The Common School

1770-1900

In reading the first part of our book “School” entitled ‘The Common School’ I read about the events that took place during the first 100 years of school. School, as we know it today, did not start out the way that we might have thought that it did. It took many trials and tribulations to get to where we are with it today. There were so many things that went into trying to at least get one thing right and wondering how to even go about doing that. 

In the early years of schooling, school itself wasn’t even nine months out of the year round it was actually about a month or two in the whole year. That alone just makes me think how people would ever think that kids would learn what they had to. When they did start to work out how they were going to have kids go to school, not everyone was able to go to school. The poorest kids could never go at all, kids who worked on farms not only did not have the money, but also just thought that they would grow up and become a farmer like their parents. Weather kids could, but children in middle class families struggled, as they still needed some supplies and had, in some cases, needed to pay their children through, either with a local payment or to the school itself. Even at this rate, many kids were still not attending school and because school was still new, the new teachers did not know what to teach their kids. Instead what they had they do was bring books from home and recite them. While it helped the kids understand how to read and write, a good majority of the information from the books was wrong. It was doing more harm then good to the kids.

At this same time, we had a large in flux of immigrants coming into this country. Many European and catholic when at the time America was a predominately Protestant country. Many of the people wanted their version of the bible to be taught in schools, however Protestants were not having their children learn along side the Catholic kids in school because they felt that their children would leave their religion. They said that they could then either have the schools be non-secular or just not teach Catholicism at all. They then though about making a separate school for Catholics so the kids can learn about their version of the bible. I personally think that all schools should be nonsecular due to each family having their own beliefs and values in their personal life and there really is no “one-size-fits-all” mentality of religion. 

Also at this time was the start of segregation in schools between black and white students. They had put black and white kids in separate schools because the people at the time still had a mentality that whites were superior to blacks. Obviously this mentality has since gone away and today we are all equal (except for the minds of some few who are still living in the past) but this mentally really hurt the kids in those days. The schools did less and cost more. All of the children could have gone to the same school and gotten the same education, regardless of race, religion or gender. 

Girls as well were no exception to the rules. Girls only got very few years of education so they then could go off to become a mother. However Catharine Beecher was one of the women who pioneered women to making teaching a career and from there brave women young went out into the world to make a new life for themselves.

School is still not perfect, but we have made many, many improvements with the well over 200 years that we have had schooling. We have gone through many changes and with the years, we are always trying to see what we can do better.