Culture Spot : School Days in America’s Past – Not Just the Little Red Schoolhouse

Throughout American history, school buildings came in a as wide a variety of styles as there were minds and materials to create them.

Short on resources but long on resourcefulness, parents in Scotts Bluff, Nebraska, constructed their first school from bales of straw. For two years in the late 1800’s, pupils recited lessons inside this grassy shelter while cattle on the outside nibbled it to oblivion. Temporary structures such as this were replaced or improved upon when the community prospered. The evolution of many a Kansas school was typical: they often began as simple dugouts, were replaced by sod shacks, and then by frame or stone structures.

Deciding where to build the school often sparked a lively debate. It needed to be within walking distance for most of the children, yet far enough from farms so that pranksters would not trample crops or harass animals. It should be built on land not suitable for cultivation and, if possible, be located near a road. Simple log or frame schools that lacked fixed foundations were sometimes set on skids and shifted about the countryside in response to changes in the population.

The schools were built from whatever materials were plentiful. Wood and stone were common in the East, sod was used on the prairies, and adobe in the Southwest. The prevalence of red brick schools in the Midwest has probably added to the myth of the “little red schoolhouse.” But, in fact, most schools were painted white. Octagonal schools – the brainchild of a phrenologist and amateur architect – were easy to heat and so were popular for a time in the Middle Atlantic states.

Traditionally, a one-room school was furnished with crude backless benches that were, over time, incised by idle whittlers with '”all sorts of images, some of which would make heathens blush.” There were no individual desks. Instead, a slanted shelf ran along three walls and served as a writing surface; a flat shelf below it held personal items. The windows were glazed with paper greased with lard for translucence and waterproofing. This fragile glazing was often broken, and in winter the openings were likely to be stuffed with hats to help keep out the cold.

Amenities were added as budgets permitted. Yards were fenced, more to keep wandering livestock out that to keep the children in. To ensure propriety, schools sometimes had separate entrances for boys and girls – an extravagant nicety in cases when the school itself was a single room. A more pressing matter was that of privies: some schools had none; others had only one. In the early 1990’s, school superintendents urged that there “be separate toilets for the sexes . . . far enough apart to avoid moral contagion.”

Standardization of buildings and facilities increased dramatically in the 20th century. Playgrounds were built and flagpoles sprang up. Additional rooms and second, or even third, stories were added. What one scholar observed about the one-room schoolhouse was no less true for theses later structures; from here a pupil’s world widened “outward from the common room . . . in an adventure of growing and learning.”

Taken from Reader’s Digest Discovering America’s Past – Customs, Legends, History & Lore of Our Great Nation.

Culture Spot : School Days in America’s Past – Schooling, Southern Style

In 1752 planter Theophilos Field placed a notice in the Virginia Gazette, soliciting the services of a qualified tutor. His needs were simple: “Any single man, capable of teaching Greek, Latin, and Mathematicks* . . .”

Field’s was one of many similar advertisements that appeared in southern newspapers throughout the 18^th century, for the gentry considered ignorance a disgrace. An uneducated member of the family was scorned as “Scandalous, . . .and a shame to his relations.”

But if education was important, it was also a problem. There were some “old-field schools” – community schools built on worn-out land – but they were relatively rare, and difficult for most children to get to. Since plantations were vast, families were isolated, and the burden of schooling fell directly on the parents.

Those who could afford it sent their sons to England for a proper education. Others found tutors who would live on the plantation and teach all of the children. The assignment could be challenging. When Philip Fithian accepted a position at Nomini Hall, a 70,000-acre Virginia estate, in 1773, he had only eight pupils. The children, however, ranged in age from 7 to 18 or older, and in experience from those just learning their letters to some who could read Latin.

Fithian was a graduate of Princeton, but American tutors were the exception. More often they were Scots or Englishmen who came to this country as indentured servants, pledging four years of service in exchange for ocean passage and the chance for a new life. Whether or not they were actually trained as teachers, those who had at least a smattering of Latin, literature, and the “the Mathematicks” made use of those skills when they got here.

While many indentured servants were treated as social inferiors, some, like John Harrower, who arrived in Virginia in 1774, were welcomed as gentlemen and had their own school buildings to work in. Horrower’s was “a neate* little House 20 foot Long and 12 foot wide” that doubled as his home. “I sleep in it by myself,” he wrote his wife back in Scotland, and “have a verry* fine feather bed under me.”

Despite his indenture, Horrower, like many other tutors in the South, was allowed to accept children from neighboring plantations as pupils. It was his one means of earning a bit of extra money to send home and help hasten the day when he and his family would be reunited.

*archaic spelling

Taken from Reader’s Digest Discovering America’s Past – Customs, Legends, History and Lore of Our Great Nation

Culture Spot : School Days in America’s Past – Defeating “Ye Ould* Deluder Satan”

Public education was a new idea in the New World, and our Puritan forebears turned it to the good use of guarding souls as well as improving minds.

Members of the General Court of Massachusetts had two goals in mind when, in 1647, they passed a law that created the first publicly supported schools in America. Their dual aims were to foil the efforts of “ye ould* deluder Satan, to keepe* men from the knowledge of ye Scriptures,” and to ensure that “learning . . . not be buried in ye grave of our fathers.”

The law required every settlement of more than 50 families to appoint a teacher to provide instruction in the Puritan version of the three R’s: reading, writing, and religion. Towns with more than 100 families had to set up a “grammar schoole*,” where emphasis was put on the education of boys of “hopeful promise,” who studied Latin, Greek, and literature in preparation for college. Girls, on the other hand, were rarely allowed above the primary level for fear that they might lose their wits if exposed to too much reading and thinking.

If a town lacked a schoolhouse, classes could be held in the meetinghouse. Teachers were paid a meager stipend, supplied with produce, and if not resident of the town, were “boarded around” with townsfolk. Families were also expected to provide wood for the school’s stove – a task that was often neglected until a child came home and complained of shivering through the day in the wintriest corner of the drafty room.

The daily routine was tied to the sun’s cycle. During most of the year the day began at 7:00 A.M. and ended sometime between 5:00 and 9:00 P.M. with a two-hour break. In winter months the schedule ran from 8:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M.

Primitive and simple though the system was, children who spent even two or three years in these schools did learn enough to become familiar with the laws of the land – and to keep the “ould* deluder” at bay.

*archaic spelling