Your great- (or great-great) grandparents really did have to walk five miles in the snow to get to school! Here’s how American childhood education has evolved since the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Today’s child-labor laws would be unthinkable to early American families. With the exception of professional or fairly wealthy households, parents often couldn’t make ends meet without children working the family farms, pitching in at family businesses, or getting jobs in mills, mines, or factories outside the home. Some of those jobs are part of the reason why the school year doesn’t start in January.
Louise Basse and her horse, Jane, navigated seven fields and gates to get to school in Goldendale, Washington, in the early 1900s. Check out these facts that will completely warp your perception of time.
The turn of the century was still long before the dawn of the Civil Rights movement, and school still had a long way to go in terms of offering equal opportunities for all students. According to encyclopedia.com, in 1910, the vast majority of African American students still lived in the South, where schools were far poorer than in the North.
Average school years in the South were only 121 days, and there were no attendance laws. Black teachers’ salaries were dismally low, and public secondary schools for African American students were few and far between. Don’t miss these “facts” about the civil rights movement that actually aren’t true.
