What was taught in school in the 1800s

Home Decade timeline s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s Before Time Teaching activities Themes Family and community Lifestyle Technologies Behind the scenes The series The book Awards Clips bank Stills gallery. Home Decade timeline s Australia in the s.

Decade summary History and politics Society and culture Science and technology. Cities and population Education Indigenous events Sport. Education Many children did not attend school in the s and those who did often only attended for a few years. May New South Wales followed the lead of Victoria and South Australia to become the third colony to introduce the principle of manhood suffrage for parliamentary elections.

June A huge gold nugget named the Welcome Nugget weighing Schoolchildren would write in class on miniature blackboards, called slates. To do math problems or write out answers, students used slates during class. These were like mini handheld blackboards.

Kids would write on them with chalk and then wipe off the slates for the next lesson. Quills and ink were used instead of pens. For big exams or to practice handwriting, paper and pens would be used, but the pens back then were very different.

They were often made out of quills from birds and were dipped in pots of ink in order to write. That could lead to things getting messy! Ink spills and stains can really mess up a test! Even using pencils was tricky — the pencils had to be sharpened with knives! In the small one-room schoolhouses of the 18th century, students worked with teachers individually or in small groups, skipped school for long periods of time to tend crops and take care of other family duties, and often learned little.

That laxity was unacceptable for a British teacher named Joseph Lancaster, who invented a system to counter it. By the early 19th century, his system had migrated to the United States—and convinced many cities that they could afford a school. Even before public school was required in Pennsylvania, cities like Harrisburg set up their own free schools using the system. Maryland briefly had monitorial schools statewide in the s, and other states participated, too.

Between and the s, Lancaster and his monitors dominated classrooms in the U. The system was even used by missionaries to instruct Native American children through the s. Instead of being separated into different classrooms by grade or subject, students of all ages sat in rows in a single room. They were separated into classes not by age, but by their mastery of certain subjects. Monitors were responsible for almost every aspect of classroom management—catching up kids who had missed class, examining students and promoting them to different classes, taking care of classroom materials, even monitoring the other monitors.

For example, in the latter half of the s, local communities designed schools to provide basic academic skills and moral education for children. Teacher compensation consisted primarily of room and board provided by the local community. The single-salary schedule did not, however, pay every teacher the same amount. Some trades only made two, three, four, or six dollars a week.

They were cramped, like multiple families to a single room apartment cramped, had no indoor plumbing or heat, and were poorly lit if lit at all. Plus, there was often no ventilation, which meant that when one person got sick, everybody got sick.

Horace Mann was an education reformer who helped Massachusetts improve its public schools. How did public education improve in the mids? Public school systems and teacher colleges were established; African Americans were admitted to some schools and colleges. The minority of high school attendees graduated with diplomas and only 2. How and why did public schools expand during the late s? As industries grew after the Civil War parents that their children needed more skills to advance in life.

So in order to expand their education they pressure their local governments to raise funding, lengthen the school year, and limit child labor laws. In , only 11 percent of all children between ages fourteen and seventeen were enrolled in high school, and even fewer graduated.

Those figures had improved only slightly by Compulsory school attendance laws were first passed in Massachusetts in and invariably spread to other sections of the country. By , thirty-two states had passed compulsory education laws and by all the states had some form of this law in place. They established schools to teach not just the essentials-reading, writing and math- but also to reinforce their core values.