OLD-TIME SCHOOLS AND SCHOOL-BOOKS - online book
An Illustrated history & description Of Schools in the 18th & 19th Centurys.
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6 Old-time Schools and School-books
uce, agreement being made in hiring the teacher just what this should be. An old Dedham contract calls for two-thirds in wheat and the other third in corn ; and Deerfield, in 1703, covenants to pay the master
 The net salary of the schoolmasters in most towns, after allowing a moderate sum for board, is estimated to have hardly exceeded, as expressed in modern terms, sixty or seventy dollars.
I have spoken of tuition fees. They were an accepted part of the educational financing in nearly all the old towns, and free schools were many years i discussed before the majority of the towns adopted them. Free schools found favor with the poorer classes, but were opposed by the wealthy, especially the wealthy who had no children to send ; and they j did not become the rule until long after the beginning of the eighteenth century. Indeed, school support by taxation was not made compulsory in j Massachusetts until 1827.
The first town to have a school supported by general taxation — that is, by a tax on all the property holders of the community — was Dedham. The date of the innovation was 1649. The town records show that the schoolhouse was "built together with a watch house, the length 18 foote, the wideness, |
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