Education in Rural America

Sources

Apprenticeships. For most rural children formal education was a prize that had to be postponed or forgone altogether due to the demands of farm life. On farms, where more than 85 percent of all Americans lived as late

as 1850, education started early but not in the classroom. Farm children received an apprenticeship education, which involved imitating adults in the skills needed to run a family farm. Youngsters learned by watching and doing. Boys tended the animals, cleared the land, repaired machinery, and helped their fathers with the harvests. Meanwhile girls worked alongside their mothers as they learned to cook, clean, sew, and garden. This education was not offered for the benefit of the children but because necessity required all members of the family to contribute their labor to putting food on the table and clothes on their backs. As a side effect, however, parents passed on the abilities necessary to sustain life in a rural environment from one generation to the next.

DISTRICT SCHOOLS

Rural America’s district schools provided public school reformers with one of their most obvious targets. One-room log or clapboard cabins with small windows, uncomfortable benches, and little heat in the winter held pupils aged anywhere from three to twenty. The conditions were so poor at these rural schools that Horace Mann was able to point out that New England farmers housed their hogs in better buildings than those to which they sent their children to be taught. Reformers wanted to improve not only the ; schoolhouse itself but also what went on inside. The district schools taught farmers’ children rudimentary reading and counting skills but little else. District schools stayed open only a few months of the year. Moreover, schoolmasters were too often ill trained, ill tempered, and ill paid. As reformers explained, they put more stress on “lickin” (with a hickory stick) than on “larnin.” Those who attended the district schools seldom forgot the primitive conditions or the severe discipline. One rural Massachusetts student recalled years later: “the wood-pile in the yard, the open fire-place, the backless benches,” and the beatings until “the youngster vomited or wet his breeches.” Reformers insisted that “modern” schools should prepare children for the emerging competitive industrial economy and that the district schools must change or go.

Source: Robert L. Church, “The District School,” in Education in the United States: An Interpretive History (New York: Free Press, 1976), pp. 3–22.

Formal Education. Many farm children received all their education from watching and imitating their elders on the farm, at church, or in the village, but formal education began to make increasing inroads. In New England, for example, country schools became the rule rather than the exception by 1840 as parents began to realize that the changing nature of the economy demanded that their children acquire new skills and knowledge. In the rapidly growing Western states simple one-room schools appeared and attendance became common by 1850. In the most rural region of the country, the South, schools developed far more slowly. Schooling remained the expectation for the children of wealthy plantation owners, but poorer Southerners rarely experienced any sort of formal education. And African American children, whether free or enslaved, had even fewer opportunities for structured learning.

Importance. Children in rural America learned the chief business of farm life by their early teens, with only a minority receiving some elementary schooling before they assumed family and farm responsibilities. Their parents often resisted demands for mandatory education because they depended upon their children’s labor and viewed reform efforts that sought mandatory attendance as a threat not only to their parental authority but also to their livelihoods. While many farm parents were resisting the spread of formal education, those in the cities saw education as a ticket to economic advancement, not a drain on household labor. Various working-class organizations in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston actively lobbied for changes in educational policies in order to give their children a chance to move up the economic ladder. It was in the thriving cities of a young industrial America where the growing demand for universal education in the form of taxpayer-supported public schools arose. Because rural parents were initially less than eager to lose their child’s labor to the classroom, urban school reformers had a difficult task in trying to persuade farmers who seemed satisfied with the informality of the dis-trict school systems. In the end, however, urban school reformers would prevail, and in time many rural Americans as well would acknowledge the importance of formal education for their children.

Sources

R. Freeman Butts and Lawrence A. Cremin, A History of Education in American Culture (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1953);

Ellwood P. Cubberley, Public Education in the United States: A Study and Interpretation of American Educational History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934).