School Days

By Alison Bruce

My son graduated from grade eight last night. It got me to thinking about how much education has changed in two centuries and how most of the critical change happened in the 19th Century.

Before 1820: Private Education
No public schools. You either paid to send your child to a private school or you hoped there was a charity-run school they could attend part-time.

There were no set professional standards for teachers. Many tutors and teachers were young men teaching to earn money while they studied for law, the ministry or an academic career at a college.

The closest thing to today's public schools were established in the northern British colonies/states. They generally ran for 10-12 weeks per year. Boys were favored and they were not free.

Pioneer children would learn their letters and numbers from their parents. As towns were established, those who could might take on teaching as a sideline when their real work was slow.

1820: The Common School Movement
Precursor to modern public schools, the movement was started by Horace Mann who believed that a free and sectarian education was a universal right for all. He advocated a longer school year and teaching standards. He helped shape policy and laws that would make elementary schooling mandatory. The first Normal School, for teaching teachers, opened in 1839 but it took until 1918 for all the states to make school attendance compulsory.

1836: The McGuffey Reader
Standardized universal education required standardized text books. William McGuffey's Eclectic Readers became that standard. His first reader was published in 1836 and his readers were used in public schools up into the mid-twentieth century - and are still in print.

The first book contained 55 illustrated lessons that introduced children to reading, arithmetic and an ethical code. McGuffey was a Presbyterian minister but his readers were non-sectarian Christian. Reformers believed that moral lessons should go hand in hand with academics. McGuffey fit the bill. His second reader, which came out shortly after the first, had eight-five lesson covering diverse subjects from history and geography to table manners. Eventually his books covered primary to grade six.


1840's: Feminization of Education
The Common School Movement had its roots in the Industrial Revolution and was happening in Britain and Europe as well.  A workforce with basic literacy and numeracy skills was considered valuable.

Women's education was another banner being taken up and the 1820's and 30's saw the opening of the first women's colleges America. It deserves it's own post but mention should be made how women teachers came to dominate in public, especially primary, education.

The following pretty much sums it up:

"God seems to have made woman peculiarly suited to guide and develop the infant mind, and it seems...very poor policy to pay a man 20 or 22 dollars a month, for teaching children the ABCs, when a female could do the work more successfully at one third of the price." -- Littleton School Committee, Littleton, Massachusetts, 1849

A Woman's Work Is Never Done - Meg Mims

My mother always said this, while raising six kids in the 1950-1960s. She chose to leave a bank clerk job and be a housewife. My grandmother, raised on a farm, worked in an office as a typist before getting married and staying home to raise her family. That trend went back to the 1800s, when girls were raised to marry and have children. Many chose to work first at a job before settling down with a husband. Many didn't have a prospective suitor. Or didn't want one.

But there wasn't much to choose from in terms of paid employment at the upper level of salary choices. Men dominated the professions such as being a physician, a lawyer, owning a business, etc. Of course, there were exceptions - but for the most part, women worked as domestics (maids, laundresses, cooks) or in factories or at home, often paid by the piece, either stripping tobacco, picking nuts, producing silk flowers or sewing, making lace, etc. They sometimes worked in millinery and dressmaker shops, or ... as teachers. It seems fitting, being September, to talk about women working as teachers.

Harriet Beecher Stowe's sister, Catherine Beecher, born in 1800 in a prominent family of social reformers, was self-taught and believed that women were natural teachers. Catherine became one in 1821 and was a co-founder of the Hartford Female Seminary - where women were trained  to be mothers and teachers. She also believed that teaching was far more important than the work of a doctor or lawyer - something I agree with - although she never supported suffrage. Still, for the early 1800s, she spurred progress for women to further their education and then pass that knowledge to children.

It seems many people agreed with Beecher. "God seems to have made woman peculiarly suited to guide and develop the infant mind, and it seems... very poor policy to pay a man 20 or 22 dollars a month, for teaching children the ABCs, when a female could do the work more successfully at one third of the price." -- Littleton School Committee, Littleton, Massachusetts, 1849

In urban schools, women taught and men were superintendents or principals. In western rural areas, men might have taken the lower pay of a teaching position if they had no other choice. School districts might have hired a man to teach the older children and a woman to handle the younger ones. If they could afford both, that is, depending on the school and settlement. And most schools were one-room, handling up to sixty children. Often there was little extra money for slates, books or even coal or wood for the stoves to heat the small schoolhouses in poorer settlements. 

Reading - utilizing the Bible, early primers or later MacGuffey's Reader - and grammar, arithmetic, geography and history were taught in schools, sometimes by teachers who had barely learned the same lessons. But while many consider the quality of lessons as basic or primitive, consider today's trend to skip spelling and grammar lessons (disappearing unfortunately). The extensive "figuring" lessons in measures and weights, basic accounting and other necessary math was vital to running a farm or a keeping a business afloat.

Women in the field appreciated the chance to live an independent life, and to earn wages - even if on a  temporary basis before marriage. By the turn of the century, 75% of teachers were women. My husband's aunt worked in a one-room schoolhouse with children ranging from kindergarten to eighth grade. She swept the steps and classroom every day, fetched coal for the heating stove, brought extra food for kids going without breakfast/lunch (during late Depression) and handled discipline - but the children loved her since she made it fun to learn.

 

 

Rural North Dakota - above

To the right, a class of thirty children, possibly the same age (easier than thirty all at different grade levels), and their female teacher - at the Watkins School, Nashville, Tennessee, late 1800s.

Today, women still dominate the teaching profession. They do have the advantage of earning pensions, benefits and fairly decent wages - although for the work involved, they are still not paid enough (in my opinion.) We all have memories of our favorite teachers. God bless them all.

Sources: http://www.pbs.org/onlyateacher/beecher.html, http://www.nwhm.org/online-exhibits/industry/4.htm

Meg Mims is an award-winning author with two western mysteries under her Eastern belt. She lives in Michigan, where the hills are like driveway slopes and trees block any type of prairie winds. LIKE her on Facebook, follow her on Twitter or check out her books on her website. Double Crossing won the 2012 Spur Award for Best First Novel and Double or Nothing is the exciting sequel.