What was the school like 100 years ago

A hundred years ago, children really overcame 5 km in the snow to get to school. In spring and autumn, the children of peasants and farmers stopped going to school altogether. And only a small percentage made it to high school. As it was, you will see in our collection of archival photographs of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

In big cities, schools were sometimes separate: for boys and girls. In the United States, there was also a policy of racial segregation, so educational institutions for blacks and whites were separate.

There were so few students in rural schools that both boys and girls studied there together, and children of all classes studied in one room with one teacher at once. Only the tasks were different.

For inappropriate behavior, students of the 1800s and 1900s could be suspended from classes or expelled from school altogether.

At the same time, physical measures of influence were also used in the classrooms: a negligent student could be slapped, hit with a ruler on the palms or knuckles, spanked and even beaten with a whip.

The desks had a lifting lid, which, with an awkward movement, could easily pinch your fingers.

They wrote with chalk on small slates (they were called slates).

Textbooks were an exception.

Of course, there were no lunches at schools. Who could afford it, brought food from home - in baskets, boxes, bags.

In black schools, the school year lasted about 121 days, and no one kept attendance records. Needless to mention, the salaries of black school teachers were much lower than those of their colleagues.

And after school, they helped their parents around the house, or even worked on a par with them — in the field, in the mine, in the factory.