administration of the state’s insanity law. This commission consists of three members appointed by the governor with the consent of the Senate. Its president must be a physician and alienist, and another member must be a lawyer. The commission appoints a board of experts to examine all immigrants suspected of insanity or allied mental disorders in order to prevent the admission of the insane into the country. In 1910 there were fourteen state hospitals (corresponding to fourteen state hospital districts) for the poor and indigent insane; these were at Utica, Willard, Poughkeepsie, Buffalo, Middletown (homoeopathic), Binghamton, Rochester, Ogdensburg, Gowanda (homoeopathic), Flatbush, Ward’s Island, King’s Park, Central Islip and Yorktown. There were also in 1910 two hospitals for the criminal insane, at Matteawan and Dannemora. Each of these is under the immediate control of a superintendent appointed by the superintendent of state prisons.
The state commission of prisons consists of seven members appointed by the governor with the consent of the Senate for a term of Four years, and the institutions under its supervision in 1910 were the Sing Sing State Prison,[1] at Ossining, the Auburn State Prison at Auburn, the Clinton State Prison at Dannemora, the New York State Reformatory at Elmira, the Eastern New York Reformatory at Napanoch, five county penitentiaries, and all other institutions for the detention of sane adults charged with or convicted of crime, or retained as witnesses or debtors. The state prisons are under a superintendent of state prisons, appointed by the governor, with the consent of the Senate, for five years; and the state reformatories are managed by a board of seven managers similarly appointed for seven years. In the state reformatory at Elmira (which, like that at Napanoch, is for men between sixteen and thirty years of age who have been convicted of a state prison offence for the first time only), the plan of committing adult felons on an indeterminate sentence to be determined by their behaviour was first tested in America in 1877, and it has proved so satisfactory that it has been in part adopted for the state prisons. In order to minimize competition between prison labour and free labour, articles manufactured in the state prisons, the reformatories and the penitentiaries, are sold only to the institutions and departments of the state and its political divisions.
Education.—The first school was established by the Dutch at New Amsterdam (now New York City) as early as 1633, and at the close of the Dutch period there was a free elementary school in nearly every settlement. But from the English conquest to the close of the colonial era the chief purpose of the government with respect to education was to prepare leaders for the state church; to this end King’s College was founded in 1754, and from 1704 to 1776 the other schools were principally those maintained by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Hardly any schools remained in operation throughout the War of Independence. In January 1784 Governor George Clinton recommended legislation for the “revival and encouragement of seminaries of learning,” with the result that the legislature passed an act establishing a state university of which Columbia College, formerly King’s, was the “mother” portion. In 1787 a second university act was passed which restored to Columbia College the substance of its original charter and made the University of the State of New York an exclusively executive body with authority to incorporate new colleges and academies and to exercise over them the right of visitation. In 1795 an act was passed which formed the basis of the present elementary-school system. This act appropriated £20,000 annually for five years for the establishment and maintenance of elementary schools, required each city and town to raise by taxation a sum for the same purpose equal to one-half of its share from the proceeds of the state fund, and provided for the election of school commissioners in each town and of trustees of each school. The state appropriation was discontinued in 1800; but in 1805 the proceeds of the sale of 500,000 acres of land were set apart for a permanent school fund, and in 1812, when the interest on this fund had become nearly $50,000 a year, the amount required before any of it could be distributed for school purposes, the common-school system was permanently established by an act which restored the main features of that of 1795, except that a superintendent of schools chosen by the council of appointment was now placed at its head. Although the interest on the state fund had risen to $70,000 in 1819, this together with an equal sum raised by the cities and towns was insufficient, and to meet the deficiency the patrons in each district were required by a “rate bill” to contribute in proportion to the attendance of their children. The schools were made free only after a memorable contest against the “rate bill.” The framers of the constitution of 1846 were nearly equally divided on this question. In 1849 the legislature passed a free-school bill subject to the approval of the people. The people approved by a vote of nearly three to one, but the court of appeals declared the act unconstitutional because of the referendum. In 1851 a compromise measure was substituted, increasing the state appropriation to $800,000 and exempting indigent parents from the “rate bill,” which was finally abolished in 1867. The administration of the common school system was in the hands of a state superintendent of schools from 1813 to 1821, of the secretary of state from 1821 to 1854, and of a superintendent of public instruction from 1854 to 1904. In the meantime the functions of the university had been extended to include an oversight of the professional, scientific and technical schools, the administration of laws relating to admission to the professions, the charge of the State Library at Albany, the supervision of local libraries, the custody of the State Museum and the direction of all scientific work prosecuted by the state. This dual system was consolidated by the Educational Unification Act of 1904, in conformity with which the university regents have become a legislative body, subordinate to the state legislature, for determining the general educational policy of the state, and a commissioner of education acts as the chief executive, advisory and supervisory, officer of the whole educational system.
