Education in the United States, 1910
From Home Life in America by Katherine Graves Busbey, 1910.
Location: United States of America
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From Home Life in America by Katherine Graves Busbey, 1910.
There are, it is estimated, twenty-four million children from 5 to 18 years in the United States, and seventeen million of them are enrolled in the public schools. Each State in the Union has a public school system of its own, supported by funds derived from its own resources, and administered by officers chosen in accordance with its own laws. The value of all school property belonging to the public school system was £171,731,942 in 1909. The revenue for school purposes for the year was £71,003,233, and the expenditure was £67,339,666.
But a glimpse at the streets of any American city between half-past eight and nine in the morning reveals the popularity of public education better than statistics. On five days in the week the streets in the middle class and even the well-to-do sections of our cities are as lively with children as the poorer districts, and all are on their way to “public school.”
For public schools in America mean elementary common schools, and correspond to the Board schools of Great Britain, except that they draw perhaps half their patronage from the class of children who in England would be sent to private day and boarding schools.
Everything is free in the American public schools—textbooks, paper, and pencils as well as the instruction, but there is no sense of charity; the American parent regards free education as much a matter of course as the street lamps and policemen. The son of the President attends public school and the son of an immigrant is entered in a public school, in his section of the city before he can speak English, while between the children from all classes go.
From homes of comparative luxury you will see mere toddlers clamber down front steps and scamper off as independent as squirrels, to take their place in the kindergarten or lowest grades (forms)of the public schools. Young girls, who in European cities would be sent forth in charge of governesses or upper servants, hurry along unattended, swinging a strapful of books in boyish fashion, while boys and girls together (co-education is practically universal in the public schools)whiz by on bicycles chattering like magpies. There may be an automobile or carriage standing before the homes of a fair proportion of these children, but it is to take the father to his place of business, and, later, mother to market and the shops. Their children ignore the family conveyance as they hurry.
A confirmed bachelor once remarked to me that it inspired him more than a military parade just to stand on a street corner and watch “the twinkling by of black and brown stockings on the many sturdy legs, or the hobbling of a long line of umbrellas held over the many independent little heads of these hardy youngsters as they make their transit from comfortable homes to the public schools.”
“Yes, indeed,” I urged enthusiastically , "and think how remarkable that the President's son” (this was in Washington)“is in that school over there, probably sitting between the boy of a small salaried Government clerk and the daughter of a seamstress.”
“Of course; why not?” he replied calmly, being an American.
In New York, to be sure, where the residence streets in the better parts so often run down at the heel into squalor at the end of “a square begun in eminent respectability,” and the attendance at any school is likely to be rather a trying composite of nationality and even race, private schools are often given preference by families moderately well off. On the other hand, in Boston it is considered a confession of mental backwardness if a child is withdrawn from public education and sent to private school. Throughout the South there are, of course, separate schools for the negroes with coloured teachers, and usually there is a coloured representative on the Board of Education or school board.
In the “slum” districts of our large cities, a three cent lunch of broth, bread, and milk is served, and in New York’s “East Side,” where it was recently discovered that half the children were sent to school breakfastless, a free meal is given every youngster who presents himself before school hours.
But otherwise, there is no distinction wherever these elementary schools are found. Every effort is made to keep the holdings, equipment, method of instruction, and subjects uniform. So similar does the visiting foreigner find whatever number of these 259,355 public schools he happens on in going over the country, that it is a common error to regard us as having a national system of education, at least partly supported by the general Government. But each State is responsible for its public schools.
The salaries of teachers in the public schools of the United States, as in all other educational lines here, are disproportionately small compared to the earnings for other work. The average monthly salary of teachers is £10, the average for men in those States making a sex classification being £12, and for women £9. Naturally the percentage of men in this profession has steadily dropped until the male teachers represent twenty-one per cent, of the total number. The young women teaching even the lowest common school grades must have completed a high school course or the equivalent, and had# generally, two years in a Normal School or training school for teachers.
I have heard it said that the American passion for ice-cream and candy finds its counterpart in our school-room methods, but this will appear somewhat ironic to any one who has watched the drilling of an average class of from forty to sixty pupils in a public school, presided over by an earnest young woman who knows that the young barbarians in her charge must master the stipulated amount of reading, writing, and arithmetic and do her credit before the supervisor allotted to her school, or her monthly stipend will cease. There is little time for sugar-coating multiplication tables and spelling, and in this wholesale training of the elemental public school young America becomes splendidly grounded in its first studies.
There are eight glides, or forms, in these public schools, the average child entering at six or seven years of age, though the kindergartens admit at four. The course does not include any modern foreign language, and the classics are not begun before the first grade in the high school. An average of fifteen years of age is late to introduce the classics into instruction which is to lead to a university or college course, and it would seem as if some of the sciences—botany and physiology and mineralogy in a diluted form are taught in the common schools—might be omitted in favour of Latin and Greek. But the public school course is of necessity a compromise, since with many of the poorer pupils education stops at fourteen or fifteen, and the “every-day things” are given first choice. There is no universal law of compulsory education in the United States, but almost every State has crystallized its views on the subject in regulations requiring school attendance for both sexes between the ages of six and fourteen, although six to twelve is not unusual.
