Proprietary Schools and Academies

Proprietary schools and academies were the dominant institutions of professional and practical education in the early American Republic. Because the U.S. Constitution contained no provisions for a federally funded system of schools, and since most states supported only the barest minimum of primary schools, Americans turned to private enterprises like proprietary schools and academies to educate the citizens of the new nation. As a result, much of the support for proprietary schools and academies relied upon the initiative of individuals, the resourcefulness of communities, the zeal of religious denominations, and the beneficence of the wealthy.

proprietary schools

Proprietary, private venture, or entrepreneurial schools were secular, tuition-supported private schools that offered specialized and practical instruction in medicine, law, or business. Like the operators of academies, proprietors frequently incorporated their schools by petitioning the state for a charter. In contrast to academies, these schools were not the primary occupation of their proprietors. Instead, proprietors established proprietary schools with other professionals in their field who wanted to supplement their income and augment their status in the community.

Medical schools. In colonial America, those seeking medical training had few options beyond an apprenticeship with a local physician or enrollment in a European medical school. By the end of the eighteenth century, few American colleges had medical faculties; furthermore, collegiate medical training was unsystematic and academic standards were low. Lacking competition from early American colleges, proprietary medical schools flourished in the early Republic.

Proprietary medical schools such as the College of Physicians and Surgeons of the Western District of New York (1812) and the Castleton Medical College in Vermont (1818) emerged as an alternative to the apprenticeship system, which was often a protracted and inconvenient arrangement for the physician and a haphazard experience for the student. These schools were cooperative enterprises of two or more local physicians. Cooperation permitted the physician-instructors (called preceptors) to maintain a medical practice while supplementing their income with student tuition fees.

Proprietary medical schools often had few books, limited equipment, and no clinical facilities. The quality of the instruction depended upon the training of the preceptors and the variety of ailments that the preceptors had encountered. Proprietary medical schools rarely issued degrees, and the licensing of graduates was practically nonexistent. The rapid increase in the number of schools in the 1820s and the ensuing competition for tuition dollars pushed many proprietary medical schools to offer superficial training programs. By the 1830s, the declining quality of these schools prompted calls for reform in medical education.

Law schools. Like proprietary medical schools, proprietary law schools faced few initial challenges from early American colleges, which had inadequate law faculties and no systematic legal curriculum. Early legal education in the colonies borrowed from the British traditions of self-education and clerkship, but the increased demand for lawyers after the American Revolution necessitated new institutions for legal training. Thus, between 1782 and 1828 enterprising judges, usually state court judges in the North, chartered proprietary law schools both to address the new demand for lawyers and to supplement their meager salaries.

Proprietary law schools varied in size but not in quality. Unlike proprietary medical schools, law school proprietors often required students to have a liberal arts education before commencing legal study. These schools commonly featured excellent law libraries and an outstanding, systematic program of lectures, tutorials, moot courts, and informal examinations. Proprietary law schools did not issue diplomas or degrees, and its graduates usually took the bar examinations after completing the course of study.

The superiority of the training that students received in proprietary law schools enhanced the popularity of the schools and the reputation and influence of the proprietor and his graduates. The first proprietary law school was Litchfield Law School in Connecticut, founded by Judge Tapping Reeve in 1782. Over a fifty-year span, hundreds of its graduates served in the highest levels of federal and state governments. Collectively, these schools scattered thousands of competent public servants, lawyers, businessmen, and educators to every region and state of the new nation.

Despite their success, proprietary law schools had begun to decline by 1829. Colleges that sought the financial gains enjoyed by proprietary law schools reproduced the latter's format of legal instruction, luring instructors and students away from the proprietary schools in the process. Other colleges, like Washington College (later Washington and Lee University) and Yale, simply incorporated nearby proprietary law schools into their own law faculties.

the academy movement

The terms "academy," "institute," and "seminary" refer to schools with any number of different courses of study, sources of financial support, and types of administrative organization. Because of this variability, there is no consensus among historians as to the characteristics that define an academy. Generally, academies were flexible, independent, and often transient enterprises that adapted to the educational needs of its students and local communities. The curriculum of any academy was ultimately contingent upon the education and aptitude of the schoolmaster. Yet depending on the proximity of the academy to other schools, academies provided a community with any course of study its citizens required, from elementary instruction to a college preparatory curriculum. Most academies served as secondary schools, offering an education in practical subjects to students who already knew how to read and write but had no desire to attend a college in the future.

Although academies occasionally received money or equipment from the state, tuition fees, lottery proceeds, and endowments were their primary sources of revenue. Academies relied upon a self-perpetuating board of trustees to manage the finances of the school. In most cases, trustees incorporated the academy by petitioning the state legislature for a charter. A charter authorized the trustees to act as a corporate body to raise funds for the school by lottery, manage the school's endowment, hire or fire a schoolmaster, and prosecute parents who refused to pay a tuition debt.

Franklin's proposed academy in Philadelphia. Benjamin Franklin published the first plans for an academy in the American colonies. In Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania (1749) and Idea of the English School (1751), Franklin blended seventeenth-century British educational thought with his own brand of materialism and individualism to envision a school that could fill the niche for practical and professional studies necessary for success in the mercantile economy. Franklin proposed an academy that would teach an "English" curriculum through experiments, exercises, and observations. The English curriculum featured an assortment of course options, including accounting, geometry, astronomy, English grammar, writing, rhetoric, history, geography, ethics, natural history, gardening, commerce, and mechanics.

