We’ve looked at the first public school in the U.S., what education was like in the Massachusetts Bay Colony circa 1635, and what the Bray School tells us about education around the time of the Revolutionary War. We also looked at the Lancaster Monitorial system from the early decades of the 19th century before shifting to the Common School Movement and how it shaped U.S. Education. We talked about the one-room schoolhouse and some of the shifts it embodied. We looked at an 8th grade exam from 1895 that didn’t begin to approach the level of content expected of modern 8th graders and we’ve looked at the abuses of the Indian Boarding School system. We went back again to look at the parallel-but-very-unequal development of Black schools in the U.S. between the Civil War and Brown v. Board and we took a look at an 8th grade exam from 1912. We also looked at the European roots of Kindergarten and how the model was brought to the U.S. Now we’re moving on to the next big shift in education.
Breaker boys, Woodward Coal Mines, Pennsylvania, circa 1900. They worked 10 hours a day, 6 days a week in hazardous conditions. Image in the public domain.
One of the great ideas of the U.S. educational system has always been that education should be for everyone. In particular, the framers of the Constitution believed that anyone with the right to vote should be educated — and educated well — so that they could fully understand and participate in the civic life of the country and protect its democracy. But historically, if students attended school at all, the vast majority of them left by the end of 8th grade because that was the endpoint stipulated by the first compulsory attendance laws. In 1900, only 10% of all students went on to high school. There were some solid reasons for this, one being that many districts, especially rural ones, didn’t have high schools so there simply wasn’t access for many students. Maybe the bigger reason was that child labor was still very prevalent at this time and children were employed widely across multiple fields: in mining, nearly all areas of manufacturing, fruit picking and other agriculture, on fishing boats and in seafood processing plants, and on the streets as messengers, couriers, newsboys, and shoe shiners. Some, like newsboys, only made money if they sold papers. Others, like child workers in factories, had guaranteed earnings but worked long hours in unsafe conditions. Children were vulnerable to a range of injuries, often severe. Breaker boys in the coal mines suffered burns, cuts, and even amputations as they picked coal from rapidly moving conveyor belts. Factories with any sort of automation at all were similarly dangerous as machinery was frequently — usually — completely exposed with no safety features. Historically (and after the Civil War, legally), children were the property of their parents and the parents had the right to take advantage of the child’s economic productivity. Virtually every working child turned his or her wages over to their parents, and their earning capacity was often critical to the survival of the family. One analysis of Philadelphia families around this time found that in non-immigrant families, children contributed 28%-33% of the household income. For immigrant (Irish and German) families they contributed as much as 46%. These are substantial percentages. Additionally, the American economy was booming and the demand for workers was high. It’s not hard to understand why 1.75 million 10-14 year-olds were working in 1900.* But attitudes toward children, childhood, and child labor were changing.
Note the sharp trend upward for secondary enrollment from 1900 on. The only dip was right around World War II.
Three things happened at roughly the same time to change this. First, there was a determined campaign** to expose dangerous working conditions in general but especially for children, and that led to a groundswell of support for curtailing the work children could do and how old they had to be to do it. Because of this, Congress passed a series of acts designed to limit child labor and improve working conditions. The first was the Keating-Owens Act of 1916 which prohibited the interstate sale of goods produced with child labor. It was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1918, but it captured the growing sentiment. Second, new and better machinery in factories allowed for more efficiency and more automated processes so fewer workers were needed — particularly, fewer small workers with tiny hands who could dart in amongst the moving parts to fix bits that broke down. Better machines meant fewer breakdowns and that meant fewer kids needed. This last one was probably the bigger driver of the tail-off in child labor, which is rather a knock on basic human decency. Because of these two factors, the number of children without economic prospects increased from 1900 on, just as the public was buying into the idea that they shouldn’t be working at all. The third factor was poorer parents beginning to desire more education so that their children could get jobs that weren’t hard physical labor or grinding factory work.***
Journalism class, Springfield High School, Missouri, 1929. Image in the public domain.
In parallel with this anti-child labor movement, several states had begun offering a publicly-funded high school education. The first state to do this was — no surprise — Massachusetts, all the way back in 1827, when it enacted a law requiring every town of 500 families or more to create a public high school. By 1860, Massachusetts had 100+ public high schools at a time when only 200 public high schools existed in the rest of the country. To say public high school education was slow to catch on is a bit of an understatement; it wasn’t even legal to use public tax dollars to fund high schools until 1874. But by 1910, 35 states had laws requiring compulsory school attendance until age 14 and several states had adopted laws similar to Massachusetts, requiring districts to create public high schools.