Better illustrations of the practical in our public education are found in the cooking-lessons given the girls by special teacher and the manual training provided for the boys. Drawing and water-colour-work are also taught, and of late in the large cities the stereotyped calisthenics in the physical culture classes of the public schools have resolved themselves into the steps of the folk dances of different nationalities.
An amusing incident in this connexion is given by the young woman at the head of this branch of instruction in New York. “I saw an announcement in a newspaper once,” she said, “that the Hungarians of the East Side were going to give a native feast with native dancing afterward. I thought I might get some points, so I went. And when the feast was over and the dancing was to begin, a group of children, whose teachers I myself had taught, came and did the dance as I myself had taught it. And all the patriarchs sat around and patted their hands in time to the music and nodded approval. Then it turned out that these Hungarian children were the only ones on the East Side who knew their own native folk dance, and they had learned it in anf American public school! While that very morning,” she continued, “I received a note from an ‘uptown’ matron asking me to superintend a group of folk dances to be given for sweet charity’s sake in her drawing-room by her little daughter and other comfort-born small Americans who also had learned to dance in the public schools!”
The lower grades of the public schools are a democracy and a cosmopolis, but in the high schools class distinctions are apparent, and there is less co-education. There are in every city “technical high schools” where boys are taught a trade and girls learn dressmaking, millinery, and interior decorating; “business high schools,” where boys and girls are taught stenography, typewriting, business terms, and business methods—as they exist in theory!—and the “classical high schools,” where the four years’ course includes Latin, Greek, and French or German, rhetoric and mathematics and zoology, botany or chemistry; and the standard of these schools is acknowledged to the extent of allowing their graduates to enter a majority of colleges and universities on certificate—that is, without examination.
This higher education is taken advantage of only by the children of the middle class—the great middle class which constitutes, however much foreign attention focuses on the spectacular contrast of poverty and wealth, the mass of American citizenship. The poor man's family are breadwinners after the elementary grades and the rich man, or even the moderately well-to-do, while he endorses democratic principles in early education, seldom continue the object-lesson beyond his child's tenth birthday. The boys of this class are then entered in a private day school or tutored at home until they are sent away to schools corresponding to the public schools of England, or in many cases they live at home until ready to enter college.
The Eton and Harrow, and Rugby and Winchester and Shrewsbury of America, are Phillips-Exeter in New Hampshire and Phillips-Andover in Massachusetts—they have the same founder, and are the keenest rivals among all secondary schools—Groton in Massachusetts, and St. Paul's in New Hampshire, Lawrenceville in New Jersey, and Tome Institute in Maryland.
These are known as “Preparatory Schools”—“prep” schools—which expresses at once the point of greatest divergence from their English models, for preparatory schools for the universities they are first and foremost. It is the university course to follow upon which all emphasis is laid, so that the “prep” school is regarded as a mere transition phase to be scurried through as fast as possible.
The American boy does not go to these schools until he is fifteen or sixteen years old, and as he is supposed to be ready to enter college at nineteen, his fund of information in the required studies must be a rapid crop. The masters in these school are there to accomplish this “cramming” process, and the boy regards the course as a means to the great end of becoming a Harvard man or a Yale or Princeton “undergrad.” The masters themselves consider their work in these secondary schools as a stepping-stone to positions on some college faculty.
The large preparatory schools are beset with applications greatly in excess of their vacancies, and a goodly number of American fathers now turn from the doctor’s announcement that “it is a fine boy” to enter immediately that son's name at the school in which the father made his own college preparation. But to find a third generation representative in any of the well-known “prep” schools is unusual. That certain well-defined and fixed quality of atmosphere into which a boy is thrust when he enters one of the English public schools and the distinctive mark of which is expected to be seen when he leaves the school, has not evolved in the American “prep” school. The youthfulness of America may preclude the possibility, but the desirability is plain.
The American boy will have acquired, in all probability, more text-book knowledge than the English, but his development otherwise will depend entirely upon the “set” in which he has moved, there being no general traditional standard of conduct about the school, and the cardinal regulations against smoking, drinking, and the “cutting” of recitations are too much on the order of “reform school” rule to make for character, growth and manliness.
The American boy runs the hazard of coming out a snob, a molly-coddle, or an immature schoolboy, according to what his small circle of companionship happens to have been, but he will be mentally equipped to take the comprehensive tests for entrance to his chosen university.
The English boy leaves the public school, I should say, above all, a man in character and well-drilled in the classics, with a few other studies as side issues.
An English boy once said to me, “I like the boys from the States, but I do think they’re a little soft, you know.”
“Soft” in American vernacular means an excess of manner, an over-evident, effeminate air of culture, and of this the American boy could never be judged guilty, so I questioned further.
“Oh, I only meant — well, whipping and birching does a fellow a lot of good, you know,” he replied, for he was Eton, and a nice boy.
I reflected what the righteous indignation of the American parent would be if caning and birching were introduced as disciplinary measures into our “prep” schools. A whipping administered by a master would undoubtedly result in the withdrawal of many pupils while to have a young boy thrashed by an elder one, perhaps publicly, and with the approval of the masters, is almost beyond American conception. And yet there is our “hazing,” more like torture for torture’s sake than the almost codified physical discipline of Eton and Harrow, to which the new-comer to our “prep” schools is always subjected.
Busbey, Katherine Graves. Home Life in America. The Macmillan Company, 1910.
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