Education... Success or flawed from the beginning?

First report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Tennessee 1869

 By Tennessee. Dept. of Public Instruction, John Eaton

          John Eaton Jr. was the first appointed Superintendent of Public Instruction for the state of Tennessee.  At the end of the second year in this new position, he wrote a roughly 140 page document outlining the events and legal encounters that he witnessed over the two year span.  The position of “Superintendent of Public Instruction” was basically to head the setting up of an “equal” education system for the state of Tennessee.  This document is an important educational document in that it points out numerous instances where the treatment and compensation of teachers was ill thought out by legislation from the beginning of the formal education systems in America.
          The document begins with John going over some of the general proposed guidelines that were set for his position and that the final goal was to establish an “equal” education system for whites and blacks.  The regulations are fairly straight forward in the beginning few pages, simply he was to appoint superintendents and all other required positions on localized levels, until formal elections could be held.  School houses were to be acquired or built, separately, for white and black students ranging from 6 to 20 years old.  Taxes were to be raised on state and local levels, and there was to be national backing to help fund the new formed school systems as long as they were deemed “equal.” 

John describes several different types of opposition that he came up against in his efforts to raise money to build an education system.  The public seemed to have very mixed feelings about the newly proposed schools; many felt that this was a government ploy to educate blacks with whites’ money, while other communities were very eager to get the education system underway.  John quickly realized that the first thing he would have to accomplish was to appoint local superintendents to convey information to the public on a smaller and more personal level.  Then he would be able to deal with finding teachers and school houses.

Superintendents were very hard to come by.  John approached as many people as he knew in the different counties, but most men were very hesitant to accept a new position with little information as to their duties and no guarantee of compensation or work after an election.  However he was eventually successful in appointing 84 superintendents, who then appointed teachers and opened schools where ever they found possible.  In many counties there were not buildings for schools so they would hold classes in the shade of a large tree, in churches, or in shells of buildings that were not complete. 

The dispersal of the state taxes was to be “pro rata,” (proportionate) to the areas in which they were collected.  However when John tried to collect the funds, he found that the state had already spent them in an effort to “liquidate the indebtedness of the state.”  This severely complicated the issue of paying all of the people he had organized to start schools throughout the state, school buildings, and teachers. 

Once the teachers started teaching classes, John had to emergently meet with state officials in an attempt to find and rush funds so that he could pay teachers and staff.  These funds were delayed and many of the new schools stopped having classes because the teachers had to pursue other means of income.  In July 1869, 63 counties reported that 37 schools had been burned.  Teachers had been mobbed and had ropes tied around their necks while being threatened of being hanged. 

Setting up an education system was proving to be an incredibly difficult task.  John visited as frequently as possible with the schools that he successfully setup and quickly realized the extreme lack of educational goals set by legislation.  Teachers did not know what they should be teaching or how to go about standardizing education.  The most prevalent subjects taught were basic arithmetic, reading, and writing.  These were the primary focuses of schools because these would give students the basic skills to survive in a developing society. 

This document pointed out numerous ways in which our education system was flawed in this country from the beginning.  The poorly thought out legislation and lack of compensation for teachers plagued many of the early efforts of establishing a successful education system in this country.  However it is interesting to see that there may be some valid arguments today that clearly relate to the late 1860’s. 

Eaton, John Jr. (1869). First report of the superintendent of public instruction of the state of Tennessee (Report No. 1). Nashville, TN: Press and Times Office. Retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?id=Ec0OAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false