Hoeltje, Hubert H

English

The Palimpsest

The Means of Education

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Volume 32 | Number 1 Article 9
1-1-1951
The Means of Education
Hubert H
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H, H. "The Means of Education." The Palimpsest 32 (1951), 34-37.
Available at: https://ir.uiowa.edu/palimpsest/vol32/iss1/9
The Means of Education
The fancy for the picturesque which gave to 
The Hoosiev Schoolmaster a popularity that has 
not diminished after a period of fifty-five years 
may in part explain our current notions of pioneer 
Iowa education. Certainly the Flat Creek school 
has become a type to which our minds revert. Not 
without reason, either, for it was in a similar little 
log hut in the wilderness along the Mississippi 
that Iowa's first teacher, Berryman Jennings, 
taught a handful of children in the autumn of 
1830. To be sure more spacious frame structures 
eventually supplanted the primitive one-room log- 
cabin schoolhouses, and buildings of stone or brick 
were not uncommon, but as late as 1862 there were 
eight hundred and ninety-three log schoolhouses 
in Iowa, about one-fourth of the total number.
The aims of education were few in those days. 
All that a child should know, except pure book 
learning, was taught at home. The regular ele­
mentary curriculum consisted of reading, writing, 
arithmetic, spelling, and geography. Discipline 
was strict and moral precepts were emphasized.
Toward the end of the pioneer period the 
schools were fairly well equipped, and the teachers 
were predominantly women. In 1867 the super-
34
THE MEANS OF EDUCATION 35
intendent of schools in Winneshiek County re­
ported an exception to the general rule. Mr. Len- 
thal Eells was teaching forty-three pupils in a new 
log building. The seats were long forms, with 
four writing desks, each eight feet long — a very 
inconvenient arrangement. In the absence of a 
blackboard, the door served in that capacity. The 
teacher was a versatile man who was fluent with 
illustrations, ‘‘asked many questions not in the 
book, and required his pupils to think/’ Sad to 
say, however, the floor needed sweeping.
But the pioneers were not alone concerned with 
elementary schools. Their ambitions soared far 
higher. In January, 1838, the Wisconsin legisla­
ture meeting in Burlington reflected something 
of the spirit of the times by establishing seminaries 
for instruction in science and literature in Daven­
port, Dubuque, Mount Pleasant, Farmington, 
Augusta, Union, West Point, and Fort Madison. 
By 1850 fifty colleges had been created by law in a 
state only four years old and having a population 
of one hundred ninety-two thousand! It is of 
secondary interest to learn that most of these col­
leges existed only in imagination, that only two of 
those founded in the forties now live — Iowa 
Wesleyan and Grinnell. Of primary significance, 
however, is the zeal for education manifested by 
the pioneers. Though the lamp may actually have 
burned low for a time, those who held it did not 
doubt the future. In being thus bold they exposed
36 THE PALIMPSEST
themselves to the criticism of extreme folly, for 
a pioneer population is not made up of young 
people of college age. Elementary schools, not col­
leges, were most needed in the new land. But 
there can be no understanding of early Iowa which 
does not comprehend the boom spirit which pre­
vailed from the beginning even into the late sixties. 
Though the material boundaries of the state had 
been measured by the surveyor's chain and com­
pass, its spiritual possibilities seemed as boundless 
as the prairie landscape. Where few things had 
yet been tried, all things seemed possible. It was 
Adolescence in a Promised Land.
Nor were the first college ventures all bubbles, 
though, like the infant Harvard, they were for a 
while only high schools glorified by pompous titles. 
In due time some of them grew up to their names. 
If the decade of the forties was an era of paper 
colleges, the fifties brought more substantial struc­
tures of brick and stone. To the credit of self- 
sacrificing divines, who equalled the Puritans in 
religious ardor and surpassed them in tolerance, 
denominational schools sprang up in every part of 
the state. Cornell College had its origin in the 
fifties, as did Coe, Central, Upper Iowa, Dubuque 
University, Lenox, and Tabor. In the late fifties 
the State College at Ames took legal form, while 
the State University, established with two 
branches by a youthful and enthusiastic legislature 
in 1847, actually opened its doors in 1855.
THE MEANS OF EDUCATION 37
The means of education in pioneer Iowa were 
not limited to the schools. The New England 
conscience, though broadened by frontier condi­
tions, could not rest in the new home until the 
lyceum had been transplanted. Consquently the 
voice of the lecturer mingled with the sound of the 
ringing ax. In the new soil the lyceum waxed 
luxuriant. It fostered a transcendentalism which 
welcomed an Emerson rejected at home and lion­
ized an Alcott who was a stranger in his own land.
With the lyceum came an endless number of 
young men's associations, the founders of most 
of our present public libraries. Books and maga­
zines were not so plentiful as today, but they were 
not rare. Newspapers, with apparently the great­
est nonchalance, pirated poetry and fiction, so that 
the writings of Longfellow, Emerson, Lowell, and 
Whittier were read in Iowa newspapers.
The drama, too, ventured into the booming river 
cities. Concerts were frequent winter diversions, 
and balls for which military bands played impres­
sive quadrilles provided the social contact which 
is after all one of the final ends of education. 
Little sympathy, in truth, does the pioneer Iowan 
ask of his descendants. Rather does he look to­
ward us with compassion, for his was the day of 
great hope, when marvelous events were upon the 
eve of happening.
Hubert H. Hoeltje


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