The regents of the University are chosen by the legislature, one retiring each year; and an act of 1909 requires that their number shall at all times be three more than the number of judicial districts. The first commissioner of education was chosen by the legislature for a term of six years, but it was arranged that his successor should be chosen by the regents and continue in office during their pleasure. The commissioner (subject to approval of the regents) appoints three assistant commissioners, for higher, secondary and elementary education respectively. The elementary school is administered by a school commissioner in each of the school commissioner’s districts into which a county may be divided, by one trustee or three trustees in each separate school district, and by a board of education in each city, village or union free school district having more than three hundred children. Any two or more adjoining school districts may unite to form a union free school district, and in any village or union free school district having a population of 5000 or more the board of education may appoint a superintendent of schools.
The compulsory education law as amended in 1907 and 1909 requires the full attendance at a public school, or at a school which is an approximate equivalent, of all children who are between seven and fourteen years of age, are in the proper physical and mental condition, and reside in a city or school district having a population of 5000 or more and employing a superintendent of schools; in such a city or district children between fourteen and sixteen years must attend school unless they obtain an employment certificate and are regularly engaged in some useful employment or service; and outside of such a city or district all children between the ages of eight and fourteen years and those between fourteen and sixteen years who are not regularly employed must attend school on all school days from October to June. In a city of the first or second class every boy between fourteen and sixteen years of age who has an employment certificate, but has not completed the course of study prescribed for the elementary public schools or the equivalent, must attend an evening school not less than six hours each week for a period of not less than sixteen weeks each year, or a trade school not less than eight hours a week for sixteen weeks a year. By a law of 1908 the board of education of any city is authorized to establish industrial schools for children who have completed the elementary school course or have attained the age of fourteen years, and trade schools for children who are more than sixteen years old and have completed the elementary school course or a course offered by any of the industrial schools. For the training of teachers for the elementary schools the state maintains ten normal schools at Oswego (1863), Cortland (1866), Fredonia (1866), Potsdam (1866), Geneseo (1867), Brockport (1867), Buffalo (1867), New Paltz (1885), Oneonta (1887) and Plattsburg (1890); it also appropriates $700 annually for each teachers’ training class in about one hundred of the secondary schools. The State Normal College at Albany, founded in 1844 as the first state normal school, is designed principally for the training of teachers for the secondary schools, about 800 high schools and academies, supported wholly or in part by the state.
The state controls professional and technical schools through the regents’ examinations of candidates for admission to such schools and to the professions, determines the minimum requirements for admission to college by the regents’ academic examinations, maintains the large State Library and the valuable State Museum, and occasionally makes a gift to a college or a university for the support of courses in practical industries; but it maintains no college or university that is composed of a teaching body. To Cornell University (q.v.), a non-sectarian institution opened at Ithaca in 1868, the state turned over the proceeds from the National land-grant act of 1862 on condition that it should admit free one student annually from each Assembly district, and in 1909 a still closer relation between this institution and the state was established by an act which makes the governor, lieutenant-governor, speaker of the Assembly and commissioner of education ex-officio members of its board of trustees, and authorizes the governor with the approval of the Senate to appoint five other members, one each year.
Among the institutions of higher learning in the state, besides Columbia University (q.v.) and Cornell University (q.v.), are: Union University (1795, non-sectarian), at Schenectady; Hamilton College (1812, non-sectarian), at Clinton; Colgate University (1819, non-sectarian), at Hamilton; Hobart College (1822, non-sectarian), at Geneva; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1824, non-sectarian), at Troy; New York University (1832, non-sectarian), in New York City; Alfred University (1836, non-sectarian), at Alfred; Fordham University (1841, Roman Catholic), in New York City; College of
- ↑ In 1906 a law was enacted for the establishment of a new state prison in the eastern part of the state to take the place of Sing Sing Prison.
