The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association, Volume 1, July 1897 - April, 1898 Page: 287
334 p. : ill., ports., maps ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Recollections of Early Schools.
from ancient monuments of the East, where the childhood of the
world is in some measure recorded, and from barbarous tribes
where that state continues, have now at last caught up with the
former discoveries of the four year olds and announce that the
alphabet was originally pictures, which the exigencies of conven-
ience and rapid use had even in very ancient times shortened into
conventional signs; the foreign names of the things represented
having probably prevented us from observing the same as a famil-
iar fact. If the cultivators of science would study the mental im-
ages formed by those original explorers of the world, the three and
four year old children, they might find hieroglyphics more signifi-
cant than any that were ever sculptured on Egyptian obelisk or
propylon.
I do not know when I learned to read. Mother attended to that
in the very early morning of life, but I could already spell and read
very well for a child of seven, when I first went to school It was
taught in an unfinished new school house about two miles from
home, to which my brother and I walked every day. The teacher
proved inefficient, and after a very brief session the school closed.
The next school was at the same place in 1838 or 1839, taught
by Mr. Dyas, an old Irish gentleman, and I think a regular teacher
by profession. The session was three or four months and the
studies miscellaneous, but the discipline was exact. He had an as-
sortment of switches set in grim array over the great opening
where the chimney was to be when the school house should be com-
pleted. On one side was the row for little boys, small, straight and
elastic, from a kind of tree which furnished Indians with arrows
and the schoolmaster with switches at that time. I remember
meditating upon the feasibility of destroying all that kind of timber
growing near the school house. My terror was a little red switch in
that rank which I caught too often, usually for the offense of laugh-
ing in school. The larger switches were graded, partly by the size of
the boys and partly by the gravity of the offense, the gravest of
which was an imperfect lesson. The third size of rods was of hick-
ory; tough sticks, which he did not use on the little boys, but
which he did use on the larger scholars, without the least hesita-
tion or reserve, if they failed to get the appointed lesson or were
derelict in any of their duties. The fourth size of switches was of
oak and would have been better called clubs. These he applied287
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Texas State Historical Association. The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association, Volume 1, July 1897 - April, 1898, periodical, 1897/1898; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101009/m1/313/: accessed April 28, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.