Franklin's proposal challenged the two dominant educational institutions of the period, the Latin grammar school and the colonial college, both of which regarded the classical curriculum to be the only acceptable course of study. Like most academies founded in the early Republic, renowned institutions like Phillips Academy at Andover, Massachusetts (1778) and Philips Academy at Exeter, New Hampshire (1781), modeled themselves after Franklin's English school. More broadly, Franklin legitimized the democratic and pragmatic character of the academy, thereby aligning the institution with the prevailing values of the early American Republic and guaranteeing its popularity among the middle class.

Denominational academies. Soon after Franklin published his Idea of the English School, religious denominations began a massive program of establishing academies that persisted well into the mid-nineteenth century. The religious revivals of the 1730s and 1740s, known as the Great Awakening, partly inspired this effort, and the Presbyterians were, by far, the most active denomination, establishing sixty-four academies in seven states by the end of the eighteenth century. Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Congregationalists, Dutch Reformed, Baptists, and Methodists collectively founded hundreds of academies throughout the United States. Nevertheless, financial difficulties, fluctuating enrollment, and inadequate staffing forced most of them to close. Although the character of religious academies varied from denomination to denomination, their greatest legacy was offering educational opportunities to women, free blacks, American Indians, and the poor.

Education for women. One lasting contribution of the academy movement was the popularization of education for women. In the early Republic, most Latin grammar schools and colleges steadfastly refused to admit women students. Beyond the common practice of hiring a tutor, female academies, seminaries, and institutes became the sole institutions for educating women. As with academies for young men, there was a great deal of variation among the courses of study in female academies. They ranged from ornamental subjects like embroidery and music to the rigorous academic subjects featured at elite academies for men.

Reform-minded male intellectuals were the early proponents of opening academies to women. In the mid-1780s theologian and poet Timothy Dwight founded one of the first academies to admit women students at Greenfield Hill in Connecticut. In 1787 physician Benjamin Rush, a leading advocate of female education in the early Republic, helped to establish the famous Young Ladies' Academy of Philadelphia. With the founding of Sarah Pierce's Litchfield Female Academy in 1792, women emerged as proprietors and instructors, rather than merely students, of academies. The extraordinary success of Pierce's academy inspired other women to open female academies and seminaries. Two of the most important female academies in the early Republic were Emma Willard's Troy Female Seminary (1821) and Catharine and Mary Beecher's Hartford Female Seminary (1823). By the end of 1820s, female academies were a permanent part of the educational landscape in rural and urban communities throughout the North and the South.

Military schools and mechanics institutes. Military academies and manual labor schools emerged as two variants of the academy movement. The earliest military academies, the United States Military Academy (1802) at West Point, New York, and the American Literary, Scientific, and Military Academy at Norwich, Vermont (1819), offered a course of study suited for training military engineers and officers. Despite their beginnings in the North, military academies flourished in the South between 1839 and the Civil War.

The other variant of the academy movement, the manual labor school, or the mechanics institute, began as an experimental school offering systematic instruction in agriculture or mechanics. One of the first manual labor schools was established at Lethe, South Carolina, in 1786, but these institutions did not become prevalent until later in the nineteenth century when large manufacturing industries emerged in northern cities.

Classical versus practical education. In 1828 the faculty of Yale College issued its famous report that defended the virtues of the classical curriculum against the superficiality and expediency of academy education. The tension between colleges and academies, as well as the opposition of classical and practical studies, was nothing new. Nevertheless, criticisms like those presented in the Yale Report of 1828 did little to thwart the growth of academies in the early Republic. Challenges to academy education in subsequent decades came from advocates of public education, whose campaigns for a free, comprehensive, and state-supported system of schools led to the demise of the academy movement.

See alsoProfessions: Lawyers; Professions: Physicians .

bibliography

Beadie, Nancy, and Kim Tolley, eds. Chartered Schools: Two Hundred Years of Independent Academies in the United States, 1727–1925. New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2002.

Brown, Elmer. The Making of Our Middle Schools: An Account of the Development of Secondary Education in the United States. New York: Arno Press, 1969.

Cremin, Lawrence A. American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607–1783. New York: Harper and Row, 1970.

Gawalt, Gerald W. The Promise of Power: The Emergence of the Legal Profession in Massachusetts, 1760–1840. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979.

Kaufman, Martin. American Medical Education: The Formative Years, 1765–1910. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1976.

Klafter, Craig Evan. "The Influence of Vocational Law Schools on the Origin of American Legal Thought, 1779–1829." American Journal of Legal History 37 (1993): 307–331.

Knight, Edgar W. The Academy Movement in the South. Chapel Hill: [University of North Carolina Press?, 1919?].

Ludmerer, Kenneth M. Learning to Heal: The Development of American Medical Education. New York: Basic Books, 1985.

Sizer, Theodore R., ed. The Age of the Academies. New York: Teacher's College Press, 1964.

Sloan, Douglas. The Scottish Enlightenment and the American College Ideal. New York: Teacher's College Press, 1971.

Smith, William A. Secondary Education in the United States. New York: Macmillan, 1932.

Solomon, Barbara Miller. In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985.

Terry L. Stoops