DEAR OLD GOLDEN RULE DAYS

Schools and Education in 19^th-Century America

by Christine Jeffords

While Four Corners doesn't seem to have a school (Cyrus Poplar's victim is a milliner, not a teacher!), there's no doubt that at least some of the people (Mary, the banker, James and Royale, the Potters and indeed most of the businessowners) have had some kind of education, and it's definite that all the Seven, excepting only Vin, can boast of similar advantage: even Nathan is literate. So what kind of schooling would they have had, and what kind are their children likely to receive if the town grows sufficiently as to start thinking about putting a public-education system in place?

[In 1840] Sooner or later every prominent American declared his attachment to the principle of free universal schooling. Common schooling, declared many a speech, would put all American children on the same footing; it would imbue them with patriotism and religious feeling. Even practical educators like Horace Mann claimed that it would not only enable young Americans to play a part in political decisions, as voters and perhaps legislators and officeholders, but was also indispensable as an economic weapon An educated people, Mann contended, could not be a poor people: knowledge and prosperity were inseparable. The idea was neatly expressed in a Pennsylvania announcement of 1784: "The spirit and character of a republic is very different from that of a monarchy, and can only be imbibed by education." Or as the Northwest Ordinance put it: "Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government, and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." To Thomas Jefferson, access to the educational ladder was the means by which the country would be furnished with a "natural aristocracy" to replace the "artificial" one with which Europe was burdened.

In practise, this ideal was not to be attained throughout the Union before 1860. State boards of education were lacking in both power and money, and the driving force came, of necessity, from local communities, energetic individuals, and church denominations, making progress piecemeal and sometimes haphazard. More money was put into private schools and colleges. As late as 1837, well under half of the children in Pennsylvania went to free public schools; Virginia didn't even have a system of public schooling at all levels until after the Civil War, and in the South generally, education was neglected except for planters' children. Nevertheless, the nation's creed called for a high degree of literacy, and there was some sign that the goal was being met: the census of 1840 showed 6,440,000 of the country's 17,000,000 population, almost 38%,to be in some degree literate; ten years hence the figure would be 11,000,000 of 23,000,000, nearly 49%. (Many of those who were not were recent immigrants, which perhaps skewed the figures somewhat.) The North American Review, pointing out in 1842 that the census two years before had shown 173 colleges with 16,233 students [an average of less than 94 per] in the United States, commented upon the "scanty endowments and insufficient means" that crippled their work, and hoped for fewer and stronger schools. Indeed, small enrollments, small faculties, and small libraries were characteristic of most. Yet it was not difficult for the humblest young man to make his way through college, for $150 would come near to providing the yearly expenses of an undergraduate at Yale; a college professor was paid around $600.

The "district" school system had spread from New England and New York State to take root in Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, and North Carolina; under it districts were allowed to levy taxes to help support their schools, but their main income came from rate bills charged to the parents, according to the number of children the family had in school. A few high schools had been established in New York, Vermont, Maine, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and South Carolina. The Western Literary Institute; College of Professional Teachers, an organization devoted to the promotion of free schools, embraced all the states except New England, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland; among its guiding lights were Samuel Lewis, Lyman Beecher, and his son-in-law Calvin Stowe. Overall, according to the census, besides those in the universities and colleges, 164,000 students were enrolled in 3200 academies and grammar schools, and 1,845,000 in 47,000 primaries. Academies, the commonest form of post-elementary education, had begun as far back as 1750 and had grown very rapidly; between 1830 and 1860 hardly a community was without one. These were largely independent schools, small in size, which drew the middle-class patron, offering practical training as well as college preparatory. Most were church- or privately-controlled and supported through tuition, though there were a few state grants and subsidies. There was also a general admission that teachers needed more than a basic knowledge of subjects and the ability to maintain order in a classroom. The first state normal school in the country had opened at Lexington, Massachusetts the previous July, the second at Barre that fall; this year came the third, at Bridgewater. Moreover, teachers were beginning to gain in prestige; within the next two decades they would come to be considered socially and intellectually second only to the clergy.

-- From A Thunder at Dawn, novel in progress, by Christine Jeffords

Though New Englanders prided themselves on their concern for education, as late as 1816 there was no place even in upper New York State where a poor child could get a free education, and most of them went through life illiterate, unless they could get apprenticed to a tradesman: anyone who kept a business needed to at least be able to read, write, and "cipher." While the best teachers of the antebellum era were graduates of the academies and rising high schools, and the masters in the larger cities of the East were nearly always well-educated men by the standards of the time, the great mass of them had little education beyond that of the schools they themselves taught. Many were incompetent adventurers, migratory, odd in their ways, crude in their manners, and often questionable of character--and in a day when there was really no way to check up on what a man claimed about himself, many early schoolmasters were, to say the least, underqualified:

...[the master] claimed to be from Kentucky, but a travelling man who stayed the night at Jeremiah Perkins's house revealed that he was actually a Missourian from Marion County, and besides being born out of wedlock, had no training whatsoever and had been asked to leave the vicinity by his neighbors when a Negro of his was discovered carrying a bag of corn from another farmer's crib to his own. At this he was likewise asked to leave their neighborhood...

--From Missouri Boyhood, novel in progress, by Christine Jeffords

Terms were short, wages low and paid in part through "boarding-around" arrangements, classes often inordinately large, and professional standards, outside a few cities, almost completely absent. Thus the best were kept out of the field and the most poorly prepared brought in. In the rural districts it was customary to hold both a winter and a summer term, and to contract separately for each, with women frequently teaching the latter but the former almost always taken by men who worked on farms or at day labor during the summer. Yet many were excellent drillmasters and kind at heart, as described in this verse by George Arnold:

He taught his scholars the rule of three,

Writing, reading, and history too;

He took the little ones up on his knee,

For a kind old heart in his breast had he,

And the wants of the littlest child he knew.

At first, a general idea seems to have been entertained that the income from land grants, license fees (liquor and theater licenses were favorites, and indeed "sin" rates continued to be used for many years to support local schools--in the West, right through till the late 1890's, they were almost universally financed by a head-tax on prostitutes), and assorted permanent endowments would in time be enough to support the necessary schools, but as it became evident how little money these sources actually generated, and how rapidly the population was increasing, this notion was abandoned. Lotteries were also resorted to, as in Maryland, which in the years 1816-21 authorized an annual one to raise $50,000 for schools. There was also some expectation, for a time, that the surplus revenues of the state and Federal governments might eventually be sufficient to support a national system of free schools, but after 1837 this idea too was dropped. By about 1825 most thinking men clearly recognized that the only safe source of support for a system of state schools lay in the general and direct taxation of all property for their support. Even this faced an uphill battle. Many thought that tax-supported schools would be dangerous for the state, harmful to individual good, and thoroughly undemocratic. There was danger of making schools too common; schools of any kind were, or should be, for the few, and chiefly for those who could afford private instruction. (There was perhaps some warrant for this, since throughout the Colonial period a vigorous and growing economy was sustained by way of a combination of independent farmers, the aristocratic class (primarily professional men, merchants, and planters), and a large mass of middle-class craftsmen and shopowners, most of whom passed on their skills and businesses either to their children or to apprentices, and in the process of doing so also taught them such "reading, writing, and arithmetic" as they would need to do the job; since at the time of these arguments few foresaw the burgeoning industrial revolution, which had barely begun, they probably assumed that what had been good enough for Grandfather would be good enough for the nation for centuries to come.) It was argued that education demands a leisure class and that the poor didn't have the necessary leisure, that it wasn't possible for the government to provide a general educational system, and that all such proposals represented the deliberate confiscation of the property of one class in society for the benefit of another. (One Rhode Island farmer threatened to shoot a member of his state's legislature if he ever caught him on his property advocating "such heresy as the partial confiscation of one man's property to educate another man's child.") Others feared that free schools were only a bait, the real purpose being to "religiously traditionalize" the children and later unite Church and State. Many didn't see the need for schools at all, and many more would have agreed with the practical New England farmer who declared that "the Bible and figgers is all I want my boys to know." The most vigorous opposition often came from the ignorant, improvident, hand-to-mouth laborers who most needed free schools.

In the older states, the schools generally began through the process of granting permission to communities so desiring to organize a school taxing district, and to tax for school support the property of those consenting and residing therein. This would later be supplemented by general taxation of all property in the district (with or without the owners' direct consent), state aid to such districts (at first from the income from permanent endowment funds, and later from the proceeds of a small state appropriation or a state or county tax), and compulsory local taxation to supplement the state or county grant. The operative word here is "communities:" schools generally began in the cities (which, with their pressing new social problems, couldn't afford to wait for the rural districts to catch up with them), and from there worked their way out into the country, where they served compact and often rather isolated areas.

This was done under the district-school system, which was first codified in Massachusetts in 1789, and spread from there throughout the North and later the Midwest, becoming the almost universal basis for school organization in those regions. (Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut accepted the system soon after it began; New York adopted it in 1812, Ohio in 1821, Illinois in 1825, Tennessee in 1830, Indiana in 1833, Michigan in 1837, Kentucky and Iowa in 1838, North Carolina in 1839, and Virginia in 1846; and as people moved out from these states into the newer Territories, they quite naturally carried the notion with them.) As an administrative and taxing unit it was particularly well suited to the needs and conditions of the life of the time: among a sparse and hard-working rural population, between whom intercourse was limited and intercommunication difficult, and with whom the support of schools by taxation was an unsettled or controversial question, local control answered a very real need. Communities or neighborhoods that wanted schools and were willing to pay for them could easily meet and organize a school district, vote to levy a tax on their own property, employ a teacher, and organize and maintain a school. Those communities which didn't want schools or were unwilling to tax themselves to support them could do without them, and let the free-school idea alone. In the mid-1830's a map of a given county was likely to show a district off by itself here, another there, two or three clumped together contiguously somewhere else; by 1860 the districts might cover the entire county, but were likely to be of different sizes and shapes; and not until the mid-1880's was a near uniformity liable to appear. Even in many cities, a district system was used: as people in each ward felt willing to provide school facilities for their children they were permitted by law to call a meeting, organize a school district in the ward, and vote to erect a school building, employ teachers, and tax themselves to maintain the school. As the city grew, it was unified by law for education as it had previously been for government, a city board of education was created and given control of the scattered district schools, and this board in turn employed a new supervisory officer, now becoming known as a city superintendent of schools, to unify and oversee them.

The district system provided schools suited to the wants and needs of country people, and where and as fast as the people were willing to support them; it was well-adapted to the deep-seated conviction of the time as to the sacredness of local government and an unshaken confidence in a localized administration of all civic affairs, under which every little community felt itself competent to select and examine its teachers, adopt its own course of study, determine the methods of instruction, supervise and criticize the teacher, and determine all such matters as boarding-around arrangements, tax rate, and length of term. The district trustees, or members of the School Board (generally three of them, but sometimes more), with the people in district meeting, exercised very important functions in guiding the (strictly local) ship of state, and to many a man the position of school trustee was the most important office within the gift of the American people to which he might ever hope to aspire, for in the years 1814-60 (and even to some extent thereafter) an American might have lived his or her whole life without contact with the central government: the state governments were much more important in everyday affairs, and local county authorities more crucial than either. In Massachusetts in 1827 the district concept was given greater strength by laws authorizing the districts to select their own school trustees, who were given the power to choose the textbooks and employ and certificate their teachers. The school district, which had started as a convenience, had become a political institution. It also quickly tended to assume what might seem an exaggerated idea of its own rights, importance, and perfection, and its independence was often carried to an extreme. Horace Mann found that in two-thirds of all Massachusetts towns, teachers were allowed to begin teaching without any examination or certificate, and frequently were paid without either; that the trustees refused generally to require uniform textbooks, or to furnish them to poor childen, as required by state law; and that one-third of the children of school age in the state were absent in the winter and two-fifths in the summer, without the trustees concerning themselves about the situation in any way. In Ohio the trustees "forbade the teaching of any branches except reading, writing, and arithmetic," and in 1840 the early laws requiring schools in the English language were repealed and the districts permitted to authorize schools in German (perhaps logical, for that state received a great many German immigrants and was eager to encourage them). In Indiana in 1836-7 laws were passed permitting householders to make individual contracts with teachers to teach their children, and in 1841 the requirement of any form of certification was made optional with the district trustees. In Illinois in 1827, the whole or half support of a school was made optional with the voters of each district, and no man could be taxed for schools without first giving his consent in writing. In many states, district trustes were allowed to determine what subjects should be taught and how, and the people in district meeting determined who should teach and how long a term of school should be maintained. In reaction, by 1850 the states began limiting the powers of the district meeting, transferring to the county and state superintendents (an office just then becoming common) the power to designate, examine, and certificate the teacher, select the textbooks, or make out the course of study, and to reserve unto themselves the authority to fix the length of the term, the rate of the tax, and the subjects that must be taught. However, in the newer Territories, the district system, owing to the vast distances, sparse population, and general weakness of any but the local governments, continued to be the de facto rule for many years.

After territories set up systems of publicly-supported universal education and began giving real attention to the financial end of the equation, creditable school buildings were erected, interiors improved with standard seats, blackboards, and the like, teachers certified, and curricula enlarged and standardized. And once a town was incorporated, it was eligible to start a city school system instead of depending on the county or the Territory, and usually did as soon as property taxes (or public sentiment for a subscription school) made it possible. Frontier-town School Boards set the teacher's qualifications, advertised for her (church papers, a numerous tribe in that day, were a favorite vehicle), paid her fare to her new job, parcelled out her room and board amongst the members, bought supplies, and kept up the schoolhouse. By the 1880's even plains schools were staging theater productions, recitations, and musical recitals, offering night classes in penmanship and language for adults, holding oratorical contests and commencement exercises, and even employing a teacher for each grade. But before that time, whipsawed plank benches, grudgingly-supported and spasmodically-attended shack schoolhouses, and a lack of books and good teachers made education a problem. As late as 1840, all American schools, except a few primaries, were private, and through the 1860's, most were supported by a system of subscriptions or voluntary contributions rather than by general taxation. In early Texas,

Mexico had passed laws decreeing the establishment of schools, but they were paper laws; not till annexation was provision made for two kinds of schools, "public" and "free," with ten per cent of the state's revenues set aside for the latter. It took till 1854 for a school fund to be established and local districts drawn up, and up to the turn of the century the state would be split by factionalism over education, with attendance at a free school having the stigma of taking charity. Meanwhile, wealthier citizens sent their children to schools in the States, or to the privately financed "public" schools, which were supported by subscription and occasionally subsidized by local funds.

...Children in the rural areas had little opportunity for formal schooling unless their families could afford private tutors. Textbooks, other than a Bible, a Blue&-Backed Speller, and the McGuffey Readers, were scarce. Terms rarely extended beyond two or three months each year, depending on the weather, the Indians, the condition of the crops, and how long the itinerant teacher remained in the neighborhood. Sometimes they were staggered so girls and boys could attend separately. Moreover, as in the South from which so many of them had come, many small farmers, even though they were mostly members of the evangelistic churches, which emphasized the Bible as the authoritative word of God and encouraged their members to read it, meaning that all men needed to have the rudiments of an education&, had no appreciation of "book learning" and didn't demand schooling for their children. In a rural region where people were scattered, good roads not always present, and demand unspectacular, the difficulties of establishing a school system were compounded. In consequence people had to teach their own children at home or send them back to "the States"...

--From Lone Star Rider, novel in progress, by Christine Jeffords

(These facts are doubtless largely responsible for Vin's illiteracy.) Throughout the Old Northwest (present Ohio and westward), the Ordinance of 1787 provided public lands (one section in every township) whose sale was to finance public schools, but in Chris's home state of Indiana (and probably elsewhere) the general rule was for neighboring families to band together and hire a teacher for 3-4 months at a time, churches to open elementaries, or parents to teach the Three R's. Not till 1852 were local levies for school buildings upheld by the State Supreme Court, and it took 15 more years for it to decide in favor of taxes covering tuition. Similarly, in Illinois, it wasn't till 1885 that state legislation passed compelling public schools to be formed; even then, rural children attended school only 84 days a year, and were taught mostly by untrained, inexperienced teenage girls--a phenomenon probably mirrored elsewhere on the frontier. Although Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois all put free public education on a state-wide, tax-supported basis (at least in theory) between 1820-30,

the clause in the Ordinance of 1785 setting aside public lands for educational purposes had failed to result in well-maintained public school systems and state universities; pioneers had been too eager to realize immediate returns from the lands, too impatient to wait until their value was sufficient to make larger returns possible. Although each state had a vast reserve of wealth earmarked for school support, in the form of one township in every thirty-six, public education was slow to get under way. Westerners approved education in theory, but their main interest was in the elementary variety, with some suspicion of the higher subjects. When the sale of the school townships failed to produce enough money to operate schools, Midwestern state assemblies were unwilling to enact taxes to supplement that support. Though Ohio established more schools and colleges than any of her neighbor states, largely as a result of the zeal of her New England settlers, as late as 1838 one citizen estimated that "a large minority, if not a majority" of the population were "utterly opposed to any legislative action to support" the schools. Indeed no state in the nation had a truly modern school system even in 1830, and ten years later only some sixteen per cent of Eastern children of school age, and nine per cent of Western ones, were estimated to be in school at all.

[Before 1837] the elementary schools generally remained private, with parents paying a dollar or two per child per year for a session of thirteen weeks, each consisting of six eight-hour days. The newly-created states had received government grants, and when the surplus revenue was distributed in 1837, the older ones had created permanent funds in hopes of assistance to an indefinite amount; hopes speedily dashed by the Panic and consequent change in policy. In that same year, Ohio had appointed a State Superintendent of Education devoted to the reform of American schools along the lines of Pestalozzi, whose experimental school omitting corporal punishment and stressing positive emotion and learning by doing had been famous in the early part of the century. But the budgetary crisis arising from that year's Panic crippled him in his work. Typical of the Midwestern situation was Illinois where a long series of state laws permitting the use of tax revenues for schools was ineffective. Only in 1855 did legislation pass compelling public schools to be formed.

--From A Thunder at Dawn

Similar situations obtained on later frontiers. The first Kansas legislature, in 1855, passed an act providing for a system of free common schools for all white children aged 5-21, but not till three years later was additional legislation enacted for the organization, supervision, and maintenance of such schools, and meanwhile private subscription was the rule. Nebraska didn't enact a compulsory attendance law till 1877, and even then the burden was light--a minimum 12 weeks a year for ages 8-14. In California, though the Constitution of 1849 set aside state land for educational purposes, no general school tax was levied till 1852, and as late as '59 the system was reaching only 27.71% of the children for 5˝ months out of the year; not till 1866 did a satisfactory public school system exist. In 1840, 40% of all white children nationwide aged 5-19 were in school; by 1850, the percentage had risen to just over 50%--and there it stuck: as late as 1860-76, only about half the nation's school-age population attended school at all, many at night after working all day to help support their families. In 1870 only 57% of Americans aged 5-16 were in public schools nationwide; in 1880, 72% were--but the head-count was always greater in the longer-settled regions: in the same year in Fort Benton, Mont., the census showed 512 school-age children, but only about 100 (i.e., 19.53%) were enrolled. Even Massachusetts, which had enacted the first school laws, required in 1860 only 12 weeks of attendance per year, six consecutively; and as late as 1870-90, the only schools in Jackson Co., Ore., were subscriptive, and only about 40% of children of eligible age went. Although by 1850 every state had a permanent school fund, the interest of which was used for school support, and a system of taxation for maintenace, this says nothing about how much money was in fact available.

