to afford easy access to all the choice reform spirits in that hub of the humanitarian's universe.

By now an experienced husbandman, May conscientiously tended his trees, vines, and gardens, and postponed fall journeys until he made sure his apples and potatoes were properly laid by for winter.(4)

Meanwhile, the hospitable May homestead overflowed with visiting reformers: William Lloyd Garrison, Bronson Alcott, Wendell Phillips, Lucretia Mott, Frederick Douglass, and many others.(5) Affectionate and jovial, they clustered in the May parlor for sessions punctuated with hilarity or with harmony around Sam's clear and beautiful singing voice. The May children glimpsed this jocular side to reform, but it was usually hidden from the general public which generally viewed reformers as acidulous, contentious, and overbearing.(6) May himself often astonished the unwary who envisioned a reformer as a fanatic with shrill tongue and piercing eye. On hearing May preach, one Detroit, Michigan, congregation were struck by "so quiet a fanatic, so cool and incendiary." One lady in his audience that day had never encountered a "genuine ultra reformer" before. May managed, the pastor of the church commented dryly, to relieve her mind of "some painful dread of the class."(7)

The kindly, gracious side of May's nature appeared to best advantage as he moved with easy familiarity into the educational scene in Plymouth County, assumed the cleric's customary position on the school committee, and began prodding the people about their educational shortcomings in his old hard-to-resist fashion. His own home sat next to a rather mean little schoolhouse. May not only visited the schoolroom frequently, but put up a swing under a large tree nearby for the children to enjoy. In many other ways, recalled one scholar, "the pastor" made us children in that little, old, poor schoolhouse feel that we were of some account.(8)

May lived in the town of Scituate only six years, but his impact on the schools became part of the history of the area. May's presence in the schoolroom, declared the county historian almost a half-century later, "was a benediction. Few men ever possessed so fully the powers of attracting the affections of both young and old as this good and genial pastor."(9) May shortly discovered congenial spirits in the Rev. Edward Q. Sewell of the adjoining parish of Scituate and in the Rev. Charles Brooks of Hingham, a crotchety pioneer who had been agitating for a state teachers' seminary since 1835. Under pressure from this assorted ecclesiastical trio, Plymouth county people improved their schoolhouses, employed better teachers and even consolidated several districts into that educational rarity, a graded school. Their labors in Plymouth were unique enough to win commendation later from the historian of American education, Henry Barnard.(10)

May commanded national attention in 1839 by delivering a dedicatory address for a new schoolhouse at a time when most people, as Horace Mann said, would as soon think of dedicating a barn as a schoolhouse. Captivated by the address, Mann printed it in full in his Common School Journal, introducing the author as "that man of enlarged ideas and excellent views."(11) Barnard said it was one of the first of such addresses given anywhere and the speech, urging enlightened and humane teaching methods as well as comfortable schoolhouses, became an influential document in school reform.(12)

May had good reason to move about comfortably in Massachusetts. The school situation there was as bad as May had found it in Connecticut. Comparably, the picture was worse because Massachusetts' original standard of excellence had paced the region. Massachusetts had established a common school system as one of its original institutions. Between 1789 and 1824, however, the state legislature had lowered school requirements below the level set by the colonial school law of 1647. When May arrived in 1836, Massachusetts had no state or county school officers. Extreme local self-government in each of the 300 towns had resulted in a leadership chaos of more than 2,000 one-room, ungraded schools, each in charge of an elected committee with powers of taxation and control.(13) Women, usually girls of 17 or 18, taught the summer schools at an average salary of five dollars a month; men, frequently youths in their teens, taught the winter terms. Most of those employed as teachers had scant education past the simple rudiments of a common education. Only a few continued in teaching as a life's work.(14)

School systems all over New England had degenerated in similar fashion. Looking back on the situation later, May charitably attributed the deterioration to the early necessity of conquering field and forest. New England's original settlers were of "more than ordinary culture," said he. To "hunt, to fish and to war with ferocious beasts and savage men" were the arts in which their descendants must be trained: arts "not taught from books, nor inside of school rooms." The common people thought they needed only the elements of reading, writing, and arithmetic, May concluded. "Few of them, indeed, had leisure or inclination to seek for more."(15)

Other critics were to see the degeneration of the common school system as a facet of a general wave of anti-intellectualism swelling over the country after the demise of the Revolutionary generation and climaxing in the age of Jackson when the backwoodsman turned culture hero and the intellectual felt alienated from his society.(16)

