Did you know that a hundred years ago mills and factories in the U.S. operated
their own schools? Hi, I'm Erin McCarthy, editor-in-chief of Mental Floss.com. At
the time many kids had jobs ,whether on family farms or with those companies.
This meant that regular 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. school hours weren't always a thing.
Some children attended elementary and high school at night. In certain cities
it was mandatory to provide night school for children. And that's the first
of many ways school was different a hundred years ago in the U.S. than I'm
going to share with you today.
Probably most Americans you know have attended school, but a hundred years ago
that was not as common of an experience. In fact, in 1900 just 51 percent of
people between the ages of five and nineteen were enrolled in school. That
changed quickly, becoming 75% by 1940, likely due to many factors, including
education reform and child labor laws. There have been what are essentially
high schools in the U.S. ever since what's now known as the Boston Latin School was
founded in 1635, but high school attendance was particularly low a
hundred years ago. In 1900 about eleven percent of 14 to 17 year olds attended
high school and by 1920 things hadn't changed much. According to an analysis
done by the National Center for Education Statistics, the median years of
school completed by persons aged 25 and over at that time was 8.2 years. 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 1 through 8. They set in order of age,
with the youngest up front and the oldest in the back. Cities had bigger
schools, with multiple classrooms. As I mentioned earlier, work had a big impact
on school days. It also affected the length of the school year. Nowadays, most
states require a minimum of 180 days of instruction per year in public schools,
but in 1905 the average school had just 151 days. And children typically missed
more days of school back then, too. The average student attended only a hundred
and six days per year. Kids who worked on farms, in particular,
took a lot of absences. They would usually take the spring and autumn off
to work. And maybe that wasn't so terrible. In the 1900s it wasn't unusual
for teachers to dole out corporal punishment. The Board of Education in
Franklin, Ohio laid out its rules in 1883, which included this: "Pupils may be
detained at any recess or not exceeding 15 minutes after the hour for closing
the afternoon session, when the teacher deemed such detention necessary for the
commitment of lessons or for the enforcement of discipline. Whenever it
shall become necessary for teachers to resort to corporal punishment, the same
shall not be inflicted upon head or hands of the pupil. Other school systems
allowed teachers more freedom. They were known to hit students' knuckles with a
ruler, along with conducting other physical forms of punishment, like having
a child write a single phrase over and over again. One way to potentially end up
on the receiving end of corporal punishment? Being left handed. For decades
into the 20th century, many educators believe that lefties exhibited more
mental and cognitive disabilities and attempted to train them into
right-handedness. Methods to achieve this included tying up a student's left hand
to immobilize it and outright humiliating students who refused to make
the switch. Thanks to EmilyExplosion27 for the suggestion and to educational
experts, who now disfavor training left handedness out of students. And then of
course there was the infamous dunce cap...which was real. If a child got in
trouble, a teacher would put a pointy cap on their head (which according to
nineteenth-century accounts occasionally featured bells to add extra shame) and
then have them sit in the corner of the room. There are people who remember it
still being used as a punishment well into the 1950s. It's commonly reported
that the dunce cap came from John Duns Scotus, a religious philosopher born in
the 13th century. He gained a following of people who would come to be called dunces
and supposedly wore pointy hats. Scotus thought that the hats allowed for
knowledge to be funneled into the brain, but eventually his teachings fell out of
favor and both the word and the cap took on a negative connotation.
Sadly, evidence for this theory about the origin of the hats is lacking. Around
1919, about 84 percent of teachers were women. Compare that with the Year 1800,
when 90% of teachers were men. It became a career path primarily for women when
public education boomed during the mid 1800s. Basically, education reformers
wanted to show that the system could be cheap, so they filled the new teaching
jobs with women who were paid much less than men. It's important to note here
that school looked very different depending on who you were. Girls and boys
did not receive the same education. Girls were pushed towards home economics and
other classes that focused on domestic skills, and in some places girls weren't
even allowed to enter school through the same door as boys. More starkly, schools
were racially segregated. The ones that white children attended were much better
funded than the schools for black children, which often used old books and
supplies that white schools had gotten rid of. Teachers in the two systems
experienced a major pay disparity. In 1954 segregation of schools was ruled
unconstitutional, but true equity remains a vexing problem for education reformers
today. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries children and classrooms
were beginning to learn and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, which was written
by a man named Francis Bellamy when he worked in a magazine marketing
department in 1892. The original words were simply, "I pledge allegiance to my
flag and the Republic for which it stands; one nation indivisible, with
liberty and justice for all." A lot of what kids were
expected to do in the classroom was just memorize things. 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. Here's a selection from McGuffey's Eclectic
Readers, a textbook that was often memorized at the time. "This is a fat hen.