As in most other things, the antebellum South followed its own notion of how things ought to work. There,

hierarchical values of honor perpetuated the duty of rule, in the case of the South the "gentility", to have their own resources for running the government and enjoying the preferments arising from it. Frugality at the centers of authority was a virtue that Southerners believed essential to the preservation of their own integrity. Those who raised military units in time of need should bear at least some of the expense in exchange for the entitlement and dignities enjoyed; governors and judges should have their own means of carrying out many of the duties of their offices. The rich had to tax themselves in order to avoid imposing any demands on lesser folk, who were equipped with the means to defend themselves through the franchise. Government activities were therefore minimal, since a consensus about such issues as taxation for public education or other common goods could be neither permanently nor readily secured...Moreover, in its settlement the tendency had been not toward the making of towns and cities, but toward an agrarian pattern, divided into patriarchal landholdings modelled after the great estates of England...

--From A Thunder at Dawn

This combination of resistance to taxation and a scattered and primarily rural population had its effect on education. How, then, did Southerner Ezra acquire what is clearly a comprehensive education along with his flashy style? It's obvious that at least some of the kinfolk with whom his mother parked him were people of means, whether planters (large or small), prosperous yeomen, or town-dwellers, most probably in the Tidewater or Piedmont regions or perhaps the Bluegrass valleys of the interior. Occasionally such a neighborhood would boast a central point to which young people commuted by carriage for privately-tutored classes, studying history, grammar, French, mathematics, poetry-reading, elocution, geography, and Bible. More often, after learning to read and write together, a planter's children were more or less segregated by sex. The boys were put under charge of a tutor--often a bright young man just out of Yale or the University of Virginia, sometimes even an Englishman; such tutoring was to well-schooled but penniless men what a governess position was to their female counterparts--for Latin and Greek, philosophy, logic, mathematics, American history, and French, and drilled in riding and shooting in the afternoons. Flute and violin were widely played by Southern men, who learned them in their youth. The girls learned to read well enough to understand the Bible and prayerbook and enjoy the popular novels of the day, studied American history, got singing lessons and sometimes "French conversation" from the tutor, and were taught by their mother and aunts to do fancy needlework--intricate feather and crewel embroidery for decorating bed hangings and curtains, delicate hairpin braid for baby clothes and their own petticoats. They also learned music, most often piano, dancing (as did the boys), and proper manners, as well as "the feminine arts" (oil painting, sketching, ornamental wreath fabrication, etc.), and were taught the intricate management skills that would enable them to helm a large and complicated household, deal with a staff of Negroes, keep accurate accounts, and very often serve as practical nurses to both black and white. Not a few played the harp. Some--probably chiefly the oldest children of liberal-minded parents--had tutors of their own: Varina Howell (Mrs. Jefferson) Davis studied for 12 years under a male New Englander. Others were taught by governesses, occasionally French ones; on prosperous Kentucky and Tennessee plantations, a family governess was the accepted instrument of female education: usually she had been schooled in the North, and very often was a New England Yankee. Louisiana too employed such women, at salaries ranging from $700-$1000/yr. in the '50's (the highest pay anywhere in pre-War America for teaching), and not a few married into comfortable establishments. And still others, like Mary Todd Lincoln (a Kentuckian), attended three-year boarding schools, two-year finishing schools (sometimes conventical), or both in succession, where they studied such subjects as piano, guitar, drawing, French, and occasionally even Latin and Greek. (A diploma from the seminary at Raleigh was worth more to a woman than was one from the University of Virginia to a man.) Meanwhile their brothers, having outgrown the tutor, spent some time at an academy (since all upper-class Southern males were expected to be skilled riders, it was very common for them, if there was such a school in the neighborhood of home, to be enrolled as day-students and commute on horseback), then went on to college. Law, medicine, the Army, and the Episcopal pulpit were about the only honorable careers open to a planter's son if he didn't inherit land. Princeton was a favorite goal of young Virginia gentlemen, who routinely arrived with at least one slave (a body-servant) in tow, while others attended Yale, Harvard, or Columbia; Philadelphia medical schools were a mecca for would-be physicians; but to most Southern boys, imbued with their region's strong military tradition, West Point was the ultimate in education, the finest institution of learning in the world. (A large percentage of the antebellum officer class, including the military commander of Texas, were of Southern birth, and most of them resigned after the fall of Fort Sumter, which was in large part responsible for the early struggles of the Union.) There were also the region's own institutes of higher learning--state universities (intended to train future political leaders), military schools (to prepare officers for the Army), and church schools (to educate clergymen). All had similar curricula: Latin, Greek, mathematics, moral philosophy, mental philosophy, political philosophy, natural philosophy, natural history, ethics, general history, English composition, and surveying, to which the military schools added strategy and tactics. All confined their extracurricular activities to literary and debating societies, but many modern scholastic and social fraternities, including Phi Beta Kappa, are rooted in them. In 1850, of the nation's 239 colleges and universities, 113 (47.28%) were in the South, serving about a quarter of the population.

As for the lesser folk, sometimes a planter would establish a neighborhood school for the children of the yeomanry of his area; sometimes, as in the contemporary Midwest and later West, the yeomen themselves would get up a subscription school. The slaves were largely ignored--indeed in many jurisdictions, especially after the Nat Turner rebellion, it was technically illegal to teach them, though many a house- and body-servant absorbed a good deal of learning simply by being in the room when the master's young were having their lessons (and since we know that Nathan served as a sparring partner for his master's son, he was probably a prime example of this)--and the "po' white trash," a class quite distinct from the hard-working and often rudely prosperous "yeoman farmer," had no interest in schooling in any case. The region had almost no state school systems, with only Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and North Carolina (which began its first public system in 1840) organizing mass public education anything like that common in the North; certain individual counties and cities ran their own (Baltimore, Natchez, Louisville, Charlotte, and New Orleans developed rather good ones), but even in the Upper South--Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky--free schools weren't numerous, their equipment was scarce and their teachers ill-qualified. The Alabama system, which wasn't created till 1854, was typical, allowing a budget of only $1.33 per year per child, and thus, right on through the century, many rural communities raised what they could for "subscription" schools and let it go at that. Even in the states mentioned, the system didn't work very well. Not till 1869 did Kentucky vote enough taxes for a widespread school system; until then, most elementaries were started by churches, or academies filled the need.

Tennessee established a state-wide tax-funded system in 1873, but it remained underfunded and largely ineffective until the early 20^th Century. The child of the poor non-slaveholder, unable to afford these or the academies and colleges, got about two or three months a year for four to six years, often only when the weather was too inclement to work in the fields. A few church elementaries did their best to plug the leaks, but couldn't serve anywhere close to the entire school-age population. In the '30's, almost half the adult white population of Virginia was illiterate. Throughout the region male teachers were the rule, possibly because there was a much greater emphasis there than up North on rough-and-tumble fighting and on the obligation of a male to resist violently anything he considered an affront, which made dealing with the big boys a real challenge. In the rural schools before 1850 or so, reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic were about the only subjects taught to any great extent. There was a special partiality to Webster's "blue-backed" Speller, Murray's English Reader (and later the McGuffeys), and Colburn's and Davies's arithmetics, with here and there the geographies of Morse and Jesse Olney and the histories of Goodrich and Webster. Grammar, taught chiefly from Murray's English Grammar,found small place outside a few cities and what one commentator in 1840 described as "half the counties in Virginia." Such elementary education as existed at all in the back country was provided in "old-field schools," frequently conducted in log cabins by ill-prepared, itinerant teachers who were often of the poorest type, chosen primarily for their ability to deal with the big boys through resourcefulness and physical strength; discipline was hard and often cruel, with many rules and penalties, and frequent use of dunce-blocks and fools' caps. Parents among the poorest whites often preferred to have their children at home, helping on the farm, instead of wasting their time on "book-larnin'," and illiteracy rates remained high till after the War. But in the Piedmont counties, owing perhaps to their comparitive closeness to the oldest centers of Southern civilization and planter culture (many younger sons of which had been among their early settlers), the picture was rosier, and the more prosperous middle-class landholders and stockmen, even of the yeomanly group, could well afford to see their children acquire a decent education if they cared to, sending daughters to the pretentious "female colleges," sons to a neighboring "institute of learning for young men"--actually a private academy--where "a little Latin and less Greek" were dispensed for a fee of $40-$50 per session, and from which they might even go on to one of the smaller nearby colleges, and thence into medicine or law, through which they might realistically hope to rise to politics, a judgeship, the presidency of a university, or even the governor's seat. Indeed, the region had (as will be seen below) a large number of academies, most of which, because they catered to and were supported by the dominant and powerful plantation class, rendered good service, with well-equipped teachers, rigid discipline, and training of a very satisfactory grade, as well as numerous colleges.

City schooling had its own distinct flavor. Some city children were sent to private schools kept in the basements of churches, or taught at home by governesses. In the late '40's and early '50's, a professional man's son in Paducah, Ky., could go to Secondary School, then enter the Male High School (probably an academy) at 14 (his studies there included rhetoric, belles-lettres, the classics, and modern languages), and finally go on to the university. In upper-class Boston a boy might start out at a neighborhood "dame" school, go on to a male-run school in a church basement, attend a Latin School (Latin, Greek, French, some mathematics and ancient history) from age 10-16, and then enter college. Or, after 1821, he could, at the age of 12, enter a three-year high school in which he was taught a slate of subjects including: composition, English literature, geography, arithmetic, and declamation in the first year; composition, English literature, ancient and modern history, logic, algebra, geometry, plane trigonometry, navigation, surveying, forensic discussions, and mensuration of superficies and solids in second; and composition, English literature, mathematics, logic, United States history, natural philosophy (physics), astronomy, moral and political philosophy, and declamation in third. This sent him forth prepared for college.

Because it took time for Territorial governments to organize school systems and make public funding available, and even then many families lived isolated from the available facilities, settlers in the West especially turned to the subscription school. It might begin with each family hiring its own teacher; later, as the Indian danger abated, children from several families assembled at one house; later still the subscription teacher presided over her own building. Pay was raised in advance by pledges or tendered on a pay-as-you-go basis: in one Oklahoma school, each child carried a nickel a day to pay his way. The Jackson County schools referred to above charged $5 per pupil (probably per month), while those on the Minnesota frontier apparently adopted a sliding fee schedule, with tuition that ranged from $3.50 to $10, which could be paid by the parents or an interested sponsor. Other schools charged a flat annual rate of $50. Overall, rates per child varied from 12˝c.-$2.50 a week (usually more in the towns, where cash was more available), but many teachers ended up taking a good part of it in "kind;" some got board, lodging, and laundry included with their pay, staying longest with the families that had the most children, but had to buy textbooks themselves. (The median seems to have been around $4.0625/mo., which, reckoning on an eight-month academic year and a student body of 57, would come to an annual $1852.50--a very decent income for the time, if it could be collected!)

Even after regular systems were up and running, local property owners carried most of the burden: in Colorado, state and county contributions covered only a quarter of the total, with district taxes making up the rest. Enrollment varied too: one teacher started with 26 children in July, lost some, then went up to 39 in early August. Because boys were more likely to be kept home to help at heavy labor, girls were often in the majority among the under-12's; by 16-17 they were expected to assume full domestic duties, while their brothers at the same age, increasingly independent, were likely to return to fill in the gaps in their education, and though usually singled out as troublemakers, these older students were seldom delinquents, having chosen freely to come back to school. Town kids could fit their chores around school hours, but on farms and ranches all hands were usually needed for work from early spring until snowfall--and harsh, unpredictable weather then kept many at home. Some Western school districts covered 1000 sq. mi. (31.6/side), and round trips could attain 15 mi.; in the ranchlands, some families maintained two homes, or Mother and the youngsters moved into town for several years so the latter could go to school. Others boarded theirs out: older scholars earned their way, younger ones paid as much as $4.50/wk. (teachers often had pupils living with them, which not only amplified their income but allowed them to circumvent the prejudice against a single woman keeping house by herself: even a houseful of boarder children constituted chaperonage!). In two-thirds of the states and territories in 1880, classes were held less than half the year, and in Montana in 1867-8, the percentage of school-age children attending class ranged from 80% in the mining districts (where the population tended to be more concentrated) to 27% among the farms and ranches. Yet teachers' salaries in the West were generally well above the national average, in part because officials reasoned they had to offer good money (one Idaho community persuaded a citizen's wife to emigrate by promising $100/mo.) to lure them at all: living costs were high, terms short, and wages in other jobs good--and there was always the prospect of homesteading or starting a small business. Probably at any one time an average of 50-60% of Western school-age children were actually enrolled, but most attended classes at one time or another.

Rural schools began in December and finished in March, and the average American received just four years of formal education. Girls were often kept home from afternoon session to help their mothers, and in the country both sexes were liable to attend in the morning only. For these reasons the morning session was the time to cover the basic subjects--reading, writing (more accurately penmanship), and arithmetic. Some degree of literacy was important in a country that considered itself Christian, for it was believed that a person who could read the Bible for himself, rather than depending on others' repetitions of it, would become a better churchman; neat handwriting was thought to be a sign of a cultured person; and an ability to cipher was vital to anyone who hoped to become a storekeeper, craftsman, or miller, while even a farmer could find it useful in keeping a check on the taxes he was charged and the state of his account at the store. So the teacher usually started with reading aloud (which helped children learn pronunciation and grammar) and writing (which involved chiefly drawing slants, or straight lines, and pothooks, or smooth curves), and then went to arithmetic after the morning recess. Afternoons were devoted to grammar, history, geography, and declamation. Because schoolbooks and writing paper were scarce at the beginning and remained costly for many families even in later years, most learning was by rote--memorizing facts and pieces, solving arithmetic problems mentally.

Many youngsters were taught at home for years by their mothers (or resident maiden aunts) because of frail health, unavailability of regular schools, or parental disapproval of teacher or pupils; the more conservative Protestants, like the Reformed Presbyterians, were especially likely to resort to this method in an effort to keep their progeny "unspotted from the world." One pair of young girls, on a typical day, did some light housekeeping, then Mother helped them study for an hour, listened to their recitations, oversaw writing exercises and sewing practise, and allowed an hour or so of play before suppertime. Sometimes one or more of the children in a family stayed home to work: one homesteader's daughter, the second of six girls, got only sporadic schooling from age 6-10, "depending on whether [her father] needed her to be his 'boy,'" while her older sister attended classes consistently. And sometimes one child of a family (every large one seemed to have its "runt") was considered not robust enough for daily attendance, and was taught at home while his sibs went out; often such children were the only ones in the household to go on to higher education, perhaps because their teaching was more individualized and their subjects more real to them than was possible under the common rote system. Even unto the '70's, after public schools had become common, many well-to-do and professional Midwesterners sent their children to private classes; and right through the '80's some mothers preferred to teach them at home, or at best send them to outside classes in the morning so they could interact with other childen, and tutor them in the afternoons. Also, if the family moved, the youngsters might be withdrawn from school and given most of their education at home. In mining camps, the children of the well-to-do, primarily the bankers, professional men, and owners and superintendents of the largest mines--especially the girls--were likely to be kept in loving confinement, sitting beside Mother at the piano and sewing machine, doing lessons on bright, airy porches, taking on light household chores, memorizing Bible verses, practising their music, playing croquet and indoor games, putting on skits, going on calls with Mother and on walks with Father; one such went on only one outdoor errand alone (to a bakery) in an entire year. There was some warrant for this, beyond a snobbish reluctance to allow one's young to mingle with the mongrel assortment of types that inhabited any such camp, for physical dangers were abundant:

Mining-camp life was no respecter of age in its presentation of peril: there were open shafts and prospect holes, some sixty feet deep, waiting for the unwary child to fall into (Vandy Cullin lost a leg in one such tumble at the age of fourteen, and being thereby barred from most blue-collar work, his father managed to finance his legal education, chiefly by selling off some of his mining stock), heavy freight-wagon wheels to get caught under, horses and mules with dangerously kicking hooves, runaway wagons and stray gunshots, and the risk of being run over by ore carts, crushed by rock blasted from the earth, or flung into the air by the twirling crank of a slipped windlass. Drowning was another particular danger, for the hillsides were quickly stripped of trees, greatly increasing the flow of the frigid streams. The camps were also often so littered with blasting caps that kids lost fingers or eyes through holding a match to one on a dare or carelessly tossing it into the stove as rubbish.

--From "Darcy" (M7 fanfic), by Christine Jeffords

In well-to-do homes it was very common for boys to have a tutor, who, until they went off to prep school or college, taught them such subjects as fencing, Latin, French, algebra, geography, history, Greek mythology, and the botany and natural history of their own region. Girls in such families were put in charge of a governess, who taught them to memorize poetry and paint on fine china, and gave them lessons in music (including piano), singing, elocution, fine embroidery, history, literature, and Latin. Home schooling was, of course, frequently resorted to on the rural frontier, and was often amazingly effective: one Montana boy who had only 23 months of classroom experience not only qualified for the state normal school at 16, but graduated ahead of schedule. Two teachers who arrived in the Beaverhead Valley in 1879 discovered that most children had read extensively on their own and cultivated a wider range of knowledge than most Midwestern youngsters. All but the poorest families generally owned at least a few books, and adults often lent children what they had. And in a day when the idea of "books for children" was still new, most of the volumes available to them were written for an adult audience, so that self-study exposed them to a mature level of vocabulary and construction almost from the start.

In many states, especially (but not only) during the earlier phases of educational history, it was seen that income from permanent funds and authorized taxation was insufficient to maintain the schools all term, and the "rate-bill" was resorted to: the deficiency in revenue was charged against the parents sending children to the school, in proportion to the number of scholars in the family, and collected as ordinary tax-bills. The charge was small: in New York City in 1826 it was 25c. per quarter "for the Alphabet, Spelling, and Writing on Slates, as far as the 3d Class, inclusive;" 50c. for the continuation of these, with "Reading and Arithmetical Tables, or the 4^th, 5^th, and 6^th Classes;" $1 for continuance "with Writing on Paper, Arithmetic, and Definitions, or the 7^th, 8^th, and 9^th Classes;" and $2 for "the preceding, with Grammar, Geography, with the use of Maps and Globes, Bookkeeping, History, Composition, Mensuration, Astronomy, etc." But it was sufficient to keep many poor children out of school, and by 1860 it had been abolished everywhere in the cities and still existed in the rural and town schools in only five of the then 33 states. On the other hand, in the days prior to compulsory school laws, children who attended were likely to amount to something in life: they were there out of choice, not necessity.

By the post-War era, finances and administration,even in the West, had begun to smooth out. In Kansas, each county had more or less school districts, managed by a county superintendent, who was elected annually and visited each school regularly to oversee instruction and curriculum. At his discretion he could review all prospective teachers by setting the standards, giving the examinations, and issuing the certificates, and could create and realign districts within his county. Then as now, property-tax bills supplied the biggest percentage of operating costs, but most states and territories spread out the financial burden of schools over several levels of government. By 1867 California had a state tax of 8c. per $100 valuation, a county tax equal to at least $3 for each school-age child, and a district tax of up to 35c. per $100 to pay for construction. Districts could also levy taxes of up to 15c. per $100 for other purposes, while any income from "school lands" (the 16^th and 30^th sections of each township) was to be distributed among the districts. Thissystem worked so well that several other legislatures adopted it, some with added wrinkles--like Nevada, which threw penal fines and 2% of toll-road receipts into the pot. In return for support from above, districts were usually required to hold classes at least three months a year. To pacify parents who claimed to live too far from a school or to need their children at home to work--and those who argued, with some justification, that they could provide better schooling themselves--legislatures limited compulsory attendance, usually to 12 weeks a year, then added a list of acceptable excuses for children to stay home. Most also eventually adopted a three-tiered system of examinations for teachers, like those used in the East: the third-grade exam, usually taken by those just starting out, certified them for a year or two; the first-grade exam, which allowed survivors to teach at all levels, was rigorous and took several hours to complete. One 16-year-old Arizona teacher answered problems in arithmetic, grammar, geography, history, physiology, natural philosophy, teaching methodology, and educational law; calculated the number of acres in a field with a diagonal of 42.43 rods; wrote brief essays on the Mound Builders and the financial troubles of the Van Buren administration; traced a water route from St. Louis to Peking; described the excretory organs; and diagrammed an imposing sentence (The merit of poetry, in its wildest forms, still consists in its truth conveyed to the understanding, not directly by words, but circuitously by means of imaginitive associations, which serve as its conductor).

