The Principal's Office: A Social History of the American School Principal

Chapter One: Preceptors, Head Teachers, and Principal Teachers: School Leadership through the Late Nineteenth Century

Chapter ONE Preceptors, Head Teachers, and Principal Teachers School Leadership through the Late Nineteenth Century Before the creation of the principal’s office, school leaders worked under limited organizational structures, with minimal guidelines and expectations of their work. This thin administrative framework left them largely reliant on their own individual leadership skills and directly dependent on community approval. The simplicity of the system allowed for both flexibility and constraint: With virtually no local or state administrative standards to follow, school leaders were free to lead schools by their own vision and initiative. Yet, the absence of any administrative infrastructure kept school leaders occupied with the most basic of operational tasks and completely dependent on the opinions, wealth, interest, and support of their community . The irony of the early years of American educational leadership—from the colonial period through the Civil War—is that principals’ freedom to develop and institute their own educational vision was compromised by the absence of a protective administrative structure. With the creation of a more centralized public education system in the late nineteenth century , school leaders experienced more professional security, but also less independence. This chapter surveys the history of school leaders, alternatively called preceptors, head teachers, or principal teachers, from the colonial period through the Civil War. Here we see that even though school leaders in 7 8 THE PRINCIPAL’S OFFICE these days were not monitored by a guiding administrative bureaucracy, they still played a middle managerial–type role in their work with communities and governing authorities. Early School Leaders The first schools in America were unregulated and eclectic operations with no standard educational processes or administrative procedures. Colonial and Early Republic communities that funded local schools offered only elementary education in one- and two-room schools with no attendance requirements, no common curriculum, and no standard policies or practices. Without a set curriculum, students proceeded at their own pace and teachers taught multi-aged classrooms, basing their instruction on memorization for basic reading and mathematical literacy and relying on whatever texts were available, be it the Bible, Webster’s Dictionary, or early reading primers such as the McGuffey Readers. Well through the American Revolution, barely half of all children in what became the United States even attended elementary school, and far fewer attended more advanced programs, variously called grammar schools or high schools. Girls enrolled in the early levels of education, but were dissuaded or excluded from more advanced education. For African American children in both the South and the North, and for the most destitute urban and most isolated rural children, education through the mid-nineteenth century was even less accessible. In the years before the creation of state and local school systems, the administration of these early American schools followed a simple and direct hierarchy. Community school boards or trustees acted as a combined parent association, personnel office, and supervisor that hired and evaluated the teacher and examined the children. Teachers were men and women chosen not for any instructional skills or academic degree, but for their religious background, moral character, and political affinity with the community that hired them. Teachers’ wages and working conditions were haphazard, based on what the community could afford. Teachers had no contract, and so could be summarily expelled from their post by a dissatisfied parent or board member, or their employment swiftly cut short when the community ran out of money. For the most part, the teacher worked alone, under broad and vague administrative directives. In one-room schools across the rural countryside from the colonial period through much of the nineteenth century, individual teachers carried the entire weight of the school. Untrained and poorly supervised in this work, drawing on little more than their own understandings of the purposes of education and their own personal strengths, these early teachers monitored enrollment, maintained the building, disciplined chil- 9 PRECEPTORS, HEAD TEACHERS, AND PRINCIPAL TEACHERS dren, abided by school board regulations and expectations, and taught whatever curriculum could be gathered and approved of by the local community. These early educators were isolated and insecure in their positions as private tutors or struggling heads of a “school” held in a church or private home. They described their work in universally dark reports of a thankless and stressful occupation. Soon after the American Revolution, Philip Freneau wrote of his experience as a private tutor as a “wretched state of meanness and servility.”1 Other teachers recounted...