The hen has a nest in the box. She has eggs in the nest. A cat sees the nest and
can get the eggs." This feels like slander against cats, frankly. They'd be more
interested in the hen. Anyway, by 1919 that teaching style was starting to
become less of a staple. During the late 19th century and early 20th century the
progressive education movement was underway, and it was led by reformers
like John Dewey and Ella Flagg Young. As the first female superintendent of the
school system in a major American city (Chicago), Young focused on teacher
training and empowerment, in addition to her writings on educational theory. These
philosophers and educators encouraged a shift in focus, from forcing children to
memorize to empowering them with more options.
They wanted the classroom to be communal and democratic, rather than all about a
teacher up front telling kids what to do. Although their vision never fully became
a reality, schools did implement parts of it. One interesting attempt occurred in
Gary, Indiana where schools were turned into microcosms of communities. Students
were expected to apply the practical skills they were learning to help keep
schools running. This could include cooking and serving food to their
classmates, building their own desks or even handling plumbing and electrical
work in school buildings (with supervision, of course)>
Speaking of hands-on activities, we've had music in the classroom for many
year. Public schools had music classes, usually teaching music theory, singing or
instruments. This meant that teachers also had to learn music as part of their
training. Luckily for the eardrums of early twentieth-century parents, the
recorder didn't become the standard starter instrument for students until
the mid 20th century. Okay, who's heard of Fifty Nifty United
States? Well kids in 1919 weren't singing that, of course, because it wasn't written
until the 1960s. But they were singing songs like A Cat Land Law, Looby Looby
Song of the Noisy Children and Dollies' Washing Day. By the way, my elementary
school music teacher made us sing pretty standard songs, like Fifty Nifty—which I
can still do—along with some head scratchers, like Billy Don't Be a Hero,
Both Sides Now, and Send in the Clowns— because what nine-year-old doesn't love
wistful explorations of lost love? Leave the weird songs you sang in school in
the comments. Even a hundred years ago kids
couldn't escape gym class, which was sometimes called physical culture. German
gymnastics and Swedish gymnastics were two of the most popular styles of P.E., or
P.C., used at the time. The former involved lifting weights, using balance beams
climbing ladders and ropes, and doing some cardio, like running. The Swedish
style sometimes made use of similar equipment, but was more focused on simple,
whole body exercises, and had a more organized method, with adults delivering
instructions, going from easy movements to challenging ones over the course of
the class. As the 20th century began, gym classes also started incorporating
lessons on hygiene and health. Recess did exist at this time, and had since the
1800s, though unfortunately little research has been done into its history.
We do know that by 1919 many popular playground games have been invented, like
jacks, Red Rover, hopscotch and kickball. Kickball was actually just emerging in
the U.S., coming out of Cincinnati in 1917. As the 19th century was ending, some
school lunch programs were beginning in cities like Philadelphia and Boston. By
the early 1920s many schools had followed suit and provided hot food, like
soups. I would be remiss if I didn't mention this, because my mother and I
still talk about it all the time, but once she sent me to school with a peanut
butter and carrot sandwich for lunch. *Jon (off screen): That's negligent*
Back-to-school shopping was a thing in the early 20th century, but it wasn't
quite like what we have today. No visits to Target and no Minions backpacks or
Trapper Keepers. One 1924 ad from a Montana store urged parents to let kids
do the shopping themselves, saying, quote, "Train the children to do their own
buying economically and in good taste. They are safe to shop here because we
will make exchanges or refund their money if their selections are not
entirely approved at home." The supplies they were buying were certainly
different. 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. Scottish teacher James Pillans is often cited as
the inventor of the blackboard. In the early 1800s he supposedly connected a
bunch of individual slates together to make one big enough for the maps in his
geography classes. As you're probably gathering, kids back in the day didn't
have it easy. I, for one, have no interest in Swedish gymnastics. One other thing
that wasn't as easy as it is for most kids today was getting to school.
Transportation to school wasn't standardized, though it does seem like an
awful lot of our grandparents had the same five mile walk to
school, in the snow, uphill both ways. Kids were expected to get to school by any
means possible, which could mean hitching a ride on a wagon, carriage or cart. The
modern idea of school buses started emerging in the first decades of the
20th century and by the early 1930s there were around sixty three thousand of
them in the United States. And finally, a hundred years ago it was sometimes
illegal to learn another language in school. For example, Nebraska passed a law
in 1919 that meant that no one could learn a foreign language in school
before they, quote, "successfully passed the eighth grade."
Iowa had a similar law, and because World War one had just ended even states
without English-only laws on the books removed German classes from their
schools. In 1923 the Supreme Court ruled that these laws were unconstitutional.
Our next episode is about the etymology of words and phrases from Harry Potter,
so pop your favorite Potter spell in the comments and we'll break it down in our
September 18th video. Subscribe here so you don't miss it, and we'll see you
muggles then!