The one-room school arose out of several factors. In a day when there were few if any compulsory-attendance laws, and those that existed couldn't be well enforced owing to the general attitude that parents had the final say over their own young, many children, especially in rural districts, attended sporadically if at all; and on the frontier, especially the trans-Mississippi, distances were so great and the population so small that there simply wasn't a need for large, graded institutions. Moreover, while the New England or mid-Atlantic farm might encompass no more than 80 acres (providing as many as eight families, usually with multiple children, per square mile), the newer frontiers such as the Midwest were noted for the universality with which speculation was pursued: not only did the big-money speculator accumulate vast expanses for resale, but even the farmer bought land to the limit of his means, hoping to hold it for future appreciation--which meant that, until he could sell it, the concentration of large tracts of land in a few hands tended to retard the growth of both population and the institutions that served it, including schools and towns. It wasn't unusual for a one-room school to number 60-70 pupils, and some pre-War examples crammed in as many as 100, though some had as few as 14-32. In a day when a fourth- to sixth-grade education qualified a person for most available jobs, and higher education was most often sought in academies, the seventh and eighth grades were likely to be the smallest, perhaps as few as four pupils each (though in 1890 the eighth grade of Kansas's Ellis School had 80); since readers weren't graded up that far, most of these young people probably did a lot of independent work, reading or solving problems at their desks and being checked at intervals by the teacher. As a general rule, each pupil shared a double bench with another, boys and girls being seated on opposite sides of the room (readers of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer may remember Tom's scheme to get himself sent to "go and sit with the girls" so he can court Becky Thatcher--a punishment generally considered to be humiliating), and the more advanced students, being older and longer-legged, on higher seats at the back. Children didn't generally start school until they were six, but there were always a few so eager for learning that they disregarded the rule:

"You gonna let Jason come to school, Miss Sarah?"

"Why, of course, Edith. Why shouldn't I?"

"Well, he ain't only five years old, and last year Miss Ida said he couldn't come till he was six."

"Oh." Sarah glanced at Jason, who was regarding her with an intent, belligerent look. "And why are your parents so anxious to send him to school?"

"We don't send him, Miss Sarah. He comes. Ma says if you pass the word to her, she'll keep him home. But Pa says he'd be obliged if you could see your way clear to let him stay; he's that bound to learn reading..."

The Revolt of Sarah Perkins, by Marian Cockrell

Frontier school plants, like everything else, varied enormously. Residents of affluent mining camps sometimes raised funds for quite impressive facilities, like one that built a two-room frame building equipped with the latest styles in school furniture. Dodge City in 1879 boasted a two-storey brick building with arched windows and a cupola. Rural districts had to float bonds or vote district taxes, then rely on volunteer labor (and sometimes even a parcel of land gifted by some local family to hold the building); what resulted could vary from the sturdy schoolhouse of Strawberry Valley, A.T., with its wallpaper, blackboards, maps, globes, dictionary, ceiling lamps, and factory-made desks, to a soddy, dugout, or brush arbor with packing-box seats and no stove. Children often provided their own seats and desks, or else sat with dangling legs on unplaned, backless wooden slabs. The same situation pertained with regard to books. Nearly a decade after Nebraska introduced a uniform list of required texts, barely half its districts used any of them, and only 76 of 2690 provided free books for students. So they often brought their own: everything from Bibles and almanacs to Balzac, with the most fortunate possessing McGuffey's Readers or popular children's magazines like Youth's Companion, Chatterbox, or Harper's Young People; the stories, puzzles, and articles of the first, which many parents who would allow nothing else thought quite good enough for Sundays as well as weekdays, were suitable for all ages and especially welcome.

A Western community's first school was usually a soddie, dugout, or log building, ranging from 12x14' to 18x22', with a dirt floor and a sod-and-branch or bark-shingled roof. The older students sat at a steep desk made of a long broad board resting on wall pegs along two sides of the room, with puncheon or rough slab seats or three-legged stools; benches in the center were provided for the little ones. The teacher had a rude desk and chair, with a slab or puncheon recitation bench in front of it. A stove or large fireplace at one end of the room provided heat; the door and window were set opposite. As prosperity and increased enrollment allowed, the classic "little red schoolhouse," ranging from 18x24' (sometimes two-storey) to 20x30' to as large as 40x40', appeared--a squat, dumpy building of brick or red-painted plank or clapboard construction, usually set off by itself among some trees, with a three-foot-high steeple or cupola holding a brassy-voiced little bell (sometimes salvaged from a grounded steamboat), a flagpole on top or in the yard, a pump or cistern, multipaned windows all around, and two outhouses at opposite corners of the yard within a fence. (To spare sensibilities, if you needed to "go," you quietly raised two fingers, and the teacher nodded permission.) Not all were one-room, even in the country: Ulysses S. Grant, in the 1830's, attended a two-room version. Two doors, one for boys and one for girls, led into the cloakroom (which also served as a vestibule to help keep the heat inside in cold weather), in which each child had his own hook, with his name written underneath, and also left his dinner bucket on a shelf; and near the inner doors was a corner shelf holding a 10-quart tin or wooden pail of water with a tin cup or long-handled tin dipper from which all the kids drank, spreading measles, whooping cough, and anything else they happened to have. A room 30x35' was considered adequate for 50 pupils. If some money and attention were given to it, such a school could be a very pleasant place. In superior examples, the whitewashed walls were almost covered with hand-lettered mottoes, Biblical texts, quotations from Shakespeare, Currier & Ives prints, pages from fashion magazines, copies of the New York Tribune and Christian Advocate, and pictures cut from some popular periodical like Harper's Bazar. A steel engraving of George Washington was a common item, and there was always a flag. A blackboard or two (if only one it was always placed up front), made of plaster or boards painted black and equipped with rag or sheepskin erasers, provided a place to work problems for all to follow, even if it was only 2x4' (and some grew to 4x10'). The teacher's sanctum was a platform in one corner, set with a kitchen table and chair or a slant-top oak desk, and provided with a hickory pointer and a large brass hand bell. Heat was provided by a cannon, Franklin, or potbellied cast- or sheet-iron stove, set in the middle of the room or in a 10'-square open space in front of the teacher's desk and usually teetering uncertainly on brickbats (cheaper than an asbestos pad). The best-equipped ones had a globe, a pull-down or wall map or two, a bookshelf with a dozen volumes in it (though the teacher often brought in books of her own to read aloud), and if lucky a fat Webster's dictionary. Some even boasted curtains at the windows and potted geraniums on the sills. The play-yard, surfaced in crushed stone, hard-packed earth, or a mud-and-cinder mix, featured a pump and a swing strung from a high bar between two trees. In the West there was always a shed or stable for the pupils' ponies. From 1800-45, even the best-furnished schools boasted only all-wood, straight-back benches, with a sloping desk surface built onto the back of each; over the 15 years following, these came to be replaced by separate splat-back or basket (captain's-style) chairs on a single post-like leg, and individual lift-top or solid-top desks with storage space underneath and two columnar runner-bottom legs or two side legs of openwork iron--the kind we still associate with schoolrooms.

Boston school buildings in 1823 had seats for approximately 300 pupils, each room having a master and two ushers, but by 1848 the number of seats had been reduced to about 180. A typical Providence grammar school about 1840 was a simple two-storey oblong, each floor seating 228 pupils at double desks in a single large room. (Boys and girls either sat on opposite sides of the room or were placed on different floors.) A single central entrance let directly into the stairwell, with a squarish chamber, probably a cloakroom, on either side of it. Each room was conducted as a separate and distinct school and had a master and one male or two female assistants. In New York City, a "model" school building of the Public School Society, erected in 1843, was a severely simple Greek Revival oblong of three storeys, with the infant or primary school on the first, the girls on the second, and the boys on the third. Each floor had one large room seating 252 pupils, with folding doors to divide the primary into two. There were also three small recitation rooms. As new buildings were erected with smaller classrooms, and the large ones in older buildings were divided and the schools reorganized, the graded system came in, with a teacher in charge of each class, 55-75 students being a common class size at first. (J.D., a city boy, would probably have attended a school of this kind.)

Some later schoolhouses were quite impressive for their time and place: the Dover reprint of Bicknell's Victorian Buildings, originally published in 1879 as Bicknell's Village Builder, shows two designs--a two-storey frame schoolhouse with two 29'x23'9" rooms side by side on the ground floor and a 48x29' lecture room above, "now being erected at Loami, Ill." (population then about 200) and a three-storey Mansard brick structure, "now being erected at Lincoln, Ill." (population then about 4687) with a central hall for the stairs, four 26x30' classrooms each on the first and second floors, and two more on the third as well as a 36x54' chapel. On the third floor front is a "recitation room" about 16x16' which communicates with both the chapel and the front schoolroom, and underneath it is a "school inspector's room." Each classroom is entered through a wardrobe vestibule, with a 19"x6'7" oblong bitten out of it for a "teacher's closet," backing a square platform at the center front of the room.

The school year, too, varied widely from place to place. In Montana, at least through the 1870's, school "kept" in summer, not winter, owing to the danger of blizzards; in other cold-climate regions, classes might open in spring and fall and close down during winter. In farming communities, school might not open till the first week of November, every child over the age of six being busy in the fields throughout early autumn, and was on for only a few months in winter (ending in time for spring planting) and a few weeks in summer. In the farm districts of Maine, school kept for eight weeks in fall, as much in spring, and 10 in winter; the older boys and girls were likely to attend only the last. In some districts, the girls or youngest children attended classes in the summer or during the spring and fall, the elders or boys, needed on the farm, in the winter. Elsewhere, as in Carol Ryrie Brink's Caddie Woodlawn (based on the actual experiences of her grandmother in Wisconsin during the Civil War), two towns might share a teacher, who served in one of them during winter and summer and the other in spring and fall, for a total of five or six months apiece. In prairie schools of the 1850's, terms ran to three months each, with a two-week vacation between. Just outside Denver in 1906 (16 years after "the frontier" had officially closed), author Ralph Moody attended a school that started around October 1 and tended to peter out about the beginning of May, by which time only a few of the smallest children, not needed at home to help with the work, were still showing up, and the teacher quietly closed the term out. And if anyone came down with a contagious disease, like mumps, the school closed for a month regardless of what time of year it was. Most commonly the term seems to have run from September 1 or early October to June 30 or the first week in June (eight to ten months), with a four-day vacation at Thanksgiving and time off at Christmas. Early schools "kept" for six days, till five P.M., or four in winter, with a two-hour recess at noon, but Saturday was given primarily to a review of the week's work (in the morning) and a spelldown (after lunch). By the '40's, when Twain set his Tom Sawyer, it had become customary for pupils to have Saturday off. Lessons began at 8:30, 8:45, or 9:00 (with "first bell" half an hour earlier); there were 15- or 30-minute recesses at 11 and 3, lunch running from noon till 1:00 or 1:30, and dismissal at 4:00 or 4:30, though in some places it was as early as 3, and 2 on Fridays. Friday afternoon was often given over to spelling bees, ciphering contests, and other reviews, in which elders were also invited to participate; brief religious exercises at the opening of the day--usually the Lord's Prayer, a hymn (or a patriotic song), a short passage from Scripture, or some combination--were at the discretion of the teacher. Some scholars (those who lived closest to the schoolhouse) regularly went home for their noon "dinner," while others brought it with them, usually in five- or ten-pound lard buckets, which could hold enough food for a whole family of siblings; it was the responsibility of the oldest child to carry the common bucket for all.

The common school subjects were taught by methods quite different from those now in use. Oral instruction, the word method in teaching reading, language lessons, instructions about realities, elementary science, geography built on the child's environment instead of pages in a book, arithmetic by analysis instead of sums by rule, music, drawing, reasoning instead of memorizing, and teaching from the full mind of the teacher rather than from the pages of a book, were hardly known in the 1840's in even the best American schools, or before 1860 outside of the more progressive cities. The knowledge aim dominated all instruction. Knowledge was the important thing, as it was rather firmly believed that knowledge and virtue were somewhat synonymous terms. The fundamental subjects were drilled upon, and the trustees or school committee, when they visited, examined the pupils as to their ability to read and spell, quizzed them on their knowledge of the rules of arithmetic and grammar and the location of towns and rivers and capes, and inspected their copybooks. Competitive reading and spelling contests were common, and to write a good and ornate hand was a matter of note, while the solving of arithmetical puzzles (the kind of thing we still see in arithmetic texts, in which a problem is posed as a situation or story), parsing and diagramming of sentences, and locating geographical points were accomplishments that marked the higher stages of a common-school education. Many early histories and geographies, particularly, were organized on the same plan as the old catechisms, as in this example from Dwight's System of Geography:

Q: What is the situation and extent of France

A: It is situated between 42 and 51 degrees of north latitude, and between 5 degrees west and 8 degrees east longitude. It is 600 miles long and 500 broad.

Q: How is France

A: It is bounded by the English Channel and the Netherlands on the north; by Germany, Switzerland, and Italy on the east; by the Mediterranean and Pyrenean Mountains, south; and by the Bay of Biscay, west.

Q: How is France divided?

A: Into 21 provinces formerly, and lately into 83 departments.

Q: From what is the name France derived?

A: It is derived from a German word signifying free men.

There was nothing for the child to do but memorize such subject matter, or for the teacher but to see that the pupils knew the answers to the questions. Up till the mid-19^th Century at least, and much later in many schools, the dominant characteristic of instruction was the recitation, in which the pupils simply recited what they had learned from their textbooks. It was school-keeping, not schoolteaching. Around 1866, however, a Swiss named Arnold Guyot, assisted by an Oswego teacher, published some beautifully illustrated textbooks and a detailed method-guide for teachers, which tended to fix, among the more progressive of the latter, the new method of oral and objective teaching.

Arithmetic went through a similar evolution. Before Pestalozzi, it meant ciphering, and either commercial counting or the solving of complicated problems. Pestalozzi replaced ciphering with simple and rapid mental calculation, teaching concrete number ideas, not words about numbers; he based his arithmetic on counting beans, boys, sticks, lines, mountain peaks, holes in the lace curtains or flowers on the wallpaper. He discarded sand-tables, paper, and slates, and trained his pupils to solve mentally rather complicated problems with whole numbers and fractions. Mental arithmetic being a very practical subject, his ideas spread rapidly, being first brought to the U.S. as early as 1821, when Warren Colburn published his First Lessons in Arithmetic on the Plan of Pestalozzi, which packed its 100 or so pages with hundreds of simple problems to be solved mentally, and sold over 2,000,000 copies in its first 50 years. The problems in it are illustrated by the following examples:

How many hands have a boy and a clock?

Four rivers ran through the Garden of Eden, and one through Babylon; how many more ran through Edeb than Babylon?

Judas, one of the twelve Apostles, hung himself; how many were left?

Miss Fanny Woodbury was born in 1791, and died in 1814; Miss Hannah Adams lived to be 53 years older; how old was Hannah Adams?

At $2.50 a yard, what will 2˝ yards of cloth cost?

Colburn's book was an instant success, and for more than 50 years was one of the most widely used schoolbooks in America. Like all successful textbooks, it set a new standard, and had many imitators, including Barnard's A Treatise on Arithmetic (1830), which was the first in the subject to include pictures to aid the pupils in mastery. After 1870 the Grube method, based on teaching each number in all possible and imaginary combinations (the entire first year was devoted to the numbers 1-10, and the second to 100), gradually came into favor, and by 1885 even the rural schools had adopted it. Only around 1900 was a return to Pestalozzian methods begun.

Pestalozzi's ideas weren't all good, however. For at least a generation from its general adaptation after about 1845, writing was taught in a formal, mechanical, lifeless way that was largely ineffective because of the attempt to present the subjects logically to children and to analyze each subject into its elements. Before children began really to write they were drilled on lines and curves and angles and movements until they were thoroughly tired of writing as a subject because it led to so little writing. In drawing the same was true: year after year was spent in studying form, with scientific instruction as to angles and geometrical figures and perspective, but without reaching color and expression. In music, drill was put on tone studies, scales, and reading notes, without much real singing. Not until about 1900 were such methods generally abandoned for the far simpler and easier procedure which leads earlier and more directly to actual writing and drawing and singing.

Ordinarily, parents furnished their children's textbooks, but it required no more than $10 to buy a complete set sufficient for a sixth-grade education, and these could be handed down from child to child, within or across family lines, as the original user outgrew them. Standard texts included readers and spellers, grammars, elocution texts or "speakers" (much like readers, but with selections chosen for reading aloud and dramatic expression), copybooks from which handwriting was taught, and rhetorics, which imparted composition and discourse and also served as texts for literary history and creative writing. Besides the Colburn text already mentioned, Ray's Arithmetics, used by millions of children, began in 1834 and came in First, Second, and Third Parts. Four years later appeared Emerson's North American Arithmetic. Enoch Pond's Murray's English Grammar, which came out in 1835, was patterned on the long-recognized divisions of Latin grammar: orthography, inflection, syntax, and prosody. Harvey's Grammar appeared 33 years later, and Quackenbos's by 1880. Frost's Easy Exercises in Composition was published in 1839, and the Spencerian Writing System in 1848. Scott's Lessons in Elocution (1814) and Lovell's The Young Speaker (1844) provided fodder for the budding orator. Morse's School Geography (aka American Universal Geography) was first published in 1784 and reached 27 editions in 60 years. A much abridged school edition appeared in 1795 as Elements of Geography; it was a little 16mo. volume of 144 pages of descriptive matter, with two small black-and-white maps and no illustrations, but was better than Nathaniel Dwight's A Short But Comprehensive System of the Geography of the World, brought out the same year--a duodecimo volume of 214 pages, built on the question-and-answer system--and it was used extensively in American schools. The original version, completely revised in 1847, sold by thousands until replaced in 1875 by the lavishly illustrated Harper's School Geography, which even pupils found interesting. 1821 saw the publication of William C. Woodbridge's Rudiments of Geography (a descriptive volume with a number of illustrations, which accompanied his Atlas) and Davenport's History of the United States, with 82 pages of questions and answers on the catechetical form, plus the Declaration, the Constitution, and a Table of Chronology. In 1822 appeared the descriptive and popular History of the United States, by Samuel Goodrich, which at once leaped into popular favor; it sold 150,000 copies in its first decade, and in 1836 the 44^th edition was issued in a revised and enlarged form. Shortly afterward appeared Noah Webster's History of the United States, which contained an introduction to the study of the Constitution, and can thus be said to mark the beginning of the study of civics at a grammar-school level. Frost's A History of the United States was pubished in 1837, and Quackenbos's Elementary History of the United States was in use by 1878. Marcus Willson's series of readers began in 1859 and by the mid-'70's included a primer, three spellers, five basic and three intermediary readers. Best-known of all schoolbooks was the series of readers compiled by William Holmes McGuffey:

As the West developed a regional self-consciousness, it reacted against the New England school of textbook writers and demanded something more suitable for its own needs. [McGuffey] was the answer to its prayer for fresher and more appropriate textbooks. A Presbyterian preacher of Scottish descent who had been born and brought up on the Ohio frontier, he had attended Washington College in western Pennsylvania and later preached, taught, and lectured in Kentucky and Ohio. In 1826 he accepted the position of professor of languages at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and later was president of Cincinnati College and of Ohio University at Athens. Not till 1845 did he leave the Middle West to move to the University of Virginia as professor of moral philosophy.