The high noon of educational renaissance did not arrive fully in New England and the central states until the forties and fifties.(17) An early dawn, however, broke in the twenties when such men as James G. Carter, of Massachusetts, an experienced teacher, called from 1821 to 1825 for "radical reforms" including the reassertion of state control over local education and the establishment of a new kind of school for teacher training.(18)

By 1837, rising reform sentiment in Massachusetts enabled Carter, now chairman of the state legislature's committee on education, to persuade the legislature to create the Massachusetts Board of Education and help redress the balance of educational power between state and locality.(19) The new board persuaded a lanky Dedham lawyer with a glowing political future apparently before him, Horace Mann, to relinquish his presidency of the state senate to become secretary of the board. The post promised to be a thankless one; opponents to school reform were marshalling their forces. But Mann had seen a vision, the vision of teaching generations that "mind is God over matter . . . ."(20) Mann appeared on the educational scene as a veritable whirlwind, writing, lecturing, cajoling, traveling, pleading in the name of educational reform. Under Mann's leadership schools improved; maps, globes, and libraries appeared in previously barren schoolrooms, and towns ventured to raise school taxes.(21) Mann inspired complete devotion in a few kindred spirits. May was one of the first attracted.

"Dear Sir," May wrote Mann on November 3, 1837, "Everybody wants Mann to come to talk on the Common Schools!" What a lift this tribute must have given Mann at the end of an exhausting tour of the state, including a speech at Plymouth. "Our own town is quite populous," May wrote, "having 3600 inhabitants, and there is a spirit increasing here, favorable to common schools. I am fully persuaded that such an address as you gave at Plymouth would do great good."(22)

May's letter inaugurated a unique friendship and working partnership that lasted until Mann's death in far Ohio 22 years later. Mann through the years enunciated policy and determined the course of reform; May helped pave the way, raise the money, influence the powerful, persuade the people, and explain before, during, and afterwards what Mann really meant.(23) Both men savored the relationship to the full.

Mann needed all the help he could get, particularly in the bitter battle for normal schools. The legislature in 1838 matched a $10,000 gift for the new school made by Edmund Dwight, a wealthy Boston merchant.(24) Mann thus had $20,000 to begin his teacher training program, but opposition ran high. Bitter controversy raged and a powerful assortment of enemies appeared to oppose the schools during legislative sessions through 1842. Opponents, fearing increased state control over education, argued that the normal schools would only consolidate "foreign" interference with local prerogatives. In any event, normal schools were unnecessary, the opposition asserted. Obviously anybody who had learned could teach. This argument, paralleling the assertion that he who eats can cook, was to haunt the teacher training movement for decades.(25)

Victory finally came on the floor of the legislature in 1840 and 1842, victory with implications far outside Massachusetts. Other states were considering the establishment of normal schools. Had the battle failed in Massachusetts, said Barnard later, the movement for teacher education all over the country might have been lost or long delayed.(26)

May, jumping into the battle, spoke all over his county on behalf of the normal schools and used his persuasive powers at every popular convention he could attend.(27) Together May and Brooks persuaded the people of Plymouth County to ask for one of the new schools.(28) A "highly respectable committee" of the Friends of Common School Education in Plymouth County became the first to appear formally before the state board of education in 1839 to ask that a normal school be located in their community.(29) Plymouth people had raised $10,000 for buildings,(30) a persuasive gesture. The board eventually rewarded their effort by establishing at Bridgewater the third normal school in Massachusetts. The board placed the first schools in 1839, one at Lexington; the second, at Barre.(31)

Having won this personal victory, May kept a watchful eye on the progress of the new schools. He and his brother-in-law, Bronson Alcott, visited the normal school at Lexington in July of 1840. May spoke to the young ladies on peace, and the shaggy Alcott mystified them with a rambling discourse on transcendentalism.(32)

May kept Mann posted on his views and activities. In February of 1842 he produced welcome support in Mann's current battle for appropriations to support the school at Lexington: "There is no project which the legislators of a free people should be more careful to encourage than one for the better education of the whole people . . . . I have heard of the good done by the Normal Schools at Lexington and Barre, but I have seen the good effect of our own school at Bridgewater."(33)

To this sympathetic friend, Mann turned five months later when the principal at Lexington, the frail Cyrus Peirce, resigned in broken health. Mann had "long thought" of May as Peirce's successor. Would May allow his name to be presented to the board of education for the vacant post?" My dear sir," Mann raced along, "neither my time nor my disposition allows me to indulge in compliment. You know something of what I think a Normal School teacher should be. With such opinions . . . you need no words of assurance of my regard for and opinion of you . . . "(34)

