Chapter 1

   School 100 years ago

 

School has come a long way since the 19th and 20th centuries. From corporal punishment to lunch, to walking five miles in the snow just to get there, here are just a few ways school was different a century ago.

One hundred years ago, many kids had jobs, whether on family farms or at mills or factories—which meant that regular 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. school hours wouldn't work. Some children attended elementary and high school at night, and in some cities, it was mandatory to provide night school for children.

In rural areas in the U.S., there was usually a single school with a single room where one teacher handled every kid in grades one through eight. They sat in order of age, with the youngest up front and the oldest in the back. Cities, however, had bigger schools with multiple classrooms.

Corporal punishment was an important part of the educational experience of many children educated during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It has often been assumed that it was an uncontroversial and widely accepted means of maintaining school discipline.

Sometimes, if a child got in trouble, a teacher would put a pointy cap on their head known as a Dunce cap and have them sit in the corner of the room. (According to 19th century accounts, the caps occasionally featured bells to add extra shame.) Some remember it still being used as a punishment well into the 1950s.

In the past, girls and boys did not receive the same education.

Girls were pushed toward home economics and classes that focused on domestic skills. In some places, girls weren’t even allowed to enter school through the same door as boys.

In every subject from writing to arithmetic, the expectation was that students would memorize and recite the important components of the lessons. Homework mostly entailed practicing that memorization. 

Kids in classrooms did most of their work with a slate and a piece of chalk, because paper and ink were expensive. There was typically a blackboard in the front of the room as well. Blackboards began to be manufactured around the 1840s.