The First and Second Readers of his series were printed in 1836 and promptly sold more than 20,000 copies. The Third and Fourth followed a year later, the Fifth in 1844 and the Sixth in 1857. By 1842 the sales of the books had reached 700,000 copies. They were something new&; they were human and interesting and varied. Children were fascinated by their stories, fables, mottoes, proverbs, poems, and pictures; especially the pictures. Here were textbooks that dealt with things they knew in real life, familiar things like dogs, games, houses, toys, and grandparents. Where the old New England Primer was burdened with submission, death, and original sin, McGuffey's Primer was full of homely objects from the child-reader's everyday world, the rough-hewn, hopeful, egalitarian frontier West: A for Ax, B for Box, D for Dog, H for Hen, J for Jug, L for Lark, O for Ox, T for Tub, V for Vine, Y for Yoke. The later books, graded in difficulty, were profusely and aptly illustrated, and dealt with close-to-home experiences like ball-playing, farm chores, family life, and going to the store.

McGuffey was not only the author of what was soon to be the nation's most popular series of school readers; a small library of interesting stories, poetry, historical episodes, travel, biography, and great oratory, most of it inculcating moral lessons, yet without engendering boredom and hatred of it in the minds of its pupils, as did so many textbooks; but the exemplar, through his selections, of the virtues most admired by its people, especially the people of rural and village regions. The stories, articles, and poems he chose, for the most part from the best literature of the Western world, were intended to reinforce the doctrine that thrift, industry, and piety were the ingredients of modest worldly success, and that village and country life surpassed that in cities, which were either ignored or used as examples of corruption. Pupils who read them learned of horse-drawn transportation rather than steamboats and railroads, of small merchants rather than manufacturers, artisans rather than factory laborers, of the outdoors, of birds and farm animals, gossipy barbers, Longfellow's "Village Blacksmith," and of town pumps, watering troughs, and village greens. Against the rough-and-tumble liberty of the rapidly growing urban upper middle class, which championed rugged individualism and economic libertarianism and fought hard to achieve inequalities of wealth and prestige, he continued to preach rustic equality. His village was classless; it promoted peace and harmony, not ruthless competition. Nature was benevolent, not a Darwinian jungle. Too much of anything that distinguished the individual, be it wealth or wisdom, was to be discouraged. Ceaseless, dogged, honest effort; not genius or a burning desire to excel; would bring prosperity; and that prosperity, once achieved, didn't yield relaxed enjoyment, the refinement of the senses, the pleasures of detachment, the release of energies for higher pursuits, or anything that might appear ostentatious. So deeply ingrained were the scarcity habits of self-denial and unremitting toil that McGuffey's characters could never graduate into decadent urban or European civilization. Too little money revealed laziness, or perhaps misfortune. But too much of it, like too much wisdom or talent or fashionable sparkle, would separate its owner from the dominant middle group. He must rise to their standard, but not surpass it. Though financiers, cattle drovers, actors, coal miners, politicians, steamboat captains, railroad magnates, factory stewards, westering farmers, runaway slaves, and later California gold seekers were familiar figures in the America of his day, none ever appeared in his Readers. There was no hint in them that the country was undergoing the travail, torment, and psychological dislocation that marked its transition from a predominantly rural to an urban-industrial society. Rather they mirrored the placid, optimistic society of a generation past, whose values had survived into a ruder and less congenial age. His adults were moderately prosperous small-town craftsmen and businessmen, humble rustics, schoolteachers, and poor widows. And except for idle tramps; ;men ruined forever by a single taste of alcohol; they were perfect.

McGuffey, himself a product of the frontier, preached what the pioneer understood: rugged individualism, the virtue of hard work, the sure reward of goodness. He never encouraged his pupils to acquire the kind of soaring ambition that could lead to too much sophistication, or carry them off to the tainted city. Instead he recommended the middling, homebound path and carried the credo of the Puritan village into the nineteenth century. The main economic virtues were industry, education, respect for property, perseverance, thrift, frugality, piety, morality, and the avoidance of tempting diversions. The social virtues were altriusm, helpfulness, kindness, humility, gentleness, contentment, forgiveness, forbearance, generosity, and peaceableness, while the properly developed conscience urged obedience, honesty, gratitude, prayer, and moral courage. Pomp and wealth were ridiculed, and praise heaped upon the virtues of rural over city life...Urban ways were ignored or used as examples of corruption. "The Mysterious Stranger" described the unhappiness of a visitor from another planet at learning that city pleasures in our world were accompanied by the penalty of death. Village boys, on the other hand, often misbehaved in McGuffey's selections, but seldom fell prey to any major vices. His young characters were always getting into trouble, or faced with problems, or the victims of unsympathetic grownups. In "The Truant," one of the boys playing hooky was almost drowned on his day of stolen freedom. But good always triumphed, and virtue was always rewarded: a meek, well-behaved girl was astonished to receive a pile of silver coins baked into a loaf of bread. In contrast to the grim lessons of hellfire and damnation typical of the New England Primer and other Puritan texts, he taught a humane morality which held up compassion and a forgiving spirit as virtues. Instead of looking at the graveyard, he saw the brightness of an Ohio morning...Here was the spirit of a new nation, not weighted with death but lifted with life and eager to build a future.

McGuffey rarely "talked down" to his students; he challenged them. When a selection contained unusual words the reader would find at the end their pronunciation and meaning. Though he was an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church, he wasn't mawkish; he had a shrewd sense of the interests of both children and the times, and he taught his morality in a simple, friendly, dignified way. The First and Second Readers were full of moralized anecdotes and tales, but they dealt with everyday children in situations comprehensible to a child. The selections were the product of their time; moralistic, sentimental, materialistic, worldly, some of them morbid about death. They stressed thrift, work, morality, and patriotism, and taught that crime does not pay, vengeance is the Lord's only, and only the good become rich and happy. They warned constantly against the dangers of excessive worldliness and materialism, inveighed against the acquisitive instinct, and placed their primary emphasis on character, generosity, and goodness. Riches were in fact a curse unless used for the greater glory of God. The most persistent theme was that human ambition and knowledge came to naught unless supported by God's wisdom. "Wealth, rightly got and rightly used...power, fame, these are all worthy objects of ambition," the Fourth Reader baldly admitted, "but they are not the highest objects, and you may acquire them all without ever achieving true success." A "noble and beautiful character" was "not only the best of possessions in this world, but also is about all you can expect to take with you into the next." The ideal figure in the Readers was not the businessman or the industrial tycoon, but the teacher or missionary. Virtue was rewarded and sin punished. The Puritan work ethic appeared again and again...

For all that, the books usually made vivid and exciting reading, far superior to the pallid stories of Dick and Jane and Spot and Puff that would be standard fare a hundred-odd years later. In each volume the selections were arranged in sequences that illustrated a theme, such as Section XLIX of the Fifth, which was entitled "Behind Time" and contained the story of a train wreck caused by the engineer's being late, of the Battle of Waterloo being lost because Marshal Grouchy failed to appear on time, of a commercial house bankrupt because the money from California arrived too late, and of a prisoner hanged because the messenger with the governor's pardon arrived too late. But the religion in them avoided dogma and dry sermons...

Yet children learning to read from McGuffey shared in the world's rich storehouse of knowledge. There they found good prose and poetry that took them out of backwoods Indiana or Iowa or away from the plains of Texas and carried them all over the world and into all periods of history. In countless homes the Readers were the only reading matter to be had, pored over by children and elders alike. Literally millions of American children learned "Casabianca," "The Boy Who Cried Wolf," and "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" courtesy of McGuffey, as well as Southey's "The Battle of Blenheim," Bryant's "The Death of the Flowers," Washington Irving's description of a thunderstorm, the description of "The Relief of Lucknow" from the London Times, the play William Tell, and even the old rhyme about "The Blind Man and the Elephant," not to mention the patriotic words of Washington, Patrick Henry, Webster, and Clay; millions learned through the Readers alone of William Tell, Joan of Arc, Douglas and Richard the Lionheart, became familiar with the Turk at midnight in his tent, the lowing herd that wound o'er the lea, young Lochinvar, the good dog Rover and Wordsworth's little cottage girl, the sound of revelry by night and the "mournful numbers;" and thousands of future politicians, journalists, and preachers acquired from them an arsenal of tags and phrases. In the upper Readers, Third to Sixth, McGuffey introduced a discriminating variety of poetry, oratory, and essays: Longfellow's homespun "Village Blacksmith" and "Paul Revere," Bryant's thoughtful, mystical "To a Waterfowl," Chief Logan's reply to Dunmore, Scott, Byron, Southey, Wordsworth, Hawthorne, Irving, Lamb, Goldsmith, Dickens, Milton, Shakespeare. The Third Reader included selections from the Bible, incidents from the life of Napoleon, poems such as Samuel Woodworth's "The Old Oaken Bucket" and Wordsworth's "We Are Seven," and a homely little explanation of "How a Fly Walks on the Ceiling." In the Fourth an essay by Daniel Drake, Cincinnati scientist and civic leader, voiced the Western people's need to know and share their own beliefs, hopes, and aspirations; and here also were Longfellow's "Wreck of the Hesperus," Southey's "Inchcape Rock," and the story "Hugh Idle and Mr. Toil," adapted from Hawthorne's "Little Daffydowndilly." The Fifth included a rhymed version of the fable about "The Spider and the Fly;" a dialogue between Cassio and Iago from Othello, entitled "The Folly of Intoxication;" a selection from Blackstone's Commentaries on "The Origin of Property;" an essay entitled "God Blesses the Industrious;" a moving passage from Henry Grattan's "Speech on the Catholic Question," which defended the rights of Irish Catholics and imbued young readers with a new spirit of toleration; such poems as Charles Kingsley's "The Sands o'Dee," Whittier's "The Corn Song," "The Battle of Blenheim," Goldsmith's "Elegy on Madam Blaize," Leigh Hunt's "Abou Ben Adhem," "The Cataract of Lodore" "abridged from Southey," Thomas Hood's "Faithless Nelly Gray," Longfellow's "Village Blacksmith," "Make Way for Liberty," Caroline Norton's "Soldier of the Rhine," Campbell's "Lord Ullin's Daughter," John Godfrey Saxe's "The Blind Men and the Elephant," Thomas Moore's "The Light of Other Days," Charles Wolfe's "Burial of Sir John Moore," and Bryant's "The Death of the Flowers;" the courtroom scene from Shakespare's Merchant of Venice, the judgment of Gesler and the shooting of the apple from Knowles's William Tell , the scene from Hamlet in which the Prince first learns that his father's ghost has been glimpsed on the castle battlements; the Thirty-Seventh Psalm; prose pieces like Irving's "The Alhambra by Moonlight," Nikolai Karamzin's parable "The Generous Russian Peasant," Daniel Webster's "Supposed Speech of John Adams" in support of the concept of American independence, the speech of Chief Logan, William Wirt's essay "No Excellence Without Labor," a scene from Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby, and Hawthorne's "Town Pump," with the object of the title "talking through its nose;" Edward Everett, Burke, Lord Chatham, Dr. Johnson, Macaulay, Byron, and a host of others, including anonymous excerpts from the Edinburgh Review. And the Sixth featured the Death of Little Nell from Dickens, Thomas Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," Joseph Rodman Drake's "The American Flag," Hester Thrale's "The Three Warnings," Southey's "Mary, the Maid of the Inn," Thomas Campbell's "Lochiel's Warning," Halleck's "Marco Bozzaris," Mary Russell Mitford's version of "Rienzi's Address to the Romans," Whittier's "Barefoot Boy," Leigh Hunt's "The Glove and the Lions," Samuel Rogers's "Ginevra" from his long poem Italy, Scott's "Lochinvar" and his "Parting of Marmion and Douglas" from Marmion, Byron's "The Battle of Waterloo," Poe's "The Raven," the Church Scene from Longfellow's Evangeline and the same author's "The Bridge," Bryant's "Thanatopsis" and "To a Waterfowl," N. P. Willis's retelling of the story of " Jephthah's Daughter," Charles Sprague on "North American Indians," Charles Phillips' essay on "The Character of Napoleon," Irving's doleful "The Grave," Orville Dewey's "View of the Colosseum," the "Speech of St. Paul on Mars Hill," Marc Antony's oration over the body of Caesar, the Death of Absalom from the Bible, General Henry Lee's "Eulogy on Washington" (the one in which he said "first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen"), and Patrick Henry's "Speech Before the Virginia Convention" (better known as "Give me Liberty, or give me death!").

--From A Thunder at Dawn

He also compiled a Speller, which was first published in 1838. (Other spellers included Spelling and Thinking (1841), Parsons's Analytical Spelling-Book (1836), and the favorite standard, Noah Webster's American Spelling-Book, more generally known as the "Blue-Backed," first published in 1783.) His Readers never took hold in New England, but they blanketed the rest of the country, and weren't replaced till 1897, when the Baldwin Readers appeared.

Besides this, the minimum equipment was a slate (one or more hinged leaves of some light unbreakable black material framed in wood, bound in red felt or flannel, and available in 8x12" for 25c. or 5x7" for 15c.); a pack of soft slate pencils (five for a nickel); half a quire (about 12 sheets) of foolscap paper (though in practise it was probably cheaper and easier to buy a bound notepad, such as we still see today, costing from a cent and a half or two cents for 64 4x6" pages up to 30c. for 60 sheets of high-grade 8x10"), a graphite pencil (4˝c. to $1.10 per dozen depending on grade), a bottle of ink (from eight cents for four ounces to 42˝c. for a half-pint, again varying with grade), and a half-dozen steel pen-nibs (four and a half to ten cents--the penholder, or staff, could be made at home if necessary). A slate-pencil sharpener cost about two cents, though a boy could simply use his pocketknife for the purpose. Notebooks were unknown: to make copybooks, children saved precious paper, ruled it, folded it, cut and sewed it. Before steel pens became common about 1850, a first step in penmanship was to make one's own, by sharpening a quill with a penknife. Students also often made their own inks, from powders, dyes, berries, or steeped swamp-maple bark; a little salt retarded mold in hot weather, and a few drops of brandy served as anti-freeze. Teachers were expected to buy "crayons" (what we call chalk) out of their own pockets; buckets, dippers, and a broom were provided by the School Board. Usually the boy pupils kept the stove supplied (though the fuel itself would be hauled by an adult in a wagon) andthe girls did the sweeping; in some country schools, one of the boys was employed as a janitor at two dollars a season, carrying coal, emptying ashes, starting fires, and sweeping out.

Grade levels in country schools were determined, roughly, by the ability to read: a bright reader of eight--for some reason the good readers were always girls--might progress through two or three readers in a year, while a dull or lazy reader of 16 might not have gotten farther than the Third. During the 1820's, a child went to "preparatory school" from age 6-10, then to an "academy" (so called well before 1817) for four or five years. In the '40's, he attended primary school from 6-9, intermediate from 9-12 or grammar from 10-15. The first fully graded school in the U.S. is generally considered to have been Quincy Grammar in Boston, which was reorganized in 1847 under the German system as described by Horace Mann. In the following year a new building was erected for it. In a day when a grammar school with 400 pupils was considered very large, it had seats for 660, grouped into 12 classrooms (55 per), with a separate desk and chair for each pupil and a cloakroom for each class. The first, second, and third floors were given over to classrooms, and on the fourth was an assembly hall large enough to comfortably seat not only the entire student body but non-student spectators as well. During the '50's most schools were divided into elementary (age 6-14) and academies and high schools (till 17 or 18). As school populations grew larger and the one-room district schoolhouse became too small, it was gradually divided in two: a primary for children aged five or six to nine or ten, and an intermediate or grammar school for ages 10-14. This soon developed into two graded schools, 1-4 and 5-8, in which each grade was aimed at one age level, a system that became fairly widespread (at least in the more populated regions) by the end of the Civil War. In the next 20-25 years the two were gradually reunited to produce a single elementary school for grades 1-8, though by the late '80's a Western town might still have only one teacher for the lower grades and one for the upper.

Until the mid-19^th century, schoolteaching was monopolized by men, and only a few women entered it; those who did usually kept small elementary schools, which took the students about as far as what we might consider second or third grade. But in 1845 Catherine Beecher, of the famous family that also produced Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, published an eloquent manifesto entitled The Duty of American Women to Their Country, which was widely distributed throughout the nation. In it she stated that population increase was running so far ahead of the supply of teachers, many of whom were deserting their humble and penurious profession for more profitable occupations, that children would grow up in ignorance unless women came forth and entered teaching by the thousands. Teaching, she said, was a more rewarding means of earning one's living than the monotonous toil of New England factories and workshops (which at that time were largely staffed by young women), and more satisfying than idling away one's time at "shopping, dressing, calling, and gossipping." She found eager disciples in New England especially, as emigration and seafaring had disbalanced the proportions of the sexes, and by 1853 that region was regarded as the prime source of teachers, with 75% of the 8000 teachers in the public schools of Massachusetts being women; the female "schoolmarm" concept spread from there to the Midwest and the Trans-Mississippi, although in the South most teachers continued to be male. In 1860 approximately 25% of elementary and secondary teachers nationwide were women; by 1880 the figure had risen to 60%. Still, difficulties remained. There was little attention paid to methodology, and few books on the subject. Samuel R. Hall's Lectures on Schoolkeeping (1829) was the first professional book published in America designed particularly for the guidance of teachers. Josiah Abbott's The Teacher: or Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and Government of the Young (1833) went through 25 editions by 1860. David Page's Theory and Practice of Teaching (1847) was one of the most successful of the early professional books. Owing to the poor pay (it averaged $12/mo. and board for women, two or three times that for men, though in some places even females got as much as $50 or even more, as above mentioned), which came only while school kept, teachers were usually on their way to something else--a young man saving for future education (many aspiring doctors and lawyers taught a term or two between sieges at school) or to set himself up in business, a young woman hoping for a husband or awaiting the return of a fiancé who'd gone West to seek his fortune. In the farming districts, teaching might bring in only $100 a year, less than a farm laborer earned, so many a male teacher turned laborer between sessions (especially since his students were likely to be all at work anyway at the times when such help was most needed), augmenting his income and keeping himself in trim for maintaining discipline. In the South, pay often came in the form of county warrants, which the teacher then had to discount with local storekeepers for 40-60% of face value--unless he was willing to wait six months or a year to get his money. Female teachers were paid so little that they had to "live in," boarding from a week to a month at a time with different families (usually those of the School Board), sharing their home and food and usually tutoring the children during their "time off." And even outside of school hours, a teacher, especially a female one, had to be a model of conduct--pious, socially discreet, and impeccable in behavior. Teachers were almost universally unmarried; if a Mrs., the teacher must (ideally) be a widow, so she "could devote her full time to her pupils"--unless, like some women, she was making up for a penurious or extravagant husband by keeping a school in her home. Cow-country kids had little respect for a "greenhorn" or "pilgrim" teacher from the East, and a male one had to be a fighter, for the cowhands would often fix it up with the bigger pupils to run him off so they'd get a lady teacher. It seems probable, indeed, that most teachers in Trans-Mississippi were women, because men could always find better-paying work on a frontier--and, in a nation that still expected every man to look forward to becoming his own master, many were busy "proving up" on homesteads or trying to get small ranches underway.

