School Life in the Nineteenth Century

As teenagers, we complain about school a lot. However, has it ever occurred to you how easy we have it compared to the early 19th century?

Well, here is where I explain. When a teacher calls on you in class, sometimes you panic. Consider, as stated from mentalfloss.com, having to memorize your lesson that was taught to you, and having to be pressured in the front of the one room schoolhouse and recite everything you had to memorize. Scary, right? Moreover, the monitorial system, which you can find more information at history.com, was when some students were chosen to be “monitors.” This means that their teacher would teach them the lesson that had to be taught that day and the monitors, who were only students, had to return to their classroom and teach the rest of the students.

Okay, if this does not sound awful to you, then here is something that might make you change your mind. Being a one room schoolhouse, where the boys and girls are separated, things still needed to be shared with one another. This includes the water. As expressed from mentalfloss.com, “the older boys would fill a bucket with water, and every person that drank from that would drink from the same tin cup”. What do you think about this now?

However, the overall student attendance was different, which many of you may wish we still had. Brought to you by mentalfloss.com, usually school started around nine in the morning and depending on the area, with crop harvesting, the school day ended at two or four in the afternoon. Another addition was that every student received one hour off, called “nooning” and that would be their lunchtime and recess. At Homer High School, we spend around 6 hours, five days a week learning new material for about one-hundred-and-eighty days. At the one room schoolhouse, according to the U.S. Department of Education, in the year 1869-70, students only had to go to school for one-hundred-and-thirty-two days. That is a forty-eight day difference. I don’t know about you, but I sure do miss recess.

The last factor I want to talk about are the troublemakers. Yes, you know who you are. At Homer High School, you may think it is terrible to have to take to a teacher or something like that, but listen to this. Imagine yourself doing some little thing wrong, even if it is just the slightest thing. Let me tell you, there were many ways teachers punished their students. Many examples from blogs.ancestory.com and history.com, includes having a ruler or a pointer being slashed at student knuckles or palms, holding a heavy book for a long period of time, or having to write “I will not…” do the bad activity they did one-hundred times. Yes this is a lot, but that is not all. Students were publicly shamed by being sat in the front of the room, having to wear a paper cone-shaped hat that has the letter “D” on it, for “dunce.” Would you like to be publicly shamed like this? I would not think so.

I hope that you change your view on school, if it was a bad one, and realize that we have it much better than we think.