later in its revision of the school laws provided for a department of Education at the university and a territorial superintendency of schools. While under this law of 1829 tuition fees were to be required, except from the poor, by the first state constitution in 1837 the school lands were taken over from the wasteful management of the towns, and a public school was required to be open for three months in every district. The state superintendency was also established, and before 1840 Michigan was well started with a complete system of common schools. [Sidenote: Progress in all sections of the country.] =Condition of the Common Schools Prior to the Awakening.=--Thus, while some of the New England states, New York, and Ohio possessed the only definitely organized systems of public education, the movement for common schools had made some progress in all sections of the country even before the educational awakening spread through the land. A radical modification had taken place in the European institutions with which education in the United States began. To meet the demands of the new environment, education had become more democratic and less religious and sectarian. Wealth had become much greater and material interests had met with a marked growth. The old aristocratic institutions had begun to disappear. Town and district schools had been taking the place of the old church, private, and ‘field’ schools, and in some of the cities the foundation for public education was being laid by quasi-public societies or even through local taxation. The academies (Fig. 32) had replaced the ‘grammar’ schools, and the colleges had lost their distinctly ecclesiastical character. State universities were starting in the South and Northwest. All these evidences of the growth of democracy, nonsectarianism, and popular training in education were destined to be greatly multiplied and spread before long. Such an awakening will be found to be characteristic of the great development of common schools that took place in the decades around the middle of the nineteenth century. But, before pursuing the subject further, we must direct our attention to some new reforms in method and content that were being introduced by Pestalozzi into education in Europe and were destined to produce a great stimulus in the public systems of the United States. SUPPLEMENTARY READING