Mann knew May well. No blandishment could have won May's consent. The Scituate pastor had grave doubts. What if a colored girl should apply for admission? What about the conservative reaction to the appointment of an abolitionist as prominent as he?(35)

May fretted further that his own health might not stand the strain that had broken Peirce. With characteristic Victorian hypochondria, the 45-year-old May brooded frequently over the condition of his lungs and liver. At the moment his lungs were "oppressed and sore."(36) More importantly, he had a realistic notion of his own inexperience in teaching and feared he would be incompetent as a principal. "Were it not for this," he wrote Mann, "I should delight to spend and be spent in its behalf. It seems to me that I would willingly die, if I could by such a sacrifice make the School what it should be."(37)

Mann overrode these multiple objections, stifled his own doubts and those of some cautious legislators about May's abolitionism, and shoved the still-protesting pastor into the principalship. Still entertaining grave doubts, May resigned his Scituate pastorate over Mrs. May's outspoken objections and moved his family to Lexington.(38)

* * *

The academy building over which May now presided was a pleasant two-story, frame structure set on a wedge of land opposite the Lexington common and the old battle ground. The young ladies boarded and roomed in the upper floors; the lower level held a "model school" for neighborhood children on whom the normal students practiced their arts under the principal's direction.(39)

The Lexington school, was Mann believed, the "first Normal School, properly so called in the world, exclusively dedicated to the female sex. It recognizes, and indeed is founded upon, two great ideas,—the relative efficiency of the female sex in the ministry of civilization, and the value of female services in the education of the young."(40) May had long before espoused both these "great ideas." in the early years of his Brooklyn pastorate he had ventured into a novel educational experiment by persuading a young woman in his parish to try teaching an unruly, winter school.

Already, the big boys, who attended school only in winter, had ousted one male teacher; indeed "turning out the teacher" enlisted joyous participation as a prime winter sport of the age. Parents smiled complacently at such boyish escapades, and a teacher who came sniveling to the school committee knew what answer to expect: "Put them down or let them put you out."(41) During Mann's secretaryship of the Massachusetts board, he reported several dozen such cases each year, anything from locking the door against the teacher to beating him brutally and throwing his into the snow.(42)

"Such a thing had not been heard of, as a female keeping a winter's school," wrote May afterwards, but the stout-hearted Cecilia Williams agreed to May's challenging proposal. Shortly thereafter, Miss Williams' remarkable talents reduced the school to order, instilled some respect for scholarship in the students, and enabled the school to attain at least "respectable rank" in the town. The experience helped convince May that "female teachers can often, if not always, manage and instruct boys better than male teachers."(43)

Such as attitude toward women was almost unheard of in the twenties. Forty years later some of May's fellow reformers still balked at admitting women into any very serious educational undertakings.

"Mr. May is a fine speaker and a good writer, and I rather love the man," conceded one in 1864, "but he is crazy on women. He would have education pretty much all in their hands, and he would besides make them politicians,"(44)

His advanced views on women as well as several other qualities fitted May for a pioneer post in the normal school movement. He proved considerate and thoughtful of the young women in the normal school and less demanding than his perfectionist predecessor, Cyrus Peirce.(45) The students were delighted with their new preceptor. During May's regime, attendance more than doubled from 31 to 66 students, enabling him to hire two assistants to help him.(46)

* * *

As his finest attribute for this influential post, May had formulated an unusually comprehensive educational philosophy, compatible with reputable educational psychology of the day. Probably the single greatest influence on May's philosophy was the work of the German-Swiss educator, Johann H. Pestalozzi, whose philosophy dominated progressive American educational reform thinking in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century.(47)

May had probably become familiar with Pestalozzian theory as early as 1826 when he first met Bronson Alcott, an ardent exponent of Pestalozzian ideas. Pestalozzian works became staples of May's personal library, and by 1828 he presented Pestalozzian theory for home consumption in a lecture before the Brooklyn lyceum.(48)

Building on the work of Rousseau, Pestalozzi laid great emphasis on the natural and harmonious development of each child's own instincts and abilities. The teacher's prime responsibility lay in assisting in that development, not in imposing authority from above. Pestalozzi rejected rote teaching and emphasized the sense impression as a foundation for learning. Thus his students found themselves learning by doing rather than primarily by reading, listening, or memorizing. His primary teaching method involved letting children experiment with "real objects." Disciples of Pestalozzi brought weights, measures, leaves, shells, or blades of grass into the school to help children learn about their world from first hand experience.

