Dawn Phelps
Columnist
School days, school days, dear old golden rule days,
Readin’ and ‘ritin’ and ‘rithmetic, Taught to the tune of a hick’ry stick,
You were my queen in calico, I was your bashful barefoot beau,
And you wrote on my slate, I love you Joe, when we were a couple of kids.
The song “School Days” was published in 1907, and the song writers were Gus Edwards and Will D. Cobb. That was six years before my daddy, Burnis Humphrey, was born near Santa Fe, Tennessee in 1913.
And, without a doubt, schools and education as we know them now are quite different from when my daddy was a kid. Back then, over one hundred years ago, there were many small one-room schools where one teacher taught all the grades from first grade to grade eight.
But, looking back, it is interesting to think about what going to school looked like in the early 1900s. And first, there were no big yellow buses stopping in front of the children’s doors to take them to school. Parents did not drive their kids to school, and for sure, the students did not have their own cars to drive.
Some kids walked four or five miles to a small schoolhouse where the schoolteacher had arrived by 7:00 a.m. to start a fire in a woodstove. Sometimes she taught a handful of students and sometimes up to forty students by herself!
Some of the rural children only attended school for about five months because they had to stay home to help plant and harvest crops in the spring and fall. My daddy completed the eleventh grade but dropped out to help my grandpa with crops the next year when he would have been a senior.
The children did not wear blue jeans. The girls wore dresses, and the boys dressed up in knee-length trousers and sometimes three-piece outfits with shirts, pants, and vests. Both boys and girls wore long socks and lace-up shoes.
There were no store-bought lunch boxes. Instead, students brought their lunches in lunch pails, metal buckets, or baskets. No hot-cooked meals.
Children were taught to respect authority and knew they would be in very big trouble with parents at home if they got in trouble at school. My daddy and mother passed that same rule down to my siblings and me when we were in school. And we were expected to bring home grade cards with good grades!
Punishment at school might involve paddling or lashes on the palms of hands or knuckles with a ruler, and some children had to wear a dunce hat. Disrespect was not tolerated.
During the years my daddy was in school, some kids had individual slates, small little black boards they wrote on with chalk. And by the time I was in school, the teachers wrote on blackboards.
In the early 1900s my daddy would have predominantly learned reading, writing, and arithmetic, just as the “School Days” song says.
Not only were the kids expected to follow strict rules, but the teachers, who were paid about $75 a month, were also held to high standards. I came across an old teacher’s contract from 1923, and here are a few of the rules a teacher was supposed to follow.
*To not to keep company with men, to not ride in a carriage or automobile with any man except her father or brother, and to not get married.
*To be home between the hours of 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. unless at a school function.
*To not loiter in downtown ice-cream stores.
*To not smoke cigarettes or drink beer, wine, or whiskey.
*To not wear bright colors and not dye her hair.
*To wear at least two petticoats with dresses not more than two inches above the ankle.
*To keep the schoolroom clean. To sweep the floor at least once a day, and scrub it weekly with hot water and soap. To clean the blackboard once a day.
By now, most students are back in public schools in the U.S. or homeschools have begun. But things are far different from the early 1900s, when the school year was shorter, the school buildings were smaller, and teachers were unmarried. “School days, school days”—oh, how education has changed!