A few country teachers had a year or two in the preparatory department of some small local college, but "normal" schools--a sort of high-level academy to train teachers in how as well as what to teach, the first public example of which opened in 1839 in Lexington, Mass. (private ones had appeared at Concord, Vt., in 1823, and Lancaster, Mass., in 1827)--were few and far between. By 1860 there were still only 11 state (public) normal schools in eight states-- Massachusetts (which had four), Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, and Minnesota. The first city normal school appeared in St. Louis in 1857. There were also six private normals in 1860; one of the earliest and most important was that at Lebanon, Oh., founded in 1855 by Alfred Holbrook, son of the founder of the lyceum movement, who served as its principal for 50 years, retiring at age 89 only four years before his death. It opened with 257 students its first year and came to enroll 2000 per year during its greatest period, 1880-95. Many noted later leaders got their start there. The Oswego State Normal School, begun as a city school and taken over by the state in 1866, and based on Pestalozzian methods of instruction, graduated 1373 in the years 1861-86, all but 175 being natives of New York State; of these 897 found positions outside the state, including every one of the contiguous 48 except Idaho, Nevada, and Utah. The public normals increased in number to 61 (54 state, two county, and seven city) by 1872, approximately 80 by 1880, and 167 public ones and slightly more private by 1898. Teachers' Institutes, generally arranged by county superintendents or at least on a county-wide level, were first offered in Connecticut (where Henry Barnard began them) in 1839, New York in 1840, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Ohio in 1845, New Hampshire, Vermont, Indiana, and Michigan in 1846, Maine in 1847, Wisconsin in 1848, Pennsylvania and Illinois in 1854, Iowa in 1858, and Michigan in 1860; these spread widely and were especially popular in the Midwest, being most often held in July and August preceding examinations to renew rural teaching certificates. (Such an Institute, indeed, might be the only formal training a prairie teacher had.) They were wider spread than formal schools, cheaper, and grew faster: in Ohio in 1845, there were only two of them, with an attendance of 240; by 1854, the number had grown to 41 and 2198. (Room, board, tuition, and classroom supplies cost about $35 in the late '90's, and probably not too much more or less prior to that, although if a would-be teacher's father was a farmer, who tended to see cash money only once a year when he sold his crop, he might actually have to go to the bank and borrow it!) Teachers both would-be and already certified were encouraged or required to attend these, which were usually held at the seats of counties with more than a few districts; they varied from one to two days to five to six weeks in length, with two to four weeks being commonest, offering instruction in required curricula and "the science and art of teaching,"and were a relatively cheap and workable substitute for modern teachers' colleges, though even the small financial outlay necessary for attendance, room, and board could be a hardship. Nor were they all hard work: lighter papers were presented in the evenings, musical and declamatory programs occaasionally marked their close, and ice-cream socials attracted local beaux--for teaching was only a steppingstone to marriage, and teachers were prized as wives by farmers and villagers alike. The Institute was followed by an examination supposed to test the qualifications for a teaching certificate, but proving little in truth except that the applicant knew more than his pupils--which seemed to be about all the citizens really demanded in any case. Teachers were certified by the local authorities (not by the state), the certificate being a general license to teach in any grade of school for which the local Board of Education or school trustees might employ the holder.

Frontier teachers were sometimes local parents, older daughters or cousins imported from back East, or farmers filling in during hard times (one Texan got $160, and fed his family thereby, for four terms during a drought). Homesteading mothers sometimes taught, leaving Father to watch over the preschoolers at home. While some schools in the California Mother Lode country were taught by preachers, and many a minister, even in the civilized East, fattened his purse by substitute or even part- or full-time teaching, Western teachers were often young ladies--frequently not much older than their older student--fresh out of "Institutes," and had no tenure; they usually married before tenure became interesting. (Others were "maiden ladies" weary of being barely tolerated dependents in the home of a married brother, like the title character of Cockrell's Revolt.) Female teachers of 15 were commonplace (Laura Ingalls, later Wilder, won her teaching certificate at that age), 13-year-olds not unknown; often they were local girls unhappy at the prospect of abandoning the wide variety of work and play they had known as children and devoting most of their time to strictly domestic tasks. (Being still close to their own youth, they probably made, in many ways, the best possible pedagogues: they remembered something of how children think, and were often still playful enough to come up with creative and interesting ways to impart learning.) Teaching demanded only 6-8 years of formal schooling, though it commanded some status in the community, and girls usually stuck with it for only two or three years before marrying--though even that brief experience could go a long way toward providing the necessities for starting a home.

By the mid-1830's reading, spelling, word analysis, declamation, and ciphering were firmly fixed as the fundamental subjects for the evolving American common school, with arithmetic, grammar, geography, American history, and civics as additional subjects in the city schools. From about 1830-60 the better city systems had emplaced as a full curriculum the following: for the younger childen, letters and syllables, reading, writing, spelling, numbers, elementary language, and good behavior; for the older ones, advanced reading and spelling, word analysis, penmanship, arithmetic, geography, grammar, American history, and manners and morals; plus sewing and darning for the girls. The graded schools of Providence show how the system evolved. In 1838, these were divided into three stages--primary schools (ages four to seven), grammar or writing schools (seven up), and high schools. The primaries taught reading and spelling, to which arithmetic and music were added by 1848, when the beginning age was raised to five. The grammar schools offered reading, spelling, writing, arithmetic, grammar, geography, bookkeeping, and epistolary composition. In 1840 they were restricted to ages seven to fourteen (the high schools took on the older students), and the epistolary course was replaced by practical ethics, American history and constitution, and composition. The high schools, originally teaching what was simply described as "the branches of a good English education," now had a list of 20 subjects. In 1840 the grammars were divided again, into intermediate (age seven and a half to ten, teaching reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, music, and geography) and grammar (ten to fourteen, with reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, grammar, composition, declamation, and American and general history). By 1845 the required studies were reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic everywhere, with geography and grammar generally added, and composition, U.S. history, and simple bookkeeping usually added for town schools. Around 1861 music and drawing became generally recognized as subjects of study. History came in largely as a by-product of the Civil War (though many cities added it to their curricula earlier); its purpose from the first was to emphasize American accomplishments, with the chief stress on the memorization of facts relating to national heroes, wars, and political struggles, and thereby to develop patriotism and an enthusiasm for the Union.

The curriculum of an elementary school leaned heavily toward reading, writing, arithmetic, English grammar (described by one writer as "the...parsing parrots, who knew everything about grammar except how to utilize its rules in common speech: 'Many is an adjective, possessive case, comparitive degree, second person, singular number, and agrees with its subject in number and person.'"), composition (which included penmanship, spelling, punctuation, and capitals), geography, and U. S. history, plus perhaps "an exercise in Latin for the handful whose parents fancied their offspring upon the pinnacle of learning;" older pupils might learn something called civics, which involved committing the constitutions of the nation and the state to memory. English-language study usually included reading, writing, spelling, and eventually the rules of grammar, rhetoric, and composition. Arithmetic was the next most important subject, followed by the various social studies, chiefly geography (a required subject under the Massachusetts school laws of 1824 and 1827) and American history (required by state law as early as 1827 in Vermont). As early as the '30's and '40's, the study of government, civics, and political economy entered some curricula. Music was introduced in the Boston system about the same time by hymn-writer Lowell Mason, who also wrote instruction manuals for music teachers, and in Providence by 1848, and was beginning at the latter time to find favor as a subject here and there in Eastern cities, but its development was largely checked for the next 30 years. Drawing, owing largely to the enthusiasm for it in Germany, was placed on the list of optional grammar-school subjects in Boston in 1848, and offered in high schools in Philadelphia 1840-4, Cincinnati in 1847, and Baltimore in 1848; by the '60's it was beginning to appear widely, consisting chiefly, at first, of the copying of such standard objects as vases and pitchers, by using geometric circles and ellipses. Organized calisthenics, exercises, and playground activities began to appear in the '50's and '60's, perhaps owing in part to the heavy immigration of Germans, who were noted both for pedagogery and for a devotion to physical improvement, expressed in their Turnvereine. Industrial-arts courses began in 1877, chiefly in cities to train boys in the building and repair of furniture and similar "do-it-yourself" arts (most crafting trades were still learned through apprenticeship). Writing exercises consisted of putting down in one's copybook the day's "copy," usually a proverb such as "Delays are dangerous." Geography chiefly involved learning names of capitals, rivers, cities, mountains, lakes, and chief products, and bounding countries; if the school had a globe, the teacher would often set it spinning till it became a colorful blur, then suddenly stop it and point to a location to be named by the students. Little attempt was made to dramatize or humanize it (or history or civics either); the children learned nothing of geography as the study of the theater of history, of the part played by climactic change, glacial action, water supply, forests, mountains, rivers, deserts, prevailing winds, rainfall, food supply in helping determine human life and habits, or of the dress, schools, churches, life and play of foreign peoples. In country schools particularly, learning by rote was the common practise: knowing what the book said, not what it meant, was the test of excellence. Sometimes the whole student body read aloud or recited from memory in concert; at one point in Caddie Woodlawn the whole room is seen singing the multiplication tables to the tune of "Yankee Doodle."

Parents and teachers told you that certain kinds of work would discipline your mind, that certain assemblages of facts would give you power, that certain readings and recitings would endow you with culture. You believed what you were told and took your education like your meals, finding some relief in the fact that what was expected of you in practise, as opposed to theory, was the three R's and a little general knowledge, but neither discipline, power, nor culture in any difficult sense. People believed that by acquiring information under discipline one could learn how to think and how to live, despite repeated proofs to the contrary. They also believed that what a child was about to receive would change its nature, and they backed up their faith with command and punishment five days a week, topped off by moralizing on Sundays. You went to school to work; your playing was done elsewhere; you went for facts, and got them, which gave you valuable experience in taking intellectual punishment without a quaver. Schools were centers of vast neighborhood interest and pride, the latter often misplaced, but justified when a particular teacher was skilled and devoted: then, despite severe limitations, real education took place, for a gifted teacher could give a gifted pupil such stimulus and attention as his great-grandchildren could seldom receive. A succession of such able teachers could make a school notable. But of education there was actually very little, because most of the teachers weren't educated. They had knowledge, but, not knowing what else to do with it, passed it on in its raw condition of fact. They knew facts, but could neither relate nor co-ordinate them. If you learned history, you knew history; whether you became thus historically minded was another matter altogether. Any studies beyond the three R's were taken for granted, since no one really knew why you studied them at all. Declensions, formulae, and new facts in general were the food on which brains grew. Miraculously, when you learned them, you became educated.

--From A Thunder at Dawn

Nevertheless, at least in pre-Civil-War days,

With class lines loosely drawn in practice and denied in theory, the boy or girl who showed energy and ambition received friendly encouragement, and if a family was lacking in ambition for its young, such young folks might quite readily receive their stimulus from individuals in the community, or from the explicitly stated values of that community. Between such figures as teacher, minister, and family doctor, plus the community itself, few capable young people failed to receive the motivation that would spur them to make the most of their potential; the Protestant doctrine of "calling," which held it a kind of sin not to perform up to the limits of one's ability, remained strong in the country towns, and the promising boy or girl was encouraged to associate a worthwhile career with serving God. Young people were led to think of "fitting themselves for the future" rather than simply preparing themselves for a job. Their awareness that "God Himself could not save them against themselves" helped them to realize the serious responsibility they had to their own future selves.

--From A Thunder at Dawn

For those who wanted more, even Carthage offered three bookstore-stationers (one of which, at the sign of the Big Book, bravely advertised "histories, biographies, poems, miscellanies, Latin, Greek, and French books, scientific works, and juveniles"), a few magazines and newspapers, roving lecturers, and homemade political oratory, besides a library whose society of borrowers not only had access to its modest store of books but also heard lectures and held debates on such formidable topics as "liability of private property for corporate debts."

--From Missouri Boyhood

An English visitor to the U. S. in the 1880's observed that, especially in what he called the West (probably the Midwest), more girls than boys went through secondary schools, perhaps because they planned to teach. But a promising youngster commonly found books or friends to open new vistas regardless of social and economic status; children of substantial middle-class families had access to good literature in their homes or in town libraries sponsored by their families, while even those in country districts of widely scattered homes managed to discover neighbors with libraries of sufficient size to lead them on. In a day when few boys escaped being told they might become President, and the road to political office was already quickest through the legal profession, it was natural for parents to encourage their young to get an education, and most took pride in having an eager scholar in the family. Especially in mining camps, which were likely to be infested with men who had plenty of breeding but no money, a child could easily educate himself:

As was true throughout the West, you never knew who was educated or a reader, so there were few camps that lacked a bookstore, and within an easy walk of their cabin (no matter what town it was in) the young Cullins could find and browse in sets of Scott, Dickens, Shakespeare, and Hawthorne, Prescott’s histories, the essays of Emerson and Macaulay. Darcy’s formal schooling was erratic at best, and she never went beyond the Third Reader in class, but outside school she could choose from a literary feast--first dime novels and earlier sensational fiction like the wildly popular but "not for family consumption" George Lippard (Gothic novels full of grotesque scenes, bloodshed, rape, and naked women, dwelling on the sins of the rich and the innocence of the poor) and Joseph Holt Ingraham’s early Pirate of the Gulf, Scarlet Feather, The Quadroone, and Burton, or The Sieges, then Don Quixote, Plutarch’s Lives, Dumas, Sand, and even the early stories of Zola. She read Aesop, Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, The Sketch-Book, Two Years Before the Mast, The Count of Monte Cristo, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Oregon Trail, The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, Moby Dick, Silas Marner, The Man Without a Country, Madame Bovary, and John Halifax, Gentleman, as well as Lalla Rookh, the English poets from Gray to Byron, the tales and poems of Poe, FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát Leaves of Grass, The Age of Fable, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, Kane’s Arctic Explorations, Longfellow, Whittier, and Pride and Prejudice. And, on a less elevated level, Ik Marvel’s Reveries of a Bachelor, Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World, Mary Jane Holmes’s Tempest and Sunshine and Lena Rivers, Ingraham’s The Prince of the House of David, Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynne (which she knew at nine), Augusta Jane Evans’s St. Elmo, Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth’s Ishmael, and Mrs. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, which she read at twelve, though her father said it was “trash.” She read Horatio Alger, Tanglewood Tales, Tales from Shakespeare, Gulliver’s Travels, The Water-Babies, and The Pickwick Papers, and loved Little Women, Little Men, and The Swiss Family Robinson. In the Cerro Gordo camps at twelve she delved deep into the books of a twenty-seven-year-old consumptive who had come to the desert in search of restored health. What treasure she found! Milton and Shakespeare, Isaiah and Job, the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, Thackeray and Scott. She drew a portrait of Lady Macbeth and read Coleridge aloud to her pets and pony. She also began reading Les Misérables in a zest for self-improvement, having heard it called the greatest novel in the world, but soon became deeply engrossed, and found that she agreed. She read Vanity Fair because her friend had thought it was the greatest when he was a boy. He had read everything--Dickens, Thackeray, Hawthorne, Balzac, Washington Irving; Homer, Don Quixote, and The Three Musketeers, all of which he loved...

--From "Darcy"

But even a farm boy could find his way into knowledge; it might be an eclectic menu, but it was available if he had the patience to mine for it:

The many hours of confinement in the schoolroom were a sore trial for a frail, restless boy like Alec, and learning by rote bored him...The plodding lessons of his various teachers struck no such spark in him as did [a single discovery made on his own], and his real education he got by himself. He was a prodigious reader, and though there was no such wealth of reading matter as boys in less rural environments might enjoy, he managed to get books, and these he read and reread till he had mastered their contents. School whetted his hunger for more learning; he wanted to learn, to know, to live, to reach out; he wanted to satisfy thirsts and hungers he couldn't tell about, and some of what he wanted so much, so deep down, seemed to be in the books. Maybe there he would find the answers to the dark questions pushing around in the pools of his thoughts and the drifts of his mind. So he soaked up McGuffey's Readers, Poor Richard's Almanac, Quinn's Jests, James Riley's Narrative, Franklin's Autobiography, Plutarch's Lives, Parson Weems's biographies of Penn, Washington, Franklin, and Francis Marion, William Wirt's Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry, and every newspaper and book of history he could get his hands on. He got hold of an old copy of William Scott's Lessons in Elocution , published away back in 1817, but still full of wonderful pieces to read and memorize; Hamlet's advice to the players, speeches by Cicero or the Earl of Chesterfield, lines from Milton, the Declaration of Independence. He got a Kentucky Preceptor, which resembled it, and there studied short essays on topics such as Liberty and Slavery, Industry, Haughtiness, Indulgence, and Credulity. He read in Parson Weems about the men in the government of England, full of passion and proud ignorance and driving their country into war with its own colonies, and of the great Chatham warning them, to no avail, "For God's sake, then, my lords, let the way be instantly opened for reconciliation. I say instantly; or it will be too late forever;" of the terrors of war, like the Battle of Trenton and the winter at Valley Forge, which made him ask himself what it meant that men should march, fight, bleed, go cold and hungry, for the sake of what they called "freedom." He read of Washington's one hundred and ten Moral Maxims of civility and good behavior, like the one that went, I hope I shall always possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an "honest man;" and another, Associate with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation, for it is better to be alone than in bad company ...

He read and reread the books brought by his grandmother from Kentucky: Addison and Steele were there, Tobias Smollett, Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim's Progress, Aesop's Fables, and that altogether crazy masterpiece Tristram Shandy; strong meat for small fry, but by the time he was fourteen, there were few of those pages into which he hadn't dipped; Homer, the Bible, and his beloved Don Quixote and The Arabian Nights; and by the last, especially, was borne away into a thousand byways, intimacies, customs, fancies, and origins of Oriental life and thought. There were no chores in The Arabian Nights; the boy there had but to rub the ring and summon a genius, who would feed the calves and pick up chips and bring in wood in a minute. Aesop too sank deeply into his mind, and made him think, as he reread the fables a second time and a third, that there were fables all around him, that everything he touched and handled, everything he saw and learned had a fable wrapped around it somewhere. Like the one about the bundle of sticks and the farmer whose sons were always quarrelling and fighting; or the one about the worst wheel of the coach making the greatest noise, and telling how, when it was asked why it did so, that "from the beginning of time, creaking had always been the privilege of the weak." The Bible was likewise full of pithy wisdom, like "Muzzle not the ox that treadeth out the corn," and "He that ruleth his own spirit is greater than he that taketh a city."...Scott, Byron, Cooper, Marryat, Dickens, and Goldsmith from the town Library Institute, which boasted between four and five hundred volumes...loved tales of high adventure, chivalry, and enchantment: The Arabian Nights' Entertainments, Ivanhoe, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Don Quixote, and the Robin Hood ballads, as well as Exquemelin's accounts of the buccaneers and Robert Bird's Nick of the Woods.

He admired the romantic expeditions of the Crusaders...He also read the "wildcat literature" such as T. B. Thorpe's Big Bear of Arkansas, Seba Smith's "Major Jack Downing" letters, and the works attributed to Davy Crockett...Poe...and books on English history and exploration...He loved best of all the poems of Thomas Hood and of Burns and later Shakespeare, whom he had first encountered in Scott's Lessons: Lear (which was his grandfather's favorite), Richard III, Henry VIII, Hamlet , and especially Macbeth; nothing equalled that. The depth and breadth of Shakespeare's humanity impressed him deeply, as did Burns, who sang the brotherhood of man.