A striking aspect of Pestalozzi's philosophy was his belief that in each child there existed innate ideas which might be drawn forth by a series of questions in Platonic fashion. To develop these ideas as well as to capitalize on the evidence provided by the senses, Pestalozzi placed great emphasis on the development of each child's own faculties. In the 19th century, "faculty psychology" became the dominant academic psychology, emphasizing the development of three sets of faculties: the reason or intellect, the feelings and emotions, and the will.(49)

Educational reformers in the United States superimposed Pestalozzianism over their basic Lockean notions. These two eighteenth century philosophies joined in the minds of May and his colleagues and formed an uneasy alliance apparently relying on Locke's "sense impression" to help the child develop Pestalozzi's "innate ideas." To support this hybrid theory, some nineteenth century American thinkers emphasized the Lockean theory of reflection and de-emphasized Locke's basic contention that only the sense impression could provide material for reflection in an originally blank mind.(50)

Educators did not resolve, however, the basic dilemma: does the major source of knowledge come from without through the sense impression or from within, via the "innate idea"? Educators faced somewhat the same difficulty in the realm of character education. Is the character moulded primarily by the individual's innate sense of moral right and wrong, or is it a product of forces working from without in the environment? How can a child be shaped and freed at the same time? Mann sought his answers in phrenology, a nineteenth century psychology behavioristic in approach, which maintained that desirable faculties could be cultivated through exercise and inhibited through disuse.(51) May once had his head read, but did not become a true believer,

A true eclectic, May selected largely from these conflicting streams of philosophy and theory and never seemed disturbed by any potential conflicts among them. As Alcott' brother-in-law, May continued a lifetime under the influence of this major American transcendentalist, and even won a reputation in the 1840's as a transcendentalist himself.(52) He believed deeply and sincerely in the reflective and intuitive powers emphasized by the transcendentalists as a means of arriving at ultimate truth: he seemed to regard the sense impression as a sort of auxiliary in the process. May eventually produced a sort of philosophical mixture of Pestalozzi and Locke heavily spiced with Alcott, a compound which seemed to satisfy him and the audiences who clamored to hear him talk year after year.

The work of the educator, May assured one influential teachers' organization in 1847, was to help pupils form habits of observation, perception, and reflection. A true education, he said, was that "which tends to develop the individual being: which leads the individual to use with facility and accuracy the organs of his own body, the powers of his own mind, the affections of his own heart,—i.e. to unfold himself, to do and become what God has made him capable of being and doing . . . ."(53) On a more practical level, May also believed the schools played a valuable role in socializing children, teaching them to get along with others and preparing them for their work in life.(54)

May's most eloquent statement of educational philosophy came on a mundane occasion: the dedication of the Hanover schoolhouse.

No doubt, many a budding intellect has been nipped, and the best affections of many a young heart have been crushed out, by the rude hands of teachers . . . who have to work upon children, as if they were blocks of wood or marble, to be hewn or chiseled into the desired form.

Education means not so much the putting of any thing into the mind and heart, as the drawing out, the unfolding, the educing, of what is in the human soul . . . . The mind of a child is not, as some seem to suppose , a bag, into which you throw words or ideas, as a boy would his marbles. No. It is an instrument, most delicate, strung by the Father of Spirits, and placed in the human frame, to be played on by that invisible being, whom we call self. The high purpose of education is not to teach a child to repeat the thoughts of others, but to lead him to think for himself. It is not to compel him to submit to the dictation of other minds, but to induce him to follow the conscientious convictions of his own,—to judge even of himself what is right, and to abide by that decision, as one who must give an account to the Author of his being.(55)

May applied these philosophical concepts to the actual role of the teacher in the schoolroom as early as 1828. The teacher must first awaken the child's curiosity May admonished, and then lead him by the simple course of reasoning or reflection to draw conclusions by himself. "Thus while [the child] is acquiring knowledge, he will be learning what is better, how to use his intellectual powers; and these will be strengthened by every effort . . . ."(56) No method could have been more foreign to the common practice of the teachers of 1828 who called a row of children to recite what had been learned, sent them back to memorize more, called the next row, and so on through the whole dull day.

