The Immigrant and the University: Peder Sather and Gold Rush California by Karin Sveen

Author:Karin Sveen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520276482
Publisher: University of California Press

FOURTEEN

* * *

The Foundation of Man’s Future Circumstances

The majority of American universities, large or small, were private institutions, run by different denominations—Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, or Congregationalist. This had been the way ever since the founding of the country’s first university, Harvard, in 1636, and the custom had continued with the establishment of Yale in 1701, Princeton in 1746, and Columbia in 1754. The idea was that study should not only impart knowledge and culminate in an exam, it should also ennoble the spirit and turn students into good and pious citizens. Education had to serve a higher purpose and help to imbue society with faith, knowledge, and cultivation. These were the classic ideals, carried over from Europe and particularly from the English universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

All of the old, established universities were on the East Coast; in 1860 California had several college but no universities. This does not mean that no one was interested in changing this state of affairs. When gold was discovered at the end of the 1840s, California became a magnet, not only for fortune hunters and workhorses like Anthony Tasheira, but learned theologians, missionaries, and ministers of one church and another, all of them educated at eastern universities, also headed west. These men were concerned that the lust for gold would warp the souls of the people out there, and they intended to do whatever they could to save them. To these men of the cloth this vocation did not merely mean preaching the gospel and giving the sacrament to the newcomers; they also saw to it that children and young people received schooling.

The Methodist brothers who had run the boarding school in the house in Alameda are one case in point; other groups provided higher levels of education and offered university preparation courses. Had it not been for such faith-based educational establishments only very few children would have learned to read and write at all. There was an acute shortage of both teachers and schools, and it was difficult to scrape together the tax dollars necessary to pay for these, not necessarily because people were reluctant to pay taxes and were only moderately interested in enlightening their minds and ennobling their spirits, but more because the majority had no intention of staying in California for any length of time. This does not, however, explain why the craving for gold should have been stronger than the thirst for knowledge. Particularly in the first years after the yellow metal was discovered scarcely anyone heeded anything but the chinking of gold, and those few citizens who worked their way up to public office found the forging of a new state hard going. The state constitution of 1850 contains articles concerning the establishment of a public school system with a school year of at least three months, but even such a modest goal as this proved difficult to put into practice, and higher education was nothing but a pipe dream.

The Reverend Samuel Willey, who had

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.