He figured his way all through the old arithmetic they had...and mastered Grimshaw's History of the United States, which covered the country since the adaptation of the Declaration of Independence. He studied an old Columbian Class Book which widened his horizons far beyond the United States or even the Western Hemisphere, taught him much about the geography and history of the entire world, and also explained that the earth is but one of several planets revolving around the gigantic, fiery, and distant sun, and that even this sun is but one of the millions of similar suns called stars; those winking lanterns that Alec could see on any clear night in the sky above him. He pored patiently over Widow Single's big Etymological Dictionary. He read the Missouri statutes, because Judge Grimes told him that every man ought to know the statutes of his own state; it would save him trouble. (The statutes also contained the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States and the first twelve Amendments, and the Act that had admitted Missouri to the Union, and these he memorized.) He read his grandfather's stack of the Western Journal, published in St. Louis from 1848 to 1856, in which he found articles on art appreciation and modern literature, J. Loughborough's "The North American Indians," and the writings of Mann Butler, including "The Life and Times of George Rogers Clark." He read the journals of Lewis and Clark, Zebulon Pike, Wilson P. Hunt, and Major Stephen Long, and the papers of scientific comment by John Bradbury, the English botanist, and Thomas Nuttall, the famous naturalist, both of whom were with Hunt's expedition; and he learned enough French to puzzle out the unaffected and consistently enthusiastic journals of Etienne de Bourgmond, Auguste Choteau's account of the founding of St. Louis (he had been in command of the effort at only thirteen; imagine it!), and Pierre-Antoine Tebeau's narrative of Loisel's expedition to the Upper Missouri. He read Alphonso Wetmore's Gazetteer of the State of Missouri , whose practical geographical data was generously interlarded with sketches and anecdotes and concluded with a series of short stories, which between them introduced the reader to Joe Joping, Jonas Cutting, the comic Yankee frontiersman, Mr. Gall Buster, and other fictitious backwoodsmen. He read Nathaniel Beverley Tucker's George Balcombe, a swift-moving story of frontier life, and his Partisan Leader, which later generations might have called science fiction, for it was published in 1836 with a fictitious date of twenty years later, and forecast the events of the Civil War. He read John T. Hughes's story of his regiment in Doniphan's Expedition , Josiah Gregg's tale of the overland trade The Commerce of the Prairies , John Beauchamp Jones's The Western Merchant and Wild Western Scenes, David H. Coyner's The Lost Trappers (an account of a heroic journey through the Far West), Hugh Garland's Life of Thomas Jefferson and Life of John Randolph of Roanoke, the scandalous Mysteries of St. Louis by the German journalist Henry Boernstein, Senator Benton's Thirty Years' View in which he gave an account of his political career, and Father deSmet's writings, Letters and Sketches, Residence Among the Indians of the Rocky Mountains , and Western Missions and Missionaries; and, for all that many people considered the theater sinful, The Theatrical Apprenticeship and The Theatrical Journey-Work by the actor and producer Solomon Franklin Smith. He studied Kirkham's Grammar; a difficult book, but he went at it with determination, and memorized it section by section, thereby improving his speech and the written expression of his thoughts immensely. He read Constantine de Volney's The Ruins and Thomas Paine's Age of Reason and a couple of works of Voltaire, and even dipped into Balzac sufficiently as to be able to repeat his stories. He read Humboldt's Cosmos. He happened on Vestiges of Creation and was struck by the doctrine of evolution as expounded there; he read Channing and Theodore Parker, admired and agreed with them, and reached a positive faith, a religion of humanity, such as Jefferson had espoused. He even borrowed Alonzo and Melissa and some of the novels of Mrs. Caroline Lee Hentz...and the popular minor classics like Ossian and Scott and Thaddeus of Warsaw...He read The Roué, The Art of War by Nicholas Machiavel, the Bibliotheca Classica of Lempriere, and Niles's Register. The year he turned twenty-three he read Gibbon. His list of "great men" grew to include Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Burns, Lord Nelson, Adams, Jackson, Henry Clay, and above all George Washington...

His grandfather talked about his becoming a lawyer, maybe one day sitting in the state legislature or the governor's chair. Wherever white men lived together, there was a need for laws and lawyers. He even said one evening, noticing Alec's close application to his reading, "Boy, who knows but what one day you might be President."...

--From Missouri Boyhood

A family might own but few books, yet their mere existence suggested that it held education in esteem, and the ones it had were read carefully, even by candlelight, and new ones acquired as soon as they became available and there was money to buy them.

In nearly all one-room schoolhouses, the teacher first classified students into several groups according to their skills and progress, them proceeded by a rotating system of study and testing. One group was called to the front, usually to sit on a "recitation" or "clause" bench, and was drilled while the others, supposedly practising and poring over their lessons, waited their turn to perform--and, in fact, were likely to pick up a good deal before they were "officially" introduced to it. Multiplication problems might be followed by drills on the rivers of Europe, the bones of the body, or the Jackson administration. Reading, writing, grammar, and arithmetic consumed the largest portion of class time, with geography, history, and geometry added if pertinent books, maps, or globes could be obtained. Report cards were coming in by 1872, but even in the '80's homework wasn't customary, and it remained light, at least for the first six grades, right through the 1920's.

Friday was a day eagerly anticipated, and not merely because of the weekend freedom to come, for it was then that the schoolroom competitions gave students an opportunity to shine. Invariably there was a spelling bee, for which the teacher chose two captains (often the two champion spellers of the previous week), who went to opposite sides of the room and took turns picking people for their teams until everyone had been taken; if you misspelled a word you sat down, and the last left standing was the winner. Oratory was another frequent feature of the day, with declamations by pupils of all ages, but most especially the boys, from the selections offered by school readers of poets, novelists, essayists, dramatists, and orators.

Each week one quarter of the boys, taken in alphabetical order, "spoke a piece" on Friday, and in this way a boy could commit to memory and make his own ten poems a year which he himself selected, of any length he pleased; Jeremy learned many lines of Longfellow, Tennyson, and Scott, and some poems of Milton, Bryant, and Whittier, besides assorted speeches and declamations, "The One-Hoss Shay" and other humorous pieces, as well as "The Keeping of the Bridge," "Edinburgh After Flodden," "The Death of Napoleon," "Hohenlinden," and "The Burial of Sir John Moore," and some literary curiosities such as the alliterative epic called "The Siege of Belgrade," that used words all beginning with the same letter for each line..."Catiline's Defense," "Spartacus to the Gladiators," Mark Antony's oration over dead Caesar, Hamlet's soliloquy, Gray's "Elegy," Scott's "Lochinvar," Mrs. Hemans's "Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers"...and that favorite of schoolboy orators, Webster's Second Reply to Hayne...

---From A Thunder at Dawn

On the last day of the term there was often an "Examination Day" program of math drills, poetry readings, oral quizzes on a variety of subjects, declamations, songs, plays, and dialogues (almost the only way, short of their being passed into the next grade, that parents could tell, in the days before report cards, how their offspring were progressing). Parents and local dignitaries attended, and the scholars decorated the blackboard with floral designs in colored chalks. There were reading exercises, a spelling-fight, a recitation by the meager Latin class, and an exercise of the geography class upon whatever map (hand-drawn or printed) was available. The oldest girls read gushy, affected "original compositions," for which prizes were awarded, and perhaps a poem or two. Musical numbers were sometimes interspersed--boys' quartet, piano solo, girls' quartet, violin solo. A community picnic, races, and outdoor games closed the day.

As for corporal punishment (or, as the song has it, "Reading and writing and 'rith-me-tic,/Taught to the tune of a hickory stick"), it was probably most resorted to by male teachers in the earlier part of the period, simply because women hadn't the physical strength to administer it. (In Brink's Caddie Woodlawn, the teacher is able to "tame" school troublemaker Obediah Jones only because she manages to take him by surprise, laying a ruler across his posterior when he isn't expecting it.) With regard to the discipline of the young, the 19^th Century was a time of transition, and methods and beliefs varied from one household to another.

Between 1770 and 1830, a new kind of middle-class family had appeared. In the years just before the Revolution, a flood of advice books, philosophical treatises, and fiction; Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding , Rousseau's Emile, and the novels of Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel Richardson, and Laurence Sterne; attacked the patriarchal family as unduly repressive and incompatible with the spirit of the time. Readers learned that...the ideal parent sought to cultivate children's natural talents and abilities through love.

...As recently as a hundred years ago [1740], routine brutality among and against Colonial teenagers aroused little adult sympathy; by 1770 the violent death of one child had been enough to spark vehement public outrage. And, in breaking away from the unkind parent, England, thoughtful Americans had taken time out to scrutinize their own behavior as parents. Some began to wonder whether the old ideas of ruling children by the rod might not be as unfair as King George's tea tax. Perhaps a child was something other than a pint-sized and unprincipled adult. Perhaps he wasn't even born bad. Perhaps he might be better helped by kindly guidance than by a trip to the woodshed. American intellectuals like Dr. Benjamin Rush imported Rousseau's ideas of natural goodness and transmitted them through the land, and as the generations rolled by, they were embraced by people who had never heard of Rousseau. Too, children were very important in the new Republic, for it needed more citizens and infant mortality was high. Those who survived childbirth, cholera infantum, and the various killer diseases of childhood were often objects of respectful attention. "Why need a child's will be broken?" asked one authority. "He will have use for it all...Train a child to self-control, so that his will may be his strong point, but do not break his will."

...While earlier Americans had tended to think of their offspring as innately depraved, those of the nineteenth century thought of them more as innocent. Indeed, they were often described in romantic and idealized terms and contrasted favorably with adults corrupted by a sinful world. With the coming of Romanticism, children were idealized for what were considered their own special attributes: imagination, innocence, trustfulness, unselfconsciousness, an innate purity and wisdom, and a closeness to nature that adults could only struggle to approximate. They were expected to feel only love and angelic cheer, not jealousy and rage. There arose a virtual worship of the child and a conviction that childhood was superior to all stages of life that follow. And, at least in families of comfortable circumstance, children truly were trusting, loving, gentle, curious, truly seemed eager to enjoy life. It followed that the happy, innocent time of childhood should be enjoyed and its pleasures prolonged as long as possible; within reason, children should be encouraged to hold tight to childish things. Adults, too, could find spiritual refreshment by playing and passing time close to the natural goodness of youth.

...Child rearing thus became a far more complex and demanding challenge than it had previously been, and to meet it, the right kind of home and family were essential. A close-knit family was a protected enclave where both parents, but especially the mother, could care for children and see to their moral development. Such a home would naturally be full of love, easygoing companionship, and respect for their emotional and physical needs. More important, affection was the bond that held the generations together and persuaded one to learn from the other. Love was both the inspiration and the means for rearing children in the modern way...Childhood was depicted not as a mere proving ground for adulthood, but more and more as a precious time of joy that would never again be so pure or so close to divinity, a stage in the life cycle, a period of growth, development, and preparation for adulthood, and the child as a special being with distinctive needs and impulses. The first fifteen to eighteen years of life were no longer primarily a rigorous apprenticeship in the business of being an adult; little ones were being seen and heard. Theirs was considered a wondrous time; the philosopher Samuel H. Hammond lamented that Adam and Eve, "alone of all the countless millions...had no childhood"; that Adam never played marbles, or skated on a pond, or drove a tandem of boys with a string, or played "hookey" from school; that Eve never made a playhouse, or took tea with another little girl, or pieced a baby quilt and cuddled a doll. How blank must have been their declining years, "wherein no memories of early youth came welling up in their hearts, no visions of childhood floating up from the long past, no mother's voice chanting a lullaby to the ear of fancy in the still hours of the night, no father's words of kindness speaking from the grave in the churchyard where he sleeps!"

No longer was the primary task of parenthood to restrain children, to break their will through intense moral and physical pressure, and to make these innately sinful creatures obedient to external authority; now, writers stressed, it was to shape a child's character in preparation for the temptations of life, to develop his conscience and self-government. Children should be allowed freedom to act out their impulses rather than subjected to restraint; they should not be sent to school too early or their heads crammed with facts, as had been a common practise theretofore. While still young and malleable, the child must develop a capacity for self-reliance, self-assessment, and self-direction, in the hope that this would prepare him for a world in which he would have to make independent choices of a career, of friends, and of a spouse. Obedience remained a primary goal, but a growing number of experts believed that persuasion, reward, and techniques designed to promote guilt, such as withholding love, expressing disapproval, or confining children to their rooms, would be more effective in their goverance than would coercion and physical punishment; physical discipline or corporal punishment, the province of fathers, was more and more viewed as producing, at best, outward conformity, and at worst obstinacy or a sense of bitterness.

...[By the 1840's] Children were given the opportunity to develop their own talents, and encouraged to do so. Public behavior was clearly spelled out: they were to be obedient and helpful, courteous and subordinate to the wishes of their elders. An early instillation of a basic concern for self-discipline and self-control seemed the best way to ensure that they could enjoy the rewards of a progressive society. Yet they were also given their own rooms and an opportunity for privacy.

Parental opinion had the right of way. If you differed, it was by mental reservation; the calm of family relations might be broken by anger or obstinacy, but seldom by impudence or youthful dogmatism. You might doubt parental infallibility, but you felt no sacred duty to assert your unbeliefs. Parental opinion was assumed to be based upon experience and therefore to be treated like axioms in geometry until you had a chance to test it. Parents were expected to be strict because they were responsible for youthful morality; to be severe because they had earned the right to authority; to grant favors slowly because a spoiled child was charged to their account; to be kind, even when they seemed cruel, because the home had been their willing creation.

There were sadistic fathers and hysterical mothers, rigid prides and mean penny-pinchings that made some parents cruel; there were boys regularly strapped by their fathers, girls locked in their bedrooms on bread and water. Sometimes a mother's vanity required flattery, sometimes suppressed sadism was given an escape, sometimes an unhappy marriage revenged itself on its progeny, sometimes there existed the incurable egoism that insists upon honor at home if it cannot be procured elsewhere. But a father in the trans-Appalachian country of America (whatever he might be in the older seaboard states) was more likely to be, at worst, a benevolent despot in an admittedly patriarchal society; and quite commonly he was permissive, at least by the standards of his own time. His children, at the age of four or so, were looked upon as little rascals rather than angels or cherubs. In their early teens, perhaps because they had chores to do (and the farm children actually knew the basics of farming by the time they reached puberty), they struck European travellers as being remarkably self-confident, independent, and fearless. There was no time in the "new country" for the prolonged infancy that existed in European society. Most parents raised their children with the implicit understanding that they were expected to spread their wings early and leave the home roost to establish themselves and their own family units elsewhere; and wished them all the best in doing so, for their generation had created a society out of the wilderness, often justifying their toil with the phrase "for the children." Yet fatherhood and motherhood came first. To fail in it, to let the children run wild or be sent off to convenient institutions, or to spend the family income on display while the home and the children's education suffered, set all the gossips talking. When children came, young men and women gave up the right to be young and live their own lives, and assumed the responsibility of a home without physical or mental reservations. They did it well or badly, but with no more protest than a tadpole makes at turning into a frog.

-- -- From A Thunder at Dawn

At the same time,

Parents probably loved their children then as much as their descendants would, but they had some strange ways of showing that love. The strangest of all was the evident satisfaction they felt when the children were whipped at school. They had a notion that education was a desireable thing, but the principles of books, if expected to stick, must be beaten into the back with rods. Having suffered this ordeal themselves, parents honestly believed that the present generation must endure it as well: they had been beaten so constantly and so mysteriously in their own schooldays that they seemed to entertain a grateful affection for the process thereafter...[The schoolmaster] used to stand by the door on opening day with a big cane. As each pupil came through the narrow door, he'd whack them across the back or shoulders with it. When they looked up in surprise and fright he would say, "That's just to show you who's running this school."...In a short time every boy but two of the biggest ones had received his portion, some once, some several times. Every girl had also been flogged, or had a boy flogged for her, except Sarah Fisher, the fourteen-year-old belle of the school...

-- From Missouri Boyhood

Since "a trip to the woodshed" remained fairly common, and no experts had yet arisen to decry spanking, schoolroom punishments, depending chiefly on local attitudes and the teacher's own beliefs and physical ability, might include being turned over the teacher's knee and getting 25 blows, counted out loud, across the rear (or five with a brass-lined ruler, if it was your first whipping), and then standing in a corner with your back to the room while the teacher wrote a note for you to take home to your mother (you had to stay home the rest of the day); balancing on the narrow end of a block of wood in front of the whole class; standing in a corner or sitting on the dunces' bench wearing a dunce cap; being locked in the "dungeon" (a dark closet in the cellar, usually harboring a rat or two) or exiled to the woodshed; or staying as much as two hours after school, perhaps adding a number to itself hundreds and hundreds of times, writing lines over and over, cleaning the blackboard and erasers, or (if a boy) chopping a cord of kindling or picking up the yard. Flogging was standard for playing hooky, spilling ink on your book, or tampering with the teacher's desk or books, and "strapping" across the legs was sometimes severe enough to leave welts. If two boys took to fighting in the classroom (fighting in the yard was another matter entirely), each was given a rod and told to lay on the other; if they didn't hit hard enough, they got a stinging lash from the teacher. "The peg" involved fastening the offender's hair to a clip, which was pegged into the wall high enough to keep him standing on tiptoes till the teacher thought he'd learned his lesson. But there were rewards too. Boys with high conduct marks for the previous week were allowed, in ascending order of honor, to go up and down the aisle carrying water for the slate-sponges during the arithmetic lesson; to get up occasionally and put fuel in the stove or adjust the damper as the teacher directed; to open and close the windows with a long pole with a hook on the end; to move the big brass screens in front of the stove to keep off the heat when it got too warm; and to bring in the bucket of drinking water and set it in the corner under the long-handled dipper.

There was some warrant for the use of physical discipline, especially among the male students. A girl was admired if she was smart in school, but a boy was ridiculed. Having little popular incentive to do well (unless they were unusually ambitious), the boys looked to school chiefly as a place offering an opportunity for sociability and mischief. The well was the scene of many an act of devilment: someone was always jabbing a hole in the side of the bucket and leaving it to spray over everyone else; at intervals brigands threw buckets, chairs, pulleys, and even less innocuous objects into the shaft. The stove was another object of temptation: coltish boys could never refrain from giving it sly kicks to see the joints of pipe come sprawling onto the floor and break up school for an hour or two while stove and pipe were put back in place and the soot swept up. To counter this, schoolmasters became so clever in the art of holding the flue together by an intricate system of twisted wire and bent nails that even if the stove was shoved over the pipe usually remained suspended and intact.

When bottles of ink were left overnight in an unheated schoolhouse, they were likely to freeze, and before the students could practise their penmanship, they had to put the bottles on the stove to warm up. If several boys "forgot" to take the caps off their ink bottles, eventually the liquid and air inside would expand with the heat, the cap would blow off with a bang, and ink would spray all over the ceiling. Since there were no names on the bottles, it was hard to decide who the culprits were--as long as they could keep from giggling at the mishap, for that would be taken by the teacher as prima facie evidence of disruptive intent. "Smoking out the teacher" (climbing up on the roof to cover the chimney) was another prank beloved by older boys. Children tipped water onto the seats of schoolmates who were up front reciting, or slipped grasshoppers, spiders, and gophers' tails into the pencil cases of younger ones.