In this 1828 work, Common Errors in Education, the 31-year-old May advocated teaching by the inductive rather than the deductive method of reasoning. Let little children first learn their own streams, roads, and rivers, he said. Then let them progress to the more grandiose abstractions of equators, meridians, and parallels. Such a proposition also ran directly counter to the common practice of teaching children to parrot massive words and mighty concepts which meant nothing to their childish minds. One little boy May knew had learned to recite reams of information about the heavenly bodies. Asked what heavenly bodies were, the boy responded readily: "When good folks dire sir, they go to heaven, and then they are called heavenly bodies."(57)

The mind must first consider particulars, May asserted, and, by comparing one with another, form larger divisions "proceeding to form from classes of truth the general and abstract ideas." A teacher should begin with what the young already know, the young pastor asserted, and proceed, "continually requiring them to exert their powers to discover what we wish them to know."(58) A teacher should not even tell a child that two plus two equals four, said May; he should lead the child to discover that truth for himself.

May had first encountered the processes of inductive thought in the classroom of a Catholic priest who kept a mathematics school May attended in Boston during the winter vacation of his freshman year at Harvard in 1813 and 1814. Both the teaching methods and the personality of the Rev. Francis Xavier Brosius, a refugee from anti-clerical persecution in France , left an irrevocable mark on May.

In Brosius' classroom May first felt "the quickening influence of kindness and gaiety in a teacher. The bosom of Mr. Brosius was a well-spring of benevolence. Little jets from that fountain sparkled continually in his smiles, cheering and refreshing us in our severest efforts . . . .In the schools I afterwards kept, I longed to be myself as much like that excellent man, as my nature would allow."(59)

The teacher, May impressed on his young charges at Lexington, is the soul of the school. "If he have life, light and love, his pupils will be animated, intelligent and affectionate."(60)

Teachers, May felt, should be qualified by competent knowledge, discriminating judgment, aptness to teach, good temper and "more than all, pure moral principles and unfeigned piety."(61) Such paragons, May felt, should not only know how to teach, but should be so well-informed on any subject that they could "promptly impart" any kind of knowledge required on the spur of the moment, in classroom or discussion.

"Never is knowledge so readily received nor so firmly fixed in the mind," May asserted, with more than a foreshadowing of twentieth century educational psychology, "as when it is imparted just at the moment the inquiry for it is naturally raised."(62)

Though he seemed to be producing a superior teacher, May grew increasingly restive at Lexington. His weak points began to show. In the eloquent statement of educational philosophy he admitted few equals, but, in the hard work of actual teaching, his own inexperience in the classroom and ineptness at organization painfully handicapped him. His background as a schoolmaster had been sketchy; only a few weeks each winter teaching country schools during his college years. Now the daily grind of the schoolroom complicated by endless chores involved in maintaining the "Normal House" exhausted him as they had his predecessor. Cyrus Peirce used to go to bed at midnight and get up at three to tend the fires;(63) this life did not agree with May.(64)

Then, too, he began to itch for his old reform cronies and conflicts. No young colored girl, sadly enough, had appeared to ask for admission. Life was a dull round of classes, punctuated by exhausting visits of inspection made by delegations from around the country, each delegation eager to observe this new phenomenon.(65)

One sparkling cold January night in 1843 May threw caution to the winds and bundled up some of the students for a gay Saturday night sleighing expedition to an abolition meeting in nearby Waltham.

Word of this adventure into radicalism shocked some parents, prompted the withdrawal of one student, and elicited an immediate reprimand from the appalled Horace Mann. Under constant fire for his revolutionary educational activities, Mann could not afford to have his schools involved in the antislavery controversy, too. A principal, he admonished May, had no business trying to make his pupils abolitionist any more than to make them Unitarians or bank or anti-bank. The state and the public had given money to make good teachers, he said, "and any diversion . . . to any other object is obviously a violation of the trust."

May replied with some spirit, dexterously avoiding the real issue. He had never promised to withdraw from abolition, he said and besides the whole affair was accomplished on Saturday night on his own time! He was not neglecting his duty to the school.

The correspondence went into abolition and education history alike.(66) The friendship between the two men survived, strong as ever, but in 1844 May heard with delight that Peirce had recovered from his illness. May resigned happily to permit Peirce's return on August 31, 1844, and concluded his service to the school by finding a larger building in West Newton to accommodate the increased number of students his administration had attracted.(67)

Probably relieved to have dull, dependable, old Cyrus Peirce back on the hob, Mann nonetheless paid warm tribute to May at the conclusion of his principalship. May's "well known character," wrote Mann in his Common School Journal, "is a sufficient testimony to the pure and elevated spirit that animated the school for the two years during which he was connected with it.

