Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [399]
By 1823 better than seven thousand male and female students were attending seventy-four Sunday schools in New York. Roughly a quarter of the pupils were African Americans—half of them adults, women as well as men. The Episcopal Church refused to join the Sunday School Union but started its own program, which over the next decade grew to some two dozen schools with a combined enrollment of six thousand. The movement spread quickly to communities on the Long Island side of the East River, and in 1829 the Kings County Sabbath School Society was formed to coordinate Sunday school work in Flatbush, Flatlands, Gravesend, New Lots, Brooklyn, and Bushwick. Memorization remained the technique of choice, and its results were toted up meticulously. (Some students were paid for each verse memorized—with coupons redeemable in Bibles).
All of this convinced evangelicals that they were at last beginning to make some inroads on pauperism and related social evils. Even “Bancker-Street Sabbath-breakers of the vilest class [i.e., blacks],” exulted Eleazer Lord, had become “decent in their dress, orderly in their behavior, industrious in their calling, and punctual at school and church!” In 1829, to celebrate the “mighty machinery of Sunday schools,” twelve thousand scholars were paraded down Broadway in orderly rows to Battery Park, where they sang songs and heard congratulatory speeches.
But the apparent success of the Sunday School Union was clouded by an acrimonious fight over public support among the city’s charity schools. Since 1812 the state government had provided financial assistance to the charity schools (funneled through the Common Council after 1824) in proportion to their enrollments. As the number and size of church-run schools increased, however, the Free School Society’s share of the pie dwindled alarmingly, and it began to attack all aid to “sectarian” schools as a violation of the separation of church and state. In 1825 the FSS called for the creation of a single public school system, under its management, that would be open to all city children, “not as a charity, but as a matter of common right.” New York, it declared, needed classrooms where “the rich and the poor may meet together; where the wall of partition, which now seems to be raised between them, may be removed; where kindlier feelings between the children of these respective classes may be begotten; where the indigent may be excited to emulate the cleanliness, decorum and mental improvement of those in better circumstances.” The Common Council agreed and, despite bitter opposition, cut off aid to denominational schools. In 1826 the Free School Society renamed itself the Public School Society, though it remained in fact a privately run institution.
Over the next several years, although the society’s schools did manage to attract somewhat more students from what it called “the middle walks of life,” the effectiveness of free common education as a cure for pauperism and immorality remained largely hypothetical. New public schools were opened only in neighborhoods of “a quiet and orderly cast”—there were none in the Five Points throughout the 1820s—and they tended to expel pupils who didn’t readily conform to their values. By 1829, of the roughly forty-three thousand children in New York between the ages of five and fifteen, as many as twenty thousand—overwhelmingly from the city’s most indigent households—still attended no school whatever. Of the remainder, about fourteen thousand went to private schools, as against the five thousand in public schools and the four thousand or so served by church-run charity schools (which coped with the loss of public support by scaling back enrollments). Many working-class youths withdrew once they were old enough to help support their families;