Old School
| September 7, 2016
Photo: Shutterstock
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It’s 2026: Your biology teacher is standing in front of the classroom. With a laser your teacher draws a quick sketch of the anatomy of the mouth on the SMART Board behind him. He pushes a button and out pop very real-looking three-dimensional models of the human mouth. The teacher’s assistant a short robot rolls around the classroom to pass out the models.
No this isn’t science fiction; it might be what your classroom looks like just a few years down the road. But our school system has already come pretty far since the first schools in Colonial America.
1630's - MID 1700's
Not everyone went to school back then. If children came from wealthy homes their parents paid for tutors to homeschool them. If a family was too poor to afford to send a child to school the child stayed home and worked on the farm instead. (Are you jealous?)
The majority of children did go to school however. Students younger than six attended Dame schools — a sort of preschool in a female teacher’s home where they were taught the ABCs.
Between ages six and fourteen children attended school in one big room with no separation for grade or age. Imagine learning with the same teacher for eight years straight! The average class was pretty big too up to 40 kids.
You think your classroom can use a little improvement? One-room schoolhouses weren’t too comfortable to say the least. There was no electricity or plumbing. During the winter months kids needed to bring wood from their homes for the wood-burning stove. And forget cozy rocking chairs around the stove; students sat on hard wooden benches with no backs.
Tough Classrooms
If you’re not sure whether you’d have enjoyed school during those times this might change your mind: The school year was much shorter 132 days as opposed to today’s 180. The school day was shorter also. It generally ended between two and four in the afternoon and the recess and lunch break was an hour long. Now that’s something to wish for.
Already dreaming of starting advocacy groups to go back to the good ol’ shorter days of school? It may have been shorter but in other ways it was a lot harder. Most teachers were strict disciplinarians and not all were so nice. If a kid so much as whispered or stepped out of line he might get suspended expelled or smacked across the knuckles (or worse!) with the teacher’s wooden pointer a stick or a paddle. Kids who didn’t know their work well enough or didn’t do their homework had to sit in the corner of the room with a large cone-shaped cap on their head labeled “dunce.” Hence the source of the term “dunce cap.”
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