"Mr. May," wrote Mann, perhaps a bit wryly and regretfully, "May well be called a saint before his time . . . .(68)

May had learned his lesson. Never again did he return to active teaching. he had, however, established a reputable status in the world of education during the spotlighted two years he spent as principal of the country's first state normal school. During his years at Lexington, said Barnard, May pioneered in the art of object teaching by using to teach lessons such common things as weights, measures, seeds, shells, and even the paring of a horse's hoof. May prepared a manual on object teaching that was subsequently "lost in the hands of the publishers," said Barnard.(69) May's pioneer efforts with this educational method antedated by some 15 years the eventual popularization of object teaching in this country by Edward A. Sheldon of Oswego, New York. May's reputation as an educational authority was confirmed in 1847 when the American Institute of Instruction invited him to give a major address on the education of the faculties.

* * *

By 1845 his reputation had spread sufficiently well to penetrate the fastnesses of upstate New York. When a small, progressive Unitarian society in the village of Syracuse asked May to become its pastor in 1845, the knowledgeable gentlemen on the society's board extended their invitation because "your familiarity with the common school system, and your capacity and disposition to elevate it, have operated strongly upon some of us and we have gone on in the reflection that this would be of high importance in our Society and would help to raise us relatively . . . ." They hoped, they wrote, that May was "not yet so committed as to prevent you from consideration of the question . . . ."(70)

May was not at all committed. He packed up his family and his furniture and headed west.

Footnotes

(1) Horace Mann to May, August 31, 1838. Horace Mann Library, Antioch College.

(2) The word "normal" is derived from the Latin word "norms" meaning a model or rule. Teachers were by implication to be given rules for teaching.

(3) May to Mann, August 16, 1838, Horace Mann Papers, Massachusetts historical Society.

(4) May to "My Dear Friend," September 6, 1837; John Carter Brown Library, Brown University.

(5) May obituary, Syracuse Daily Standard, July 3, 1871.

(6) Samuel J. May's son, Joseph, liked to recall this gaiety among reformers, as in his William Lloyd Garrison, a Commemorative Discourse (Boston: G. H. Ellis, 1879), p. 8.

(7) S. J. Barrows, (ed.), Life and Letters of Thomas J. Mumford with Memorial Tributes. ( Boston: G. H. Ellis, 1879), p. 51.

(8) Mumford, May Memoir, p. 168.

(9) D. Hamilton Hurd, (ed.), History of Plymouth County (Philadelphia: J. L. Lewis, 1884), p. 339.

(10) [Henry Barnard], "Samuel J. May, An American Educational Biography," American Journal of Education, XVI (1866), p. 145.

(11) May, "Dedication of a Schoolhouse," Common School Journal, II (July 15, 1839), pp. 218-224.

(12) [Barnard], "May Biography," American Journal of Education, XVI (1866), p. 145.

(13) Arthur O. Norton, The First State Normal School in America : The Journals of Cyrus and Mary Swift (Harvard Documents in the History of Education, Vol. I; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926), xxxiii-xxxiv.

(14) Ibid., xliii.

(15) May, Revival of Education, pp. 10-11.

(16) Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), pp. 154-160. Also see Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1945), Chapter 29.

(17) Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961) p.20.

(18) Norton, Peirce Journals, pp. xxxiv-xxxv.

(19) Ibid., xxxvii.

(20) Louisa Hall Tharp, Until Victory: Horace Mann and Mary Peabody (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1953), p. 136.

(21) Ibid., pp. 137-141.

(22) May to Mann, November 3, 1837, Mann Papers.

(23) For a further discussion of May as Mann's missionary to the unconverted, see Chapter VII.

(24) Common School Journal, I (February 1, 1839), pp. 33-35.

(25) "Committee of the Legislature on Education: Majority Report, Against Normal Schools, 1840," Peirce Journals, p. 265.

(26) Ibid., p. xiv.

(27) Samuel J. May, A Brief Account of his Ministry given in A Discourse preached to the Church of the Messiah in Syracuse, N.Y., September 15, 1867 (Syracuse: Masters and Lee, 1867), p.29.

(28) [Barnard], "May Biography," American journal of Education, XVI (1866), 145.

(29) "Second Annual Report of the Board of Education," Common School Journal, I ( October 15, 1839) p. 308.

(30) Common School Journal, II (March 11, 1840), p. 232.

