Berry College: A History

ONE. Origin of a Vision

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 [First Page] [1], (1) Lines: 0 to 41 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [1], (1) Descriptions of the educational and socioeconomic conditions of the southern highlanders in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century provide the historical setting for the founding of the Berry School. As Martha Berry, a daughter of privilege, learned about the lack of education and the poor economic circumstances of people in rural areas of the South, she became interested in efforts to improve their opportunities for a better life, thereby forever changing the direction of her life. chapter one Origin of aVision The Rise of Public and Private Schools The Georgia Constitution of 1777, written just a year after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence , called for the building of schools in each county to be supported by the state, and six years later the state legislature authorized the first of these schools, which came to be known as academies. By 1800, almost all of the state’s schools, including the county academies, were private, requiring the payment of tuition. These academies provided a classical education as well as more practical courses and prepared some students for college. For most students , however, attendance at the academies, which offered both elementary and secondary, or highschool , education, represented the extent of their education. Other private elementary schools soon came into existence. These old-field schools derived their name from the fact that they were often built in fields no longer suitable for agriculture, and they typically offered arithmetic, English, geography , reading, spelling, and writing. Most Georgia children, however, received little or no education.1 In 1817, the Georgia legislature provided for a free-school fund, but before any schools were established , the fund was restricted to the children of the poor, with money apportioned to counties for the education solely of children of families willing essentially to declare themselves paupers. The schools for children of those classified as poor provided limited educational opportunities in counties across the state. In 1837, the legislature passed a measureprovidingforacommon-schoolsystem,but an economic depression began that year, and the law was rescinded in 1840. The children of Georgia ’s middle- and upper-class families continued to receive education in the private old-field schools and academies, while the children of the indigent attended the public poor schools. In the late 1850s, thestatelegislatureenactedanotherplantoestablish 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 [2], (2) Lines: 41 to ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [2], (2) a broad system of public schools, but the Civil War soon brought an end to this effort.2 In1870,thestatelegislatureauthorizedapublicschool system, which soon was established at the primary level. The school terms initially lasted three months per year and increased only to four months by 1890. High schools remained private, since the 1877 Constitution provided only for elementary education and the state university. In 1903, the state had just seven four-year high schools, which graduated a total of ninety-four students.3 For more than a century in various parts of the world, interest in education for the practical needs of life had stimulated a movement for manual-labor education. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi was one of the earliest adherents of the combination of manual and industrial activities with education. As early as 1775, he operated a school in Zurich, Switzerland, that included in its curriculum farm production and other manual activities. Over the next three decades he worked unsuccessfully to establish a system of such schools, but Phillip Emanuel von Fellenberg and others had better results establishing manuallabor schools in Switzerland during the first half of thenineteenthcentury.Theseinstitutionscombined literaryinstruction,scienceeducationrelatedtoagriculture , and farm labor.4 In 1797, John De le Howe established the first U.S. manual-labor school, at Lithe, South Carolina. He sought to prepare boys to be farmers and girls to be farmers’ wives. By 1830, manual-labor schools operated in numerous states, most of them different from Howe’s school in that the primary focus was not teaching...