History Mystery
What
was school like for pioneer kids?
Trace
Valley School, 1910. The school was located between Fayetteville
and Elkins. Myrtle Watts was the teacher.
Robert Winn collection (S-89-23-2)
An Ozark kid from the 1800s, or even the early 1900s, would be mighty surprised by the schools of today. To begin with, the school calendar was very different from today’s. School couldn’t start until around July, because children were needed to get crops planted and cultivated. It would end at harvest time, usually October, because the chores involving harvesting and storing the summer’s crops needed all the hands a family could summon. If not done on time and done right, a poor harvest could leave a family hungry before spring.
The school bell rang at 8 a.m., let out at 4 p.m., with an hour for lunch and play. The classroom, which, early on, might have been a lean-to shed thrown up in a hurry, and later a one-room cabin built by the men of the community, held all the neighborhood kids, first grade through eighth. But kids weren’t expected to be there every day, because, as one settler put it, “when I was old enough to learn, I was big enough to work.” Another woman remembered missing school every Monday because she had to help her mother with the wash.
The earliest schools were subscription schools, where families paid the teacher in cash or room and board or, as one man remembered, “anything you might have, from possum hides to pumpkins.” Later, school districts got a little tax money and ended the year when the money ran out. Free truly public schools came much later to the Ozarks.
There were no school buses. The kids got up very early, did their morning chores like hauling firewood or water, feeding animals, whatever they were big enough to do, then walked a mile or more to school. At school, the bigger boys might be recruited to again haul firewood for the stove or water for the communal bucket and dipper, a far cry from today’s water fountains.
Teachers were not the highly educated professionals today’s children have. Often, the teacher was not much older than the oldest students and had only an eighth grade education. She or he often furnished the books, as Arkansas didn’t furnish free textbooks until 1937. The teacher also had to build the fire, sweep the floor, and keep order in the school, no easy thing when some of the boys were much bigger than the teacher. A lot of discipline depended on parents assuring kids that a whipping at school meant another when you got home.
The curriculum was often limited to the “Three R’s: Reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic,” or “ciphering,” as figuring with numbers was called then. If they were going to be farmers like their parents, they didn’t need much more. Some of the itinerant teachers had more training in other subjects like geography or history, but books and equipment were hard to come by in the backwoods. Arithmetic could be taught using acorns and hickory nuts for counting, but detailed geographical maps were a different matter, one of pretty low order importance to local folks.
Many of the folks who started in one-room schools came out of them with a love for books and learning new things. Even before mandatory attendance requirements, they saw to it that their children could get more schooling than they had. Mothers with eighth-grade educations, or less, watched proudly as their children graduated high school, then college and beyond.
Those schools must have been doing some things very well, don’t you think?