(31) Barnard, "May Biography," American Journal of Education, XVI (1866), p. 145.

(32) Alcott "spent the morning," defining transcendentalism, wrote one of the students, "but I have not yet learned what it is." Norton, Peirce Journals, xxiii.

(33) May to Mann, February 13, 1842. Mary Peabody Mann, Life of Horace Mann (Boston: Walker, Fuller and Co., 1865), pp. 171, 172.

(34) Mann to May, July 27, 1842, Mann Papers.

(35) Abolitionism was the communism of its day as far as social acceptance was concerned. May had served as agent of the New England Antislavery Society in 1835 and 1836, been mobbed five times, and was widely and unfavorably known among the state's more solid citizens for the warmth of his Garrisonian attachments.

(36) According to his children and his contemporaries, May lived almost all his 73 years in excellent health. Odd and transitory ailments, however, were apt to attack him just when he was deciding to leave one spot and move somewhere else. A mysterious swelling on his face delayed his transfer from Lexington to Syracuse in 1845. May to Dudley Phelps, March 19, 1845, May Memorial Unitarian Church Records, deposited at First Trust and Deposit Company, Syracuse, NY.

(37) May to Mann, September 2, 1842, Massachusetts Historical Society.

(38) Mann to May, November 9, 1842, Mann Papers.

(39) Peirce to Henry Barnard, January 1, 1841, Norton, Peirce Journals, p. xlviii. Also see George B. Emerson, "Description of Lexington Normal School," Common School Journal, II (March 11, 1840), p. 236.

(40) Common School Journal, I (March 15, 1838), p. 86.

(41) Editorial on May Centennial containing a history of social customs in the history of common schools, Syracuse Daily Standard, September 26, 1897.

(42) Lawrence A Cremin, (ed.), The republic and the School: Horace Mann on the Education of Free Men (New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1957), p. 22.

(43) Miss Williams later married the Rev. Charles Brooke of Hingham, May's associate in Plymouth County reform. For the Brooklyn incident, see [Barnard], "May Biography, American Journal of Education, XVI (1866), pp. 144-145; Samuel j. May, A sermon, preached at Hingham, March 19, 1836, being the Sunday after the death of Mrs. Cecilia Brooks (Hingham: J. Farmer, 1837), pp. 21, 22.

(44) John D. Philbrick to Henry Barnard, July 6, 1864, New York University. Philbrick was a long-time superintendent of schools in Boston, a pioneer in this office. Until the second quarter of the century, women taught only in the summer schools and progressed very slowly thereafter into higher positions. Curti, social Ideals of American Educators, p. 173.

(45) "I am too indulgent, and cannot help being." May wrote Mann, July 17, 1844, May Memoir, p. 181. Peirce, though in retirement, had protested to Mann because he had heard that May did not make the pupils "agonize" as they should. Mann to May, February 6, 1843, Mann, Horace Mann, p. 171.

(46) May Memoir, p. 179.

(47) Shepard, Pedlar's Progress, p. 85.

(48) Pestalozzian works in May's library included Exposition of the Principles of Conducting Infant Education by J. P. Greaves; Henry Pestalozzi, by Dr. E. Biber, and a volume called Hints to Parents . . . in the Spirit of Pestalozzi's Method. May offered to loan these books to Henry Barnard; retrieving them from their new home in the Barnard Library proved quite a chore. May to Barnard, July 30, 1857; December 4, 1857, New York University.

(49) Bronson Alcott, "Pestalozzi's Principles and methods of Instruction," American Journal of Education, IV (March and April, 1829), pp. 97-107. also see Ellwood P. Cubberley, Public Education in the United States (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1919), pp. 262-268, and Butts, Education in American Culture, pp. 218-219, 177-178.

(50) Butts, Education in American Culture, p. 178. Here is an example of this amalgam from May's own writing: " The correctness of our ideas depends on the accuracy with which our senses perceive externals. If perceptions are wrong, reflections cannot be right, and complex ideas in the mind and emotions in the heart will partake of the inaccuracy." Samuel J. May, "The education of the faculties and the proper employment of young children," The Lectures Delivered Before the American Institute of Instruction at Plymouth, August, 1847 (Boston: American Institute of Instruction, 1847), p. 90. For basic Lockean theory see above, Chapter III.

(51) Cremin, The Transformation of the school, p. 12.