The rear desks in a country school were occupied mostly by boys, for only a very daring girl would care to be a part of the horseplay that went on there when the teacher's back was turned. One favorite pastime was shooting paper wads at the ceiling: you chewed a scrap of paper to a pulpy mass and propelled it upward with a thumb; if expertly done, it stuck, dried out, and became a permanent part of the décor. (Pitching spitballs, being likelier to catch the teacher's eye, was less popular a diversion than we might expect.) The older boys were the ambitious lads who wanted all the learning they could get, and the farm dwellers who could only come during winter when work was slack; to these the school was a kind of clubhouse, and an opportunity for juvenile courtship. Among the younger lads,

Distractions were endless: scufflings, pinchings, pokings of pins into one's neighbors, spitballs, pea-guns, fly-catching, the surreptitious inventory of the contents of pockets; fishhooks, twine, "marvels," Barlow knives, jew's harps, hunks of maple sugar, birds' eggs, potato guns, and perhaps a picture of "Adam and Eve without a rag." The greatest of all came in fine weather, when the drowsy summer sounds drifted in through the open window, and the sight of idle boys "whose fathers weren't able to send 'em to school" playing and chasing butterflies on the hill invited a boy to play hooky. Recess brought its temporary reprieve, the girls foregathering by themselves while the boys took to games like fox, three-corner-cat, hide-'n'-whoop, tops, marbles, and catch, as well as the swapping and eating of apples, gingerbread, and molasses candy. Sometimes there was scuffling, but serious fights were postponed till after school, when the approved ritual of knocking a chip off the shoulder was followed by wrestling, slugging, bloody noses, and torn muddy clothing...

--From Missouri Boyhood

In winter many children would carry a half-baked potato to school to help keep their hands warm, then finish cooking them on the stove and eat them at noon. At some schools they took turns bringing a lidded pail of milk each day; heated on the stove (with the cover loosened to prevent an explosion), it made hot cocoa possible. But on most days, as today, cold food was the rule: sandwiches or bread-and-butter, cold cooked meat or poultry, perhaps a little crock of sauerkraut or potato salad (with or without ham), doughnuts or fruit-filled fritters, any of a broad variety of home-canned delights, and for dessert a wedge of pie or cake, cobbler, gingerbread, fried-pies or cupcakes, pudding or sweet biscuit, cookies or tarts, a jar of stewed fruit, or any fresh fruit that might be available. Milk wouldn't keep without a thermos, but cold tea, cider, lemonade, or cool, refreshing homemade shrubs, switchels, and capilloires would, and in winter hot maple lemonade (flavored with a stick of cinnamon and a slice of lemon) or apple cider punch would restore the chilled inner child.

A half-hour midmorning or -afternoon recess afforded just enough time for a game of three-corner-cat. In marble season the boys, and an occasional tomboy, smoothed off a place in front of the door and played for keeps, unless the teacher forbade it as gambling; ring-taw was the most popular game. Tops, easily carried in a pocket, were a good schoolyard toy: you could race them, hold contests to see whose would stay erect the longest, attempt to keep two spinning at a time, or play Conqueror, an exciting game in which two whirling tops were allowed to bounce against each other, with the winner being the one that knocked the other over while remaining upright itself. Two children with diavolos (toys made of wood and twine that tested eye-hand coordination) could remain happily in competition for hours; Cat's Cradle required only a long length of stout string. A Jacob's-ladder toy was portable and absorbing. Whirligigs (spinning toys made with a few pieces of wood and some string) and acrobats (carved figures that flipped and chinned themselves on a string stretched between the upper ends of a wooden H when a child squeezed the lower ones) were simple but fun. Balls, of course, were universal, as were jackstones, jackstraws (also known as pick-up-sticks), and games like hopscotch. Another favorite was crack-the-whip, with the biggest boy at one end and the smallest (the cracker) at the end. A girl could bring a jump rope or a jointed penny doll, no more than three inches high, in the pocket of her pinafore. Lively games like tag, Prisoners' Base, pom-pom-pullaway, hide and coop, Old Mother Tipsy-Toe, King of the Castle, Miss Jenny O'Jones, Lady Queen Ann She Sits in the Sun, and fierce-fought Wolf-Over-the-River (also known as blackman) kept kids active and in trim during recesses; if there was room in the schoolyard or in a nearby field, two teams of boys could enjoy an improvised game of shinny, a kind of field hockey that required only stout branches for sticks and anything from a leather ball to a flattened tin can for a puck, or football with a cleaned animal bladder. Small children played games like London Bridge, Ring Around the Rosy, and Farmer in the Dell, and older girls guessing games with buttons, beans, and string. In winter the hardiest played fox-and-rabbit in the snow, while the girls and small boys enjoyed parlor and guessing games--Hide the Thimble, Clap In and Clap Out, Drop-the-Handkerchief, Copenhagen, Verbarium, Birds Have Feathers, Break the Pope's Neck, The Minister's Cat, My Lady's Garden, Puss-in-the-Corner, Ten Fine Birds, Fly Away Pigeon, Buzz, Cupid's Coming, Crambo, Rigmarole, Who Am I?, alphabet games, charades and riddles, various forms of blindman's buff, or Earth, Air, Fire and Water--around the hot stove. Clever teachers often used " guesseries" and memory games like Rigmarole, Buzz, Who Am I?, Alphabet Geography, Crambo, and homemade Anagrams to sharpen wits and make learning more fun.

Apart from individualized at-home instruction, subscription schools, and publicly-supported schools, there was another option, the private school, often held in a home. Some of these were founded by ministers, others were what had been called in an earlier era "dame schools":

...The Reverend [Dr.]Hudson had announced that he would accept one hundred pupils at a fee of four dollars for twelve weeks...a big, two-storey building on the corner...called Dr. Hudson's Academy after its founder, who was a minister, a learned, quiet, kindly gentleman, and, though a rigid disciplinarian, had a keen sense of humor and was a good reader of character. The boys respected him...[and he eventually progressed to an enrollment of] 120 boys and girls, [and later] seventy-six boys and fifty girls [a total of 126]...

...At last his mother put him into "Miss Clemson's Infant School," a private class taught by an intelligent young woman who was willing to abide by her ideas on how children should be educated, and to help their minds unfold as naturally and beautifully as sun and rain helps roses bloom. There, at going-on-six, he started with Lydia Frey, who was seven months younger than he, Sarah Pitney, a young Bishop who was the orphan nephew of the [Baptist] Reverend Mr. Bishop, the Oakley boy, and half a dozen others. Holly Ann Addington, eighteen months younger, soon followed them, but she attended school only in the mornings: her father and aunt, who were raising her since her mother's death soon after she was born, felt that she needed the companionship of children her own age at least to that extent, but that she really learned more rapidly at home with Aunt Josephine in the afternoons.

Miss Clemson's house, which she had inherited from an aged aunt and was obliged to support by keeping school, was a large, square, hospitable-looking place with wide steps up to an old-fashioned porch, and the two big parlors on one side of the first floor were used as schoolrooms, well equipped with desks, maps, blackboards, and books. The youngest children were taught by either Miss Clemson herself or her cousin, "dear Mary Briggs," while the older ones were generally under a succession of pompous or ineffective college students, young men to whom teaching was a way to make a little money before or during college, and the Reverend Stoddard migrated from one set to the other to impart the lore of history...

--From A Thunder at Dawn

A school such as the latter, charging perhaps a dollar a month per pupil for two or three dozen scholars each year, could make all the difference between starvation and at least maintaining a front of "genteel poverty."

Having passed through the six or eight grades available locally, an ambitious child or one of well-to-do parents could go on to higher education. In 1827 the Massachusetts Legislature passed a law requiring that a high school should be established in every town of 500 families, teaching U. S. history, bookkeeping, algebra, geometry, surveying, and, in communities of 4000 or more inhabitants, Greek, Latin, world history, rhetoric, and logic. Such a school generally offered three years of instruction and was co-educational, with a principal for the boys and one for the girls, perhaps a vice-principal and an usher, and 2-4 assistant teachers. Some of these schools were financed by tuition. Underclassmen might study reading, writing, grammar, analysis of words, arithmetic (written and mental), geography (both descriptive and physical), physiology and hygiene, U. S. history, and vocal music, with one period a week for general exercise. The "B" class (juniors) studied Latin (five recitations per week), grammar and arithmetic (four each), algebra, natural philosophy (physics), general history and political science, and writing (three each), reading and vocal music (two), and general exercise (one); the "A" class (seniors) had Latin, rhetoric and analysis (five each), geometry and algebra (three each), general history and political science, writing (three each), reading and vocal music (two each), review of arithmetic and general exercise (one each). Entrance was by examination, and graduation followed a rigorous four-day written exam by the superintendent and several board members. The year was 42 weeks long, with six periods a day, five days a week, and tuition was commonly charged by the quarter, often separately for each subject taught.

The first high school in Providence, R.I., was established by ordinance in 1838, and the building was dedicated five years later. It had two full storeys plus a half-basement, with the main stairway being a spiral affair in a half-tower at the narrow end of the building, and a second one in a center shaft. On each of the major floors were four equal-sized classrooms, each having 20 desks in four rows of five, each desk seating two students; at the front of the room was a platform for the teacher, and windows on two sides provided ventilation and light. High schools were established in the following cities in the years shown: Boston and Portland (Me.), 1821; Worcester (Mass., girls'), 1824; New York City (1825, abolished 1833); Boston HS for girls, 1826 (abol. 1828); Plymouth, Salem, and New Bedford (Mass.), 1827 (the last was abolished in 1829 and re-established in 1837); Burlington (Vt.), 1829; Lowell and Newburyport (Mass.), 1831; Rochester (N.Y.), 1834; Augusta and Brunswick (Me.) and Medford, Northampton, and Waltham (Mass.), 1835; Ipswich, Marblehead, and Scituate (Mass.), 1836; Harrisburg (Pa.), Lewiston (Me.), and Lanesborough, Leominster, and Newton (Mass.), 1837; Camnridge, Gloucester, and Taunton (Mass.) and Philadelphia, 1838; Baltimore (known as Baltimore City College), Buffalo, Charleston (S.C.), and Roxbury (Mass.), 1839; Middletown (Ct.), 1840; Cohasset and Springfield (Mass.), 1841; Binghamton (N.Y.), 1842; New Orleans, Providence (R.I.), and Brookline (Mass.), 1843; Detroit, 1844; Chelsea (Mass.), 1845; Cleveland and Columbus (Oh.), 1846; Hartford (Ct.) and Cincinnati, 1847; Charlestown and Manchester (Mass.) and New York City, 1848; Toledo (Oh.), Lancaster (Pa.), and Fall River, Fitchburg, Lawrence, and Lynn (Mass.), 1849. Of these 55, only 14 (25.45%) were outside New England; of those, eight (57.14%) were outside the Northeast; and of the eight, only three (37.5%, or 5.45% of all) were in the states south of the Mason-Dixon Line .

Given the continuing general devotion to local control of schools, curricula were varied. In one typical example, the first-year students got largely the fundamentals--reading, grammar, mental arithmetic, and penmanship; in second, they studied algebra, geometry, trigonometry, physiology, and rhetoric; and in the third, chemistry, natural philosophy (physics), Latin, American literature, astronomy, botany, and "universal" history. One Ohio institution had a slate including English grammar and composition, vocal music, physiology, botany, history, geography, chemistry, astronomy, geology, French, German, classical languages (which would mean Latin, Greek, and perhaps Hebrew), and drawing. Other such schools might offer any combination of algebra, geometry, natural philosophy, astronomy, geology, Latin (or Caesar, Virgil, and Cicero), French, German, bookkeeping, rhetoric, logic, chemistry, arithmetic, physiology, botany, Greek and Roman history, general history, U. S. and state Constitution, singing, composition, political economy, Greek, English, drawing, surveying, intellectual and moral science, syntax, etymology, orthography, Greek and Latin reader and prose, economics, ancient, Biblical, and physical geography, zoology, grammar, spelling, reading, parsing, English, U.S., and modern history, science of government, mental philosophy, moral philosophy, and study of words. Extracurricular activities could include an alumni group, literary society, athletic association, dramatic club, debating club, school newspaper, Montagu(dedicated to raising the cultural level), Hisperion (intended to develop skills in debating, parliamentary law, and student self-government), and "Band of Mercy" (promoting love and gentle treatment for animals). It seems likely that the academies such schools supplanted were similar.

By 1860 there were 321 high schools in the United States, of which 286 were located in the 19 contiguous states from Maine south through New Jersey and Pennsylvania,into Maryland, and west to Missouri (one), Iowa (three), and Minnesota(one). There were two in California and three in Texas, and the remaining 30 were located in the Southern states. Over half the total were in Massachusetts (which had 78), New York (41), and Ohio (48). By this time high-school courses were based on the completion of the common-school course of study, and the high schools had begun to take over the work in English, modern languages, history, mathematics, and the physical sciences previously taught in the academies, and to offer, tuition-free, the subjects of study and courses of nstruction for so long found only in those institutions. The Civil War brought a halt in the development of the system, which didn't get well started again until after 1870.

Outside the homogenous Yankee region, however (and even to some extent in it), it was much more common for place now occupied by high school to be taken by the "academy," which

offered oportunities to the offspring of the common man...spread rapidly between 1820 and 1840, until by 1850 one out of every eighty-eight persons was listed by the census as a pupil in one of the nation's 6000 such institutions; a total of some 263,544, for an average of about forty-four per academy. In addition to the classical course, academies offered to those unable to attend college an introduction to the modern languages and literatures, the natural sciences, logic, and mental philosophy. Their low-cost tuition and the custom of "boarding oneself" on a goodly stock of provisions from the farm meant that for the first time sons and even daughters of farmers and village tradesmen might receive an education more enriching than that offered by the district school.

--From A Thunder at Dawn

Coming into vogue in the early 1800's, these institutions remained till public high schools replaced them, mostly after the Civil War (in 1860 there were only 300 of the latter in the whole country). By 1850 there were about 1000 academies in New England, 1600 in the Middle Atlantic, and 2040 in the South, besides the Midwestern ones. Though the largest boys' schools had enrollments of 400 or slightly more, with faculties of 20 teachers (a ratio that would be considered favorable even today), 50 was the average about 1840. Most were private (either sectarian or owned by an ambitious pedagogue), supported by tuition, incorporated and governed by a board of trustees; they were seldom directly affiliated with or controlled by any church, and while they were chartered by the state, there was practically no control from that level. Many began from gifts or estates left by will for the purpose by some public-spirited citizen, or were organized by private subscription or as private stock companies. A few were organzied along denominational lines and were under ecclesiastical control. Practically all charged a tuition fee, and most had dormitories and boarding halls. A number provided for some form of manual labor whereby a portion of the expense of attending could be earned. The organization and administration of such a school was in the hands of a board of trustees, who usually held corporate powers through a charter from the state; they managed the business and financial affairs of the school and selected the teachers. This board was commonly a local private corporation, often a law unto itself in matters of control (though it reported to the state school authorities), and constituted as a self-perpetuating body. Many of these academies became semi-state institutions through the state aid extended to them. Some exist today, like the two Phillipses (Andover and Exeter); a few evolved into colleges. Some (Alden Partridge's Academy at Norwich, Conn., founded 1819; Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, 1839; The Citadel, Charleston, S.C., 1843) dressed their pupils in uniform and gave them military training; some, in size and quality, were not very different from the smaller colleges of the day. All, however, emphasized practical education for a life in America rather than the Middle Ages: they taught Latin and Greek, but they added instruction in more practical subjects, including geography, algebra, geometry, history, U. S. Constitution, forensics, composition, and trigonometry.

These academies were primarily independent institutions, not bound up with any colleges, which accepted pupils who had completed the common schools and gave them an advanced educatio nin modern languages, the sciences, mathematics, history, and the more useful subjects of the time, with a view to "rounding out" their studies and preparing them for business life and the rising professions. They thus built upon the common school course, rather than running parallel to it as the old Latin grammar schools of New England had done, and mark a clear transition between the aristocratic and somewhat exclusive college-prep Latin school of Colonial days and the more democratic high school of today. They became educational centers wherever they were established, gave good preparation for college work (by 1825 a number of colleges based their entrance examinations on the completion of an academy course), and educated many who never went on to college. They soon occupied a large niche in the educational domain which would have remained unfulfilled for a long time had they not existed. As in everything else, there were bond to be some duds: if men with rudimentary educations had nothing else to do, they formed academies. Many a successful minister felt that an academy bearing a name such as Wesleyan, Asbury, Cokesbury, Ebenezer, or Bethel should be an adjunct to his church building. Some states granted would-be academicians the right to stage lotteries to raise money--and more than a few times "founder" and lottery money simply vanished with no academy in sight.

All academies offered arithmetic, algebra, geometry, chemistry, natural philosophy, composition, English grammar and pronunciation, penmanship, reading, orthography, declamation (except in some of the female academies), geography, and general history; most added Latin, Greek, rhetoric, and astronomy. Practically half offered, as well, bookkeeping, French, American history, logic, philosophy (both moral and intellectual), surveying, and trigonometry. Less common were architecture, biography, conic sections, levelling, logarithms, statistics, dialling, civil engineering, extemporaneous speaking, geology, mineralogy, physiology, topography, technology, Greek antiquities, state history, Hebrew, Italian, law, mythology, nautical astronomy, political economy, perspective, stenography, embroidery (for girls), and principles of teaching. Book instruction in such sciences as astronomy, natural philosophy, chemistry, and zoology came in very early in the century, particularly in the academies, but the first laboratory instruction in science--chemistry, at Harvard--wasn't begun till 1846. By 1850 some lecture-table demontration had become common in the better academies and high schools, and after about 1870 lab instruction began to find a place for itself. Nevertheless, while an academy might not boast a great deal of equipment, a succession of able teachers could make it notable. In one, the junior class studied arithmetic, grammar, Anderson's Popular History of the United States, and, after mastering Caesar and Cicero, added algebra, natural philosophy, botany, and Nordhoff's Politics for Young Americans. Seniors studied astronomy, political economy, rhetoric, chemistry, trigonometry and surveying, commercial law, "moral science," Mark Hopkins's Evidences of Christianity, Butler's Analogy, Shakespeare, Virgil, more Cicero, and Milton's Paradise Lost. One 1824 academy gave courses in English, Latin, Greek, arithmetic, bookkeeping, geography, algebra, surveying, navigation, natural philosophy (a catchall term generally meaning the study of science), history, rhetoric, logic, botany, chemistry, and mineralogy; it also had a farm attached to it, so the students could daily observe the mechanics of farming, and had a course of lectures to acquaint them with the newest scientific improvements in it. Others offered curricula that included Latin, Greek, ancient history, algebra, English literature, and Bible study. Demerits were marked for fighting, missing classes, and other infractions. As late as 1870, over two-thirds of all students entering college were graduates of private academies rather than public high schools. There were male academies, female academies, military academies, and academies teaching all grades through sophomore college.

Most of the boys boarded with families in town, which cost two dollars a week, payable at the end of every month; tuition was $12.50 per month [=$100 for an 8-month year], laundry about $1.25 a week, and every boy was more or less expected to belong to one of the literary societies, which required a fee of two or three dollars to join...[They rose each morning at six and had morning prayers half an hour later, followed by breakfast at 7:15. They had classes from eight till 12:15 and from 1:30 to 5:45, with an hour and a quarter for lunch between sessions, and fifteen-minute recesses at 10:45 and 4:15. Then they had dinner, and from eight to nine they studied in their rooms. At nine they had evening prayers, and ten o'clock was bedtime.

