Greater Kennebec & Androscoggin River Valleys
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Gardiner High School In 1866 Nay-sayers influenced educational attitudes Brian Swartz
B
efore Gardiner High School ended its winter term on Thursday, March 1, 1866, the public was invited to visit classes and see how students were doing. But “the number of visitors was small, showing a lamentable” lack of interest by parents, commented the local Kennebec Reporter. Two of seven high school directors showed up, as did only one Gardiner school-committee member. Two ministers, “one layman, and about a dozen ladies” checked out what students were doing. “The order of the school was good, showing a marked improvement in this respect during the year,” wrote a Reporter staffer, perhaps co-publisher
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G.O. Bailey or his partner, F.J. Brown. The staffer popped into various classrooms, witnessed “one of the best recitations in Arithmetic to which we ever listened,” watched students “analyzing and parsing … Milton’s Paradise Lost,” and watched “beginners” (today’s freshmen) learn about geometry and American history. “We have not passed a day more pleasantly of late, than that we spent in the High School, listening to these recitations,” the newspaperman stated. The Reporter’s publishers had hoped “to see a little more interest manifested by our citizens generally.” Officials elected to run the Gardiner schools should have been there March 1. As for
parents, if they “would now and then look in upon the exercises,” doing so “would encourage the teachers and animate the pupils.” The Reporter discussed the Gardiner residents “who are constantly grumbling” about the high school while “endeavoring to defeat appropriations to sustain it.” Thinking they knew everything about the schools without darkening the doors, such bellyachers “are those who know the least about it,” the paper commented. The sidewalk school directors’ anti-education attitude permeated down to Gardiner’s younger generation, too. Throughout the Gardiner school sys-
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