There were probably

more axes ringing in Pennslyvania than there were school bells during those months in the early 1770s when the Rev. William Tennent

was chopping timber out of the Bucks County wilderness for his "Log College."

The Presbyterian evangelist raised the two-story structure directly across from his church on the Old York Road at Neshaminy, about 20 miles north of Philadelphia. And in doing so he promoted a departure in higher education that outraged his more conventional contemporaries by capsulizing a spirit of egalitarianism that was to captivate the world a few decades later.

A dissident priest in the Church of England who had turned to Presbyterianism, Tennent had ridden the tide of Scotch-Irish immigration to the New World, arriving at William Penn's provincial capital on September 17, 1718,

an event he duly noted in his diary: We landed safe at Philadelphia the head Town of Pensilvinia and Courteouslie intertained by Mr. James Logan Agent and secretarie of all Pensilvinia.

was

The new immigrant quickly established his credentials with the Presbyterian Synod of Philadelphia, but he did not tarry in the capital, at that time a community of 13,000 colonists. At the age of 45, trundling his growing family with him, he set out to spread the word of God in the New World. He traveled first to East

Chatham in southeastern New York, then to nearby Bedford, and then back again to Bucks County, establishing his pulpit in Bensalem. A graduate of Edinburgh University and a gifted Latin scholar, Mr. Tennent apparently found himself becoming almost as concerned about his parishioners' lack of learning as he was with their need for salvation. In any case he took to devoting increasing amounts of his time to teaching them how to read their Bibles and catechisms. And when in the autumn of 1726 he moved south to a little settlement on the forks of Neshaminy Creek, he built not only a church but a school as well.

Mr. Tennent sensed what seemed to be an American compulsion to constantly move westward, he saw how relentlessly the wilderness was being pushed back toward the Allegheny Mountains, and he concluded that the Middle Colonies could not wait for new preachers and teachers to come in from the mother country or down from the New England colleges of Harvard and Yale. Although his initial motivation for building his school was a determination to educate his sons for the Presbyterian ministry, the logs were hardly chinked before he had decided to accept other young men interested in that calling or in becoming teachers.

His church at Neshaminy was opened for services in the summer of 1728, and so probably to the astonishment of the backwoods villagers - was a structure which one observer remembered as being "about 20 feet long, and nearly as broad,' located on the Old York Road. “In it," wrote the Rev. George Whitefield, a visiting evangelist from England who

"

preached at Neshaminy in November of 1739, "the students spent most of the day and lodged at night with families in the vicinity."

By the time Mr. Whitefield arrived at Neshaminy, as noted in his Journal, subsequently printed by Benjamin Franklin, Mr. Tennent had dispatched "seven or eight" ministers into the field. "More were almost ready to be sent forth," he added, "and a foundation is now laying for the instruction of many others."

By that time also the primitive institution was being called a "college" - in scorn and derision, born of apprehension, by certain critics of an aristocratic turn of mind. Not only did it fail to provide the range of courses offered by such "real" colleges as Harvard and Yale, they said, but even worse it admitted young men whose humble backgrounds demonstrated that they were not college material. Mr. Tennent himself made no pretensions. He did not award diplomas, for example, and there were no formal graduating ceremonies. His curriculum was nevertheless no snap. The students were trained in elocution and forensics, they read the classics, and they studied Latin, Greek, some Hebrew, moral philosophy, and theology. Thus armed they proved to be able fomenters of a new egalitarianism in higher education, spreading the "log college" movement to other regions in the Middle Colonies by establishing similar institutions. Among them: Fagg's Manor, opened in 1739 in Pennsylvania's Chester County by Samuel Blair; Samuel Finley's school in Maryland at Nottingham, Cecil County, in 1744; and Robert Smith's at Paques in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in 1750.

Their graduates in turn carried on the work. Dr. Benjamin Rush, a product of Samuel Finley's school who was to become a leading figure in the Revolution and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was active in founding Dickinson College. John McMillan, an early minister in western Pennsylvania, graduated from the Paques school and in turn set up a log college in the Redstone country of southwestern Pennsylvania. And Samuel Davies, who was graduated from Fagg's Manor, became the fourth president of the College of New Jersey. Messrs. Blair and Finley and two of Mr. Tennent's sons had in fact helped to charter this institution (it was later to be known as Princeton University) which enrolled its first students in May of 1747.

That was one year after William Tennent died at the age of 73. He had left his mark.

-WALTER WOOD

Associate Editor, American Education

as the pre-eminent educational enterprise laid the foundation for the American educational system, for the schools were nearly the only elements within that system until well into the 20th century.

Whether the schools were public. private, or parochial probably made little difference in terms of what the students learned. The different auspices under which the schools functioned did, however, complicate the pattern of American education. Numerically the public schools have dominated the enrollments. For most of this century about 85 percent of American school children have attended public schools. Now the figure is over 90 percent, principally as a result of declining enrollments in Roman Catholic schools. which account for 80 percent of the nonpublic school students. The remaining 20 percent of nonpublic school students are either at other religious schools (13 percent) or schools without religious affiliation (seven percent).

Some educators' fascination with the organizational differences between public and private school systems has obscured the essential similarities between them. Both cover a very broad range of schools serving the top, middle, and bottom of the socioeconomic groups in America. Both tend to serve the residential community near them, thus making individual schools relatively homogeneous ethnically and economically. Both use the same curriculum materials and teach courses in similar sequences. These similarities have been true throughout the history of American education. For example, in the early 20th century the differences between a public school located in an immigrant neighborhood with predominantly Jewish families and a Roman Catholic parochial school attached to an ethnic parish composed primarily of Italian immigrant families were not enormous, except, of course, for the addition of Christian doctrine in the parochial school. In both schools a premium was placed upon literacy and upon Americanization, and in neither was there much opportunity to mix with children of other economic or ethnic backgrounds. Today the public schools of Great Neck, Long Island, are probably more similar in curriculum and clientele to such private schools as Dalton and Fieldston, 20 miles away in New York City, than they are to public ones in Wyandanch or Roosevelt, 20 miles in the opposite direction.

Schools, then, whether they be public or private, are the essential element in the network that makes up the American educational system. In recent years they have been supplemented by a variety of other educational enterprises, particularly television, which is likely to become even