--From A Thunder at Dawn

Boys' and girls' academies in the Midwest charged at parity, with $25/yr. being about the minimum tuition (it went up to $45 for college); some of the most prestigious were quite pricey, with the Hudson River Institute (a boys' school) costing $300/yr. for board and tuition and the Bedford Female Institute $250. More typically the cost seems to have been $50 each for board and tuition, the former including laundry, bedmaking, and fuel for heat and light; besides his clothes, the pupil supplied his own blankets, towels, sheets, and table napkins. He might attend half-hour chapel daily (except Saturday) at 7:45 A.M. (or sometimes as late as 9), but could go to Sunday service at the church of his own or his parents' choice. While the subjects were generally more difficult than those he had studied in the lower grades, he might be released at noon on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Besides his classroom studies, he might ride, fence, learn to shoot, and study cotillion dancing, and the boys might "subscribe" for a reading room, a school paper, and other extracurriculars. Each class (year) usually had a football and a baseball team, as well as its own president, motto, colors, and cheer.

A military academy was structured after the style of West Point, with a superintendent instead of a principal (future General William Tecumseh Sherman served for a time in that capacity at the Louisiana Military Academy, which was operated by the state, and resigned when, following the election of Lincoln, Southern secessionists attempted to place in his custody arms seized from Federal facilities) and a teaching staff made up of officers. (Many West Point graduates, having served a few years on active duty, resigned from the Army and took up such positions if they didn't join the burgeoning railroads of the 1850's, the Point being one of the best schools of engineering then in existence.) Boys studying there were called cadets, as at the Point, and wore uniforms, though it wasn't at all unusual for Southern ones to bring a black valet and even a groom with them, along with their personal horses and dogs. Their studies might include optics, astronomy, artillery/theory of gunnery, physics, natural science, Latin, Greek, and history, plus music and dancing on the side; football and baseball teams were formed, and hare-and-hounds played. Exemplary pupils could be promoted to corporal and later even captain of cadets, or made cadet drillmasters. Attending a military school didn't oblige a boy to enter the Army later; he might, instead, go into law, medicine, or even the clergy.

As the century progressed, "natural history" became known as biology, then was divided into biology and zoology, then expanded to include physiology, psychology, paleontology, ornithology, entomology, and anthropology. "Natural philosophy" was subdivided into astronomy, physics, chemistry, mineralogy, geology, meteorology, and physical geography; "moral philosophy" into history, economics, political science, and sociology. The commonest form of English to be taught in the secondary schools was grammar, followed by composition, rhetoric, declamation and forensics, logic, and English literature. Ancient history was generally given more time and attention than modern European, which in turn often outweighed American; most of the content of the texts was political and military in nature, giving little space to social or cultural aspects. Geography was especially popular in the first year of high school, and was largely informative and descriptive in nature, stressing the location of rivers, mountains, cities, and states. Some secondary schools taught bookkeeping, penmanship, and commercial arithmetic. Foreign languages long held a preferred status, with Latin (and to a lesser extent Greek) leading all the rest; mathematics, especially algebra and geometry, stood with them in importance and were stressed in both college-preparatory and non-prep courses, leading naturally as they did to the study of navigation, surveying, and the like. Trigonometry and mensuration were also taught in some institutions. One greatly admired high school in Providence, R.I., offered c. 1830-50 a three-year course including reading, writing, geography, world and American history, logic, philosophy, "evidences" (presumably of Christianity), arithmetic, bookkeeping, surveying, astronomy, Latin, Greek, natural philosophy, and vocal music. Some so-called High Schools, like Philadelphia's Central in 1848, had the authority to grant academic degrees--such as a B.A. at eighteen--after a course including English, French, history, chemistry, general science, and classical languages, "with special studies in anatomy, photography, and bookkeeping." In the '50's, Union School--a public high school at Lockport, N.Y.--offered such courses as higher mathematics, logic, rhetoric, and natural science; it boasted large, cheerful classrooms, a well-equipped laboratory for teaching chemistry, and some 600 students, and was known throughout the Northeast for the excellence of its standards and program. English literature, formal grammar, the sciences, civil government, economics, accounting, and business law entered high schools in the '60's.

Few Western high schools before 1900 held full nine-month sessions or went all the way through 12^th grade, so colleges had to concentrate on their "academy," or preparatory-school, departments. In 1880 Nebraska only 70 of 2701 schools (c. 2.6%) claimed to offer a full 12 years of instruction, and even these were probably restricted to the largest cities, like Omaha, where the tax base was likely to be the healthiest. Most Midwestern colleges, indeed, began as academies, and pupils attended for seven years--three in the prep school and four in the college; they also tended, eventually, to admit women on an equal footing with men (Iowa State was the first to do so), and didn't condone the snobbery of exclusive clubs and fraternities. Coeducation was accepted as a just, sensible, and economical system; it was hard to explain to a pioneer woman who could endure the toil and hardships of trail or field that she was physically incapable of enduring the strain of a masculine education. Long after women in the West were happily pursuing standard liberal-arts and professional courses on a full equality with men, Eastern pedagogues were learnedly asserting that females were unfit for the rigors of severe mental discipline. Nevertheless, although Midwesterners had little ideological opposition to equal college education, it was easier for males to earn money for their own tuition: a girl's chief option was domestic work in the college town, if she could find any. Where there were several children on a farm, the boys must have the first chance, and the girls must stay at home and help with their butter-and-egg money or by teaching school. Most male students boarded with and did odd jobs for some family in the town, or rented a small furnished room to live in (women dwelt in a dormitory), and ate either in the girls' dining hall at $3/wk. or, if they had no hall of their own and couldn't bear the formality in the girls', formed a dining club. This was usually organized by an older student who undertook to find a convenient house with an adequate cook and a not-too-incompetent waitress; he ate free by virtue of his position as steward and general manager, and the rest paid about $10/mo. (which was, of course, slightly cheaper than the dining hall).

Before 1900 only about 1% of young people aged 18 to 24 went on to "higher education." All pre-War colleges (246 had been founded by the end of 1860) were small and poor, and college life often a strruggle: as late as 1839-40 the entering class at Harvard numbered only 76, at Williams 24, and at Amherst 38; 10 years later the respective numbers were 87, 27, and 53. Yet finances need not be a bar, for as late as 1891 the University of Chicago (a private school) could be attended for only $75/yr. tuition, and when it opened its doors in 1892, the future University of Scranton (Jesuit) charged only $40; state-supported schools were of course even cheaper. Up until about 1885 many boys entered college at 16 or 17, though individuals as young as 13 (the historian John Lothrop Motley was one of these) or 14 were readily admitted if they could pass the exams. Perhaps for this reason, pre-War colleges regulated students' morals strictly, imposed compulsory chapel or church attendance, and offered a prescribed curriculum heavily loaded with Greek, Latin, and mathematics, with a smattering of history, political economy, modern languages, chemistry and physics, and of course religion, since the pulpit (unlike law or medicine) was the one profession that couldn't be attained through apprenticeship. The students released their pent-up youthful energies through religious revivals, literary and debating societies, geological and botanizing expeditions, fraternity antics, hazning, pranks, and occasional revolts against bad food, harsh discipline, and disagreeable teachers. The typical college was rural and small--big cities and big colleges were thought dangerous for young men; the average had 100-300 students overall, and 8-10 professors who taught almost all subjects indiscriminately.

In 1833, a student at Brown University took classics, algebra, and geometry as a freshman; the next year he added English grammar, surveying, navigation, nautical astronomy, and trigonometry. As a junior his studies included mathematics, natural philosophy, chemsitry, and physiology; as a senior, moral philosophy, astronomy, psychology, Greek, analogy, geology, Christianity, and American Constitution. Other male colleges offered such subjects as languages (ancient and modern, including any assortment of Spanish, German, French, Italian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and even Danish), political economy, history (American, constitutional, ancient, European, and modern), chemistry, solid geometry, natural history, logic, geology, "Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Early English" or "Shakespeare and general English," natural philosophy (physics), astronomy, physical geography, art, civil engineering, belles-lettres, archaeology, anatomy, philosophy, elementary botany, the comparitive anatomy and physiology of vertebrates, rhetoric, themes, zoology, forensics, metaphyics, physiology, mineralogy, Oriental philosophy, and English. Every aspiring clergyman studied ecclesiastical history, Latin, Hebrew, and Greek; in the early part of the century some of them even mastered Arabic.

Fencing was a popular study among the upper crust, either the French or the Hungarian style being taken. Track, football, baseball, archery, gymnastics, polo, boxing, glee clubs, orchestras, newspapers (some of them daily) and literary magazines, debating and literary clubs, amateur theatricals, and even cricket, rowing, and lacrosse beguiled the students' free time. Most college men were bound for the professions--law, medicine, divinity, journalism, engineering or surveying, academy- or college-level teaching; if a boy was going into business, he was generally thought better off to start as a clerk or a salesman, learning from the ground up, rather than to acquire theoretical knowledge in college. As a rule they came from farms and equated physical exercise with productive labor; until the '50's, when intercollegiate competition was introduced and the gymnastic movement (begun by a German instructor at Harvard in 1826) was at last widely accepted, they contented themselves with swimming in the nearest river, walks, skating, and impromptu games of football, cricket, bowling, and "bat and ball." As early as the '40's, students were organizing more or less informal boat and foot races and swimming, wrestling, and boxing matches, and were playing early versions of baseball and football. Up through 1840, the Boston theater was out of bounds to Harvard undergraduates (which wasn't to say that some of them probably didn't sneak out and indulge in it!), and students were required to spend the Sabbath eve quietly in their rooms. During the week, classes were held every other hour, 6 A.M.-4 P.M. Student riots--often bread- and plate-slingers in the dining hall, stemming from nothing more than a playful "shy"--were far from rare (the historian William Hickling Prescott eventually went blind as the result of an injury suffered in such an affray). By 1878, when Teddy Roosevelt was there, a Harvard man gave as much thought to his fencing, boxing (with "a fashionable private tutor"), dancing lessons, and cotillions as he did to his lessons. Once he was a sophomore, he could begin to take electives (4-5 a year) as well as his required, or "prescribed," courses (3-4). A college professor was paid about $600/yr.--about the same as the average clergyman.

Despite the liberal attitudes that prevailed west of the Alleghenies, the greatest percentage of 19^th-century women weren't interested in fitting themselves for any kind of career or profession; they might want to have a skill laid by to support themselves and their children if they were widowed, but most looked forward to marriage and an ordinary home life. So, having passed through the standard grades, they were taught fashionable, refined things like deportment and elocution, which were supposed to make them more interesting and improve their ability to be gracious hostesses. Some entered a Female Academy as early as eight, and there studied reading, writing, spelling, grammar, deportment, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, with instruction in painting, piano, and organ available for an extra fee. Board and lodging cost only $10/mo. Others waited till they were 11 or 12 before enrolling in a two- to five-year boarding school or a fashionable day school; these taught such subjects as botany, geography, French, Latin, German, drawing, music, English grammar, history (Greek, Roman, English, American, and "universal"), penmanship, cotillion dancing, embroidery, manners, water-color painting, decoration of china, dramatics, botany, geology, astronomy, physics, mathematics, rhetoric and composition, literature (English, American, and perhaps French, though many people believed that anything written in the French language was automatically immoral), elocution, Bible, and arithmetic. (They were expected to acquire at home such skills as cooking, sewing, housekeeping, simple remedial medicine, style in entertaining, elementary gardening, croquet, diavolo, and the riding and driving of horses.) Two hours a day were given to practise at piano and spoken drama, plays were given at intervals for the families and friends of the students, and in the evening the latest dances were practised.

The kind of schooling we most often associate with young women of this era is the finishing school, sometimes called a seminary or female academy. These institutions were boarding schools, generally two- or three-year (two sessions per year), intended for girls of what we would consider high-school age, and were generally founded by religious bodies, though girls of any denomination could attend as long as they could find the time and tuition. Subjects included (in any number of combinations) piano, singing, music, poetry reading, drawing, painting, recitation, fine embroidery, plain sewing, needlepoint, hemstitching, elocution, deportment, dancing (probably the ballroom type), classic ballet, social arts (basically how to entertain), "literature" (including only those novels thought suitable for a young lady's eyes), composition, horsemanship, geography, English, Spanish, French, German, Latin, botany, history, refined manners, and painting on china, plush, and velvet. The more advanced ones, such as those run by the Quakers (who believed that the Inner Light was present in all persons regardless of sex), offered more challenging curricula, such as composition, Latin, Greek, French, mathematics (including a separate course in algebra) , the natural sciences, philosophy, orthography, grammar, "geography with the use of maps and globes," "the elements of astronomy," natural philosophy, chemistry, rhetoric, and English and/or classic literature. At a typical school, the girls rose anywhere between 5:00 and 6:30 to a cupola bell, had morning prayers and a stroll around the campus walks or a study-period till breakfast (an hour beginning at 7:00 or 8:00), and attended classes for 5˝-6 hours, interrupted by half an hour for "recreation and lunch" at 12:30 or dinner from 2:00 to 3:00. Till 5:00 they were free for sewing, letter-writing, school politics, and the like; 5-6 P.M. was a study hour, 6-7 "tea" (supper), and bedtime, following more study, at 9-9:30, again to a bell. Part of the daily routine (as Ezra in "Working Girls" obviously knows), to develop physical grace, consisted of walking up and down a circular staircase with a book balanced on the head. The girls slept two to a room, sharing a bed, as most had been accustomed to do with sisters at home. There was a principal (female); one girl served in this office when she was only 17. Though these schools were primarily intended to turn out gracious, graceful middle-class wives, the diploma was accepted as qualification for a schoolteaching position, and many a teacher had nothing else.

Young ladies of the 19^th Century weren't considered truly educated unless they'd had some training in pencil sketching, water colors, or even oils. And because, among cultivated people, reciting poetry, painting china, doing fine embroidery, and making music--either by singing or by playing the piano--were thought to be desireable social graces for a woman, any young lady with the slightest talent in any of these was urged to cultivate it, and every self-respecting finishing school had to offer instruction in them. Needlework samplers and silhouette-cutting were also taught, along with banjo, harp, and--as late as the '50's--harpsichord. In the '40's "the ornamental branches" included needlework, waxwork, embroidery, drawing, and painting, and once a fortnight the young ladies wrote compositions, for which prizes were awarded.

Nevertheless, the intellectually curious girl did have options. Isabella Graham's School for Young Ladies in New York City was in existence before 1795. As early as 1831 Cincinnati Female College was offering gold medals for skill in Latin, Greek, French, mathematics, music, and painting. In 1840 there were only seven institutions for the higher education of women: one of them, surprisingly enough, was Georgia Female College (now Wesleyan Methodist), in Macon, Ga., chartered in 1836; others included Salem College, Salem, N.C. (established as a seminary in 1772), Emma Willard's Female Seminary in Troy, N.Y. (founded 1821), Catherine Beecher's School for Young Ladies in Hartford, Conn. (1824), and Mary Lyon's Mount Holyoke Seminary (later College), South Hadley, Mass. (1837). These tried to concentrate on subjects other than airs and graces, manners and morals, while assuaging male fears that education for women threatened the sanctity of the home by emphasizing the domestic application of their curricula: chemistry could be useful in cooking, mathematics would improve a woman's ability to keep the household accounts. (Many graduates also proved to be excellent teachers.) 20 years later the number had increased to 1861, among them the New England Female Medical College (1842), the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia (1850), Wesleyan in Cincinnati (1843), Elmira (N.Y.) Female College, Butler University in Indiana, and Mary Sharp College for Women, Winchester, Tenn. (all 1855). Benicia Seminary for Young Ladies (later Mills College), founded in California in 1852, was within a few years turning out Protestant young ladies who could read Latin or argue theology. Emma Willard's Seminary wasn't a college, but it acted like one, teaching Latin, Greek, mathematics, science, philosophy, history--all the hard subjects young men studied at college--and also training large numbers of female teachers. It quickly became known as a place where a clever girl could really get an education, and the students swarmed in from all over the country. Mount Holyoke was a real college, with courses modelled on those at Amherst, and in many cases taught by the same professors. Troy Female Seminary, from which Elizabeth Cady Stanton graduated before she was 17, offered such courses as moral and natural philosophy, history, Latin, algebra, trigonometry, logic, botany, chemistry, physiology, geology, astronomy, zoology, natural theology, rhetoric, and modern languages (Spanish, Italian, French, and German); it drew letters of praise and application from parents all over the country, and enrolled 90 girls its first year. The girls read Shakespeare's plays, then read them aloud in the assembly hall as an entertainment, each taking a part. No young woman seeking to teach could ask for a better recommendation than a certificate from Troy. Antioch College (in 1853) and the State Universities of Iowa (1856), Indiana (1868), Michigan (1870), and Illinois (1870) were among the first to go coeducational; Cornell followed their lead in 1872, Boston University the year after. Vassar was founded in 1861, Smith and Wellesley in 1875, Radcliffe in 1879, and Bryn Mawr in 1880.

The U.S. Department of Education has estimated that the average American of 1800 had only 82 days of formal schooling throughout his lifetime; of 1840, 208; 1850, 450; 1860, 434; 1870, 582; 1880, 690; 1890, 770; 1900, 934; 1910, 1080; 1920, 1226; and 1930, 1591. Assuming a school month of 20 days, this comes to a total of respectively a bit over four, ten, 22, 21, 29, 34, 38, 41, 54, 61, and 79 months. If a school year equalled nine months, this gives a grade attainment of less than one, just over one, about two and a half (twice), three-plus, almost four, just over four, four and a half, six, six and three-quarters, and eight and three-quarters. Yet for all its shortcomings, education in the 19^th century was, at its best, comprehensive. One boy, attending an eight-grade country school c. 1892-1900, "read and answered questions about Silas Marner and The Vicar of Wakefield and The Merchant of Venice, learned to spell words like pneumonia and embarrass and distinguish and tintinnabulation and give the definitions, did arithmetic problems which covered a whole blackboard, to find out how long it would take and how much it would cost to shingle a house, a shed, and a barn with a silo at the end. He tapped the maps with the teacher's long pointer to show where Omaha was, and Santa Cruz, the Amazon, the Nile, Edinburgh, Fujiyama, Hong Kong, and Petrograd; he wrote themes on 'The Stamp Act Congress,' 'The Battle of Bunker Hill,' and 'The Meeting of General Grant and General Lee.'"

The following message circulated through several Internet boards in 2005:

Remember when our grandparents, great-grandparents, and such stated that they only had an 8th grade education?  Well, those old timers were better educated than we thought.
Check this out. Could any of us have passed the 8th grade in 1895? This is the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 Salina, KS. USA. It was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina, KS and reprinted by the Salina Journal.

Grammar (Time, one hour)
1. Give nine rules for the use of Capital Letters.
2. Name the Parts of Speech and define those that have no modifications.
3. Define Verse, Stanza and Paragraph.
4. What are the Principal Parts of a verb? Give Principal Parts of do, lie, lay and run.
5. Define Case, Illustrate each Case.
6. What is Punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of Punctuation.
7 - 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.

Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft wide. How many  bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50 cts. bushel, deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 6 ft. long at $20 per metre?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance around which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.

U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)
1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?
8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607 1620 1800 1849 1865

Orthography (Time, one hour)
1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, honetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication?
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals?
4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u'.
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e'. Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: Bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, sup.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: Card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
9. Use the following correctly in sentences, cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.

Geography (Time, one hour)
1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?
3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
4. Describe the mountains of North America.
5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fermandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco.
6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.
7. Name all the republics of Europe and give capital of each.
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give inclination of the earth.

Gives the saying - "she/he only had an 8th grade education" - a whole new meaning.

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