PARENTS: Get Involved with Your Students' Education

by Melvin G. Williams, Scholar in Residence

Atheneum Society of Wilbraham

A recent story in the Springfield Union-News called readers' attention to the Atheneum Society and to our manuscript collection. Pat Cahill wrote about a recurring theme in our nineteenth-century community. Letters, school committee reports, and books all agree that parents should get involved in their children's education.

But not enough of them were practicing what some Wilbraham educators were preaching 153 years ago.

In the spring of 1846 members of the local school committee sounded frustrated when they wrote, "We do therefore most earnestly urge the cordial cooperation of parents with teachers in upholding a mild but firm government. Let the scholars know that their parents & their teachers are united, & we should seldom hear of the necessity of severe punishment, or of the breaking up of schools through the insubordination of the scholars."

And in summary they added, "Think no time better spent than that which you devote to the visiting of your schools."

"The more things change," the Springfield newspaper story observed, the more they stay the same. These documents "show many differences in schooling styles then and now," Cahill wrote, "but there was one striking similarity: a desire for parents to play a bigger role in education."

In a significant way her story illustrates a point that we humanists often make: that the past isn't just the past at all. In a very real way it is about the present, about you and me, about our values and challenges, and about our institutions and community as well. When you visit the Old Meetinghouse to breathe in the history of our town and consider the education that local children received a century and a half ago, be thinking too about the education you are providing for your own children and grandchildren. Some very current issues have their roots in our history.

We were fortunate to have an academy in our small farm town, the school committee report for 1852 proudly asserts. "The town of Wilbraham has long been noted both far off and near for having within its borders one of the best academic institutions in the United States." But the report also cautions that "it is to our common schools that we must look to supply the great educational wants of the community: not only must we depend on them for the elementary part of school learning, but many of our youth will have no opportunity of ever attending any other school."

At these common schools children learned the 3Rs plus a steady diet of American history and geography: about the pilgrims and puritans, about President George Washington, and about the Indian territories to the West. But there was more to learn than just the facts. We were still a young nation and schools in Wilbraham like others across the land celebrated the importance of the common person on whom our democracy depended. Horace Mann, Massachusetts School Superintendent, wrote in 1848 that universal education will keep the working men and women from being "servile dependents and subjects" of the wealthy. It "never can happen," he said, that "an intelligent and practical body of men should be permanently poor."

A Vermont educator agreed. Common schools are "an equalizing power, a leveling engine, which we may rightfully and lawfully employ," Horace Eaton wrote. "Let every child in the land enjoy the advantages of a competent education at the outset of his life, and it will do more to secure a general equality of condition than any guarantee of 'equal rights and privileges' which constitution or laws can give."

Our Wilbraham educators of the day were no less visionary. "Every enlightened person knows that early education and moral training is essential to the laying of the foundations of these blessings," the 1852 report asserts. "And it would not perhaps be too much to say that if in all the States in the Union schools had been as Common and free, and as good as it is in Massachusetts, that the danger which was supposed to threaten the Union and the peace of this republic would never have been thought of."

Great ideas, lofty prose. But the 1840 report also scolded that our schools risked losing it all when "parents do not feel interested in the schools so much as to visit them and look into their progress."

If a farmer hires a man to work upon his land, if a mechanic agrees with a journeyman to work in his shop, or either of their wives employs a maid to perform any service in the house, they all look after these laborers to see how their work is performed. But these same persons, perhaps, if hey are parents, will employ a man woman to teach their children--to form their characters--to work upon the immortal mind and give it direction--and yet never once go to see how the work is performed, or give a word of advice, encouragement, or one of friendly admonition the teacher.

Their solution: "If parents would visit schools often to inquire after their state & progress & manifest a lively interest in them, it would undoubtedly do more than any other one thing to elevate these primary institutions of learning and give them the importance in the Public mind which they ought to occupy."

Good advice then. Good advice now.

October 1998

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