towards the settyng up of a free skolle,” which was started next year to “teche the cheldarne to write and rede and cast accompthe.” At St Lawrence Jewry in 1568 a school was kept over the vestry. At St Ethelwyn’s in 1589 Smythe “the schoolmaster” paid 10s. “for kepinge scole in the belfry.” At Stevenage in 1561–1562 the old Brotherhood house and some endowment was bought by subscription for a school “to teach scholars called pettits to read English, write, cast accounts and learn the accidence.”
Some of these and other like schools were rather junior or preparatory departments of the grammar school than independent elementary schools. The foundation of purely elementary schools was rare in E1izabeth’s reign. In Warwickshire, Alcester in 1582, Henley-in-Arden in 1586, in-Salop, Onibury in 1593, in Essex, Littlebury in 1595, appear to be pretty well all those known. Those mentioned in Mr de Montmorency’s “State Intervention,” taken from the Digest of Schools of 1842, are mostly of charities afterwards applied to elementary education, not founded for the purpose. In most counties the earliest elementary endowed schools are of James I.’s reign, such as Appleton, Berkshire, in 1604, Northiam, Sussex, in 1614, Sir William Borlase’s school at Great Marlow in Buckinghamshire (now a secondary school) in 1624. At great impetus was given to them by the Commonwealth, and many were founded by state action, only to be destroyed at the Restoration. Conspicuous among Commonwealth schools was that of Polesworth, Warwickshire, founded by deed of 10th March 1655, the first endowed school which provided for girls as well as boys, the boys under a master to learn to write and read English, the girls in a separate schoolroom under a mistress to learn to read and work with the needle. In Wales Thomas Gouge, an ejected minister, in 1672, started voluntary schools.
After 1670 there was a large increase in elementary school foundations. The reign of Queen Anne saw a new development take place of the charity schools. The movement was started in 1698 by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, and taken up by the bishops with an organized propaganda for getting subscriptions. The schools founded were commonly called blue or blue-coat schools, though there were red maids’, green and even yellow schools. Many were boarding-schools on the model of Christ’s Hospital, where slum children, girls and boys, in separate schools of course, were taken in and prepared for service and work. But there were many day schools. All, however, provided a uniform of the Christ’s Hospital type. They were chiefly in the large towns, and still comprise some of the richest endowed elementary schools. Over 100 of them were established between 1698 and 1715 in London and Westminster, and in 1729 there were 1658 schools with 34,000 children. In that year the curious development of “circulating schools” was started in Wales, the masters residing for a certain time in one district and then passing on to another. (This was a device known in medieval times, and notable examples of it were Sir Robert Hitcham’s rotatory school for Earl’s Colne and two other places in Essex during the Commonwealth.) Griffith Tones was the principal promoter, and at his death in 1761 there were 10,000 children in the schools. In 1801 the Lancasterian system of schools, not of a few boys or girls, but of several hundreds taught in classes of 60 or 80, chiefly by pupil teachers, was inaugurated in the Borough Road by Joseph Lancaster. Out of it grew the British and Foreign School Society. This was undenominational. In 1811 the National Society adopted the similar, but rival, Bell or “Madras system” for Church of England teaching. The effect of these two organizations was to cover the country with elementary schools, partly endowed, chiefly supported by voluntary contributions and low fees. These completed the system, if system it could be called, of sporadic elementary schools. After the Reform Act of 1832 the state stepped in with grants and has gradually made elementary education universal. (A. F. L.)
See further under Education.
SCHOONER, a vessel rigged with fore and aft sails, properly with two masts, but now often with three, four and sometimes more masts; they are much used in the coasting trade, and require a smaller crew in proportion to their size than square rigged vessels (see Rigging and Ship). According to the story, which is probably true, the name arose from a chance spectator’s exclamation “there she scoons,” i.e. glides, slips free, at the launch of the first vessel of this type at Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1713, her builder being one Andrew Robinson. The spelling “schooner” is due to a supposed derivation from the Dutch schooner, but that and the other European equivalents, Ger. Schoner, Dan. skonnert, Span. and Portuguese escuna, &c., are all from English. “ To scoon,” according to Skeat, is a Scottish (Clydesdale) dialect word, meaning to skip over water like a flat stone, and is ultimately connected with the root, implying quick motion, seen in shoot, scud, &c. In American colloquial usage “schooner” is applied to the covered prairie-wagons used by the emigrants moving westward before the construction of railways, and to a tall, narrow, lager-beer glass.
SCHOPENHAUER, ARTHUR (1788–1860), German philosopher, was born in Danzig on the 22nd of February 1788. His parents belonged to the mercantile aristocracy—the bankers and traders of Danzig. His father, Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, the youngest of a family to which the mother had brought the germs of mental malady, was a man of strong will and originality, and so proud of the independence of his native town that when Danzig in 1793 surrendered to the Prussians he and his whole establishment withdrew to Hamburg. At the age of forty he married Johanna Henrietta Trosiener, then only twenty, but the marriage owing to difference of temperament
was unhappy. Their two children, Arthur and Adele (born
1796), bore the penalty of their parents’ incompatibilities. They were burdened by an abnormal urgency of desire and capacity for suffering, which no doubt took different phases in the man and the woman, but linked them together in a common susceptibility to ideal pain.[1]
In the summer of 1787, a year after the marriage, the elder Schopenhauer, whom commercial experiences had made a cosmopolitan in heart, took his wife on a tour to western Europe. It had been his plan that the expected child should see the light in England, but the intention was frustrated by the state of his wife’s health. The name Arthur was chosen because it remains the same in English, French and German. During the twelve years which followed the removal of the family to Hamburg (1793–1805) the Schopenhauers made frequent excursions. From 1797 to 1799 Arthur was a boarder with M. Gregoire, a merchant of Havre, and friend of the Hamburg house, with whose son Anthime he formed a fast friendship. Returning to Hamburg, for the next four years he had but indifferent training. When he reached the age of fifteen the scholarly and literary instincts began to awaken. But his father, steeped in the spirit of commerce, was unwilling that a son of his should worship knowledge and truth. Accordingly he offered his son the choice between the classical school and an excursion to England. A boy of fifteen could scarcely hesitate. In 1803 the Schopenhauers and their son set out on a lengthened tour, of which Johanna has given an account, to Holland, England, France and Austria. Six months were spent in England. He found English ways dull and precise and the religious observances exacting; and his mother had—not for the last time—to talk seriously with him on his unsocial and wilful character. At Hamburg in the beginning of 1805 he was placed in a merchant’s office. He had only been there for three months when his father, who had shown
- ↑ Johanna Schopenhauer (1766–1838) was in her day an author of some reputation. Besides editing the memoirs of Fernow, she published Notes on Travels in England, Scotland and Southern France (1813–1817); Johann van Eyck and his Successors (1823); three romances, Gabriele (1819–1820), Die Tante (1823) and Sidonia (1828), besides some shorter tales. These novels teach the moral of renunciation (Entsagung). Her daughter Adele (1796–1849) seems to have had a brave, tender and unsatisfied heart, and lavished on her brother an affection he sorely tried. She also was an authoress, publishing in 1844 a volume of Haus-, Wald-, und Feld-Märchen, full of quaint poetical conceits, and in 1845 Anna, a novel, in two vols. See Laura Frost, Johanna Schopenhauer: ein Frauenleben (1905).