(52) In 1847 the graduating class of Harvard Divinity School invited May to make the traditional Divinity School Address and informed him, in something less than tactful fashion, that he had been chosen on the eleventh ballot by a seven to six vote, because he represented "the theological movement known as transcendentalism." The dissenting six wanted somebody less controversial. See Willard L. Sperry, "A Beautiful Enmity," The Harvard Divinity School, pp. 157-158.

(53) S. J. May, "The education of the faculties and the proper employment of young children," The Lectures Delivered Before the American Institute of Instruction at Plymouth, August, 1847 (Boston: American Institute of Instruction, 1847), pp. 89, 101.

(54) May told the county superintendents' convention in 1845 that parents should send their children to school because of the desirability of learning to know "those they are to pass through life with." District School Journal. VI (April 23, 1845), p. 52. May's aim throughout his career as chairman of the Syracuse Board of Education, according to the board's historian, was to "make the course of study complete and practical, so as to be a fit preparation for a business life." Edward Smith, A History of the schools of Syracuse (Syracuse: C. W. Bardeen, 1893), p. 142.

(55) May, Dedication of a Schoolhouse, p. 223.

(56) May, Common Errors in Education, 216.

(57) Ibid., p. 219.

(58) Ibid., p.222.

(59) S. J. May, "Speech on the occasion of the dedication of the Salina School House, May 12, 1859," Twelfth Annual Report of the Superintendent of Public Schools of the City of Syracuse, March 15, 1860 (Syracuse: J. G. K. Truair and Co., 1860), p. 45.

(60) May, Opening of a School house in Hanover, p. 223.

(61) Ibid., p. 223. "Spend money on teachers rather than building, "May advised Gerrit Smith in 1855 when Smith was straining to found his own university. Smith thought this good advice; unfortunately his "university" at McGrawville perished, teachers and buildings alike, when Smith's interests were diverted to more pressing excitements such as John Brown's enterprise at Harper's Ferry. Smith to May, August 27, 1855, Smith Papers, Syracuse University.

(62) S. J. May, Memorial of the Quarter Centennial of the establishment of Normal Schools in America . (Boston: C. P. Moody, 1866), p. 34.

(63) Mann, Horace Mann, p. 163.

(64) May to unidentified correspondent: "I believe I know what a Normal School should be,—but I have so little facility in managing the details of the plan, that dissatisfaction has been reward of labors almost every night." October 2, 1842, Massachusetts Historical Society.

(65) In December of 1843, May did escape into Boston for one grand and glorious convention of reformers, a socialist convention at which all the experimental communities were represented, and all the other untrammeled spirits had their say. May had a reviving chat with Alcott who was about to break up his own small community of himself and Charles Lane at Fruitlands. Abby Folsom was there too and had a few sensible words to say, "crazy as she is generally thought to be." Letter from Charles C. Burleigh, quoted in "The Isms of 40 Years Ago," Harpers Magazine, LX (December, 1880), p. 183.

(66) Mann to May, January 27, 1843; Mann to May, February 6, 1843; May to Mann, February 7, 1843; Mann to May, February 22, 1843. Substantial portions of the interchange were published in the memoir of Horace Mann written by his wife and published in 1865. May had protested their inclusion, feeling at that late date that the letters would reflect on Mann's antislavery spirit. Mrs. Mann demurred, believing the letters would clear her husband's name. Never did anyone love "the man, whom all his friends involuntarily call 'dear Mr. May' better than [Mann]," she wrote, "and none the less, but all the more, because Mr. May is, by his nature and culture alike, so profound a hater of slavery. What a comment it is upon the torpid state of the national conscience at that time, that no public interest was safe that was associated with the desire to do away with chattel slavery!" Mann, Horace Mann, p. 167. Merle Curti gives a good account of the contretemps in Social Ideals of American Educators, pp. 130, 131.

(67) Eben S. Stearns, "Historical Sketch of the Normal School," Quarter Century, pp. 51-52.

(68) Common School Journal, VII (September 1, 1845), p. 261.

(59) Barnard, "May Biography," American Journal of Education, pp. 141-145. Barnard himself was involved in the loss of May's manuscript. He was supposed to pick it up from Harper and Brothers' New York office in 1847, but there is some evidence to indicate that he never accomplished the errand and that the manuscript perished in the fire that leveled Harper and Brothers shortly afterward. May to Barnard, January 8, 1847; Harper Brothers to Barnard, March 4, 1847. Harper and Brothers to the author, October 17, 1957.

(70) Dudley Phelps to Samuel J. May, January 31, 1845. Records of May Memorial Unitarian Church, Syracuse, New York.