The education of Newport’s John Stuart epitomized early schooling success as it evolved in Maine. The elderly Stuart recalled that in 1817 town officials hired a man to teach 26 classes for what was a princely sum of $10: “Our mothers and some old Puritans said they were glad to have the school, but to pay a man such an extraordinary price was awful.… Well, he can never go to Heaven. But the school went on.”

Happily, Stuart treasured and made lifelong use of his formal education, becoming a minor community leader and leaving posterity a short, pungent autobiography, “Laugh and Grow Fat,” published in 1874. The book provides us with some of the finest insight into Maine’s 19th-century rural life and may be seen as the perfect end product of a one-room schoolhouse approach.

Times and teaching methods have changed dramatically, but as Gordon A. Donaldson makes clear in his carefully documented, readable new book, “From Schoolhouse to Schooling System,” education persists and expands.

As educational methods evolved and things have grown from hiring male college students on summer vacation into a key industry, all agree that the next generations of John or Joan Stuarts must be taught the basics and more before entering an increasingly technological work world.

Donaldson, professor emeritus of education at the University of Maine, has a formidable understanding of all forms of public education in our state, from Colonial times to the present. He was co-chair of Maine’s Commission on Secondary Education, a teacher and a high school principal. He has created a book comparable to Ava H. Chadbourne’s 1936 classic “A History of Education in Maine.” The latter chronicles the state’s pedagogical efforts from the arrival of the first Europeans to the 1930s.

Donaldson critically re-examines Chadbourne’s findings from 1900 through the 1930s, when most everything (with a few urban exceptions) was town run and mostly one-room village schoolhouses, with slowly increasing state and national participation.

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Education has always been political and controversial, but the big changes have been centered around the shift from town and villages to state and national teaching methods and funding and the evolving idea that everyone in the United States must get an education for their own lifelong good and for the future of the nation.

“From Schoolhouse to Schooling Systems” is a monumental and, on some levels, even a definitive work, especially where it touches on the ever-growing place of education in American social, political and economic life. It illuminates the changes in physical plants, ethnic diversity, funding, curriculum and all that is mandated in educational systems.

There has been the call from the business sector and legislators to make teaching more efficient and accountable for the “products” – pupils. And the old saw continues: Is education worth the money?

However, this is a tale told through brick and mortar, statistics, pedagogy and attitudinal shifts. Few actual persons – teachers, instructors, administrators – are ever mentioned.

The system seemed to develop in a faceless manner. Perhaps this is democracy.

But what of the Jack Londons who required little more than access to a library?

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What about Alan Taylor, who came up through the Maine schools and has won two Pulitzers?

What of students with special needs who learned to read, write and earn a living?

As good as “From Schoolhouse to School System” is – and it will remain on my shelf as a go-to reference – it lacks a clear picture of individuals’ educations. Did the majority of graduated “products” of the mid-20th century and 21st century “laugh and grow fat,” as citizen Stuart did?

William David Barry is a cultural historian who has authored or co-authored seven books including “Maine: The Wilder Half of New England,” “Deering: A Social and Architectural History” and “Pyrrhus Venture.” He lives in Portland.


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