Girls learning auto mechanics; Central High School, Washington D.C., 1927. Image in the public domain.
And high schools were what people increasingly wanted. This is attested to by the rapid increase in high school enrollment during this period. From an enrollment of about 10% in 1900, the percentage of 14-18-year-olds enrolled in high school rose sharply: to 18% in 1910, then to just under 30% in 1920. By 1940, 73% of 14-18 year-olds were enrolled in high school. Graduation rates also rose quickly; in 1910 only about 9% of 18 year-olds actually graduated but by 1940, 51% were graduating. A high school education quite literally opened the door to better paying, non-menial work and people knew it. High schools also gave students access to things they could only dream about — cutting-edge technologies like the typewriter and the combustion engine, classes in the arts, and instruction in things like composition, languages, biology, and physics. They also had opportunities to play sports, something that had previously been reserved for those who could afford the leisure time and equipment.
This shows school enrollment for non-White children children ages 5-19, not just high school enrollment, but it’s still possible to see the steep rise in enrollment just after the Civil War and then again beginning in 1900.
This increased access spread most rapidly in the Northeast and across the Midwest and West. Two states with homogenous populations and generally higher median incomes — Iowa and Nebraska — were able to achieve very high enrollment rates sooner than other places, even outpacing more established systems like New York and New Jersey. The movement was slower to spread in the South where there was sometimes resistance to the whole idea of high school; some believed that it was a threat to traditional values.^ There was also less public funding available for high schools for a lot longer in the South than in other places and less access overall because so much more of the South was rural. It was also much slower to spread for People of Color because they were shut out of White high schools and there was even more public resistance to publicly funded high schools for Black and Hispanic students. It took a lot of determined, grassroots activism to provide high school education to these children and in spite of the many obstacles, total school enrollment among African Americans rose from essentially zero in 1850 to just under 70% in 1940 — a remarkable achievement. Hispanic high school attendance and graduation rates would lag even further behind because they, too, were barred from attending most high schools and were often engaged in low-paying agricultural work that suppressed attendance. Not until after 1940 did enrollment rates for Hispanic students begin to trend upward.^^
Today, 90% of all students 14-18 years of age are enrolled in high school. It is one of the greatest success stories in the U.S. — that we provide high level education for everyone, regardless of social class, income, gender, religious affiliation, or ethnicity. It’s one that European countries wouldn’t begin to emulate for at least 50 years and even still don’t offer to literally everyone.^^^
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*This is out of a total child population of 8.08 million; according the the Census Bureau, slightly more than 1 in 5 of all children between the ages of 10 and 14 was employed full time. Sixty-nine percent (69%) of this workforce was non-agricultural, i.e. employed in factories or other work. You might see slightly different rates for this, but I used the government’s data and mathed the math and this is what I came up with.
**Specifically, anti-child labor advocates hired a photographer named Lewis Hynes and he produced a series of pictures of working conditions that frequently featured children. He captured the dangerous conditions and the inevitable injuries — sometimes very severe, like amputations and disfigurements — the children suffered. He also captured their extreme youth, which, juxtaposed with the dangerous conditions, was even more shocking to the American public and did a lot to spark calls for reform.
***This is important because it shows that impoverished parents weren’t callous towards their children’s safety; children worked as a matter of survival for the family. Parents recognized the difficult and dangerous conditions and wanted better for their children. When opportunities for that arose, they took them.
^This was a period of rapid social change and like all such periods, experienced backlash from rural communities that felt their way of life was threatened. In particular, there was a strong rural-urban divide around not just the institution of high school but what disruptive ideas might be taught there. This reached a kind of fever-pitch with the Scopes Monkey Trial in the 1920s. Sadly, this all feels somewhat familiar.
^^It’s hard to get specific rates for high school enrollment for Black students during this period; it’s even more difficult to get rates for Hispanic students. Time and again, I ran across the phrase “it is estimated” rather than hard data. Record keeping in education around People of Color was absolutely not a priority for a very long time.
^^^In Europe, around age 14 students are sent either to a school that prepares them for university for 4-5 years or to vocational training for 2 years, after which they transition into the work world, often as apprentices but sometimes as full-time employees. Which way they go is highly dependent on their performance in school up to this point. In some countries (Finland), those who do vocational training have the option as adults to enroll in higher education and pursue a degree at the state’s expense. To some extent this helps control for students who aren’t as developed when they are sorted into one path or the other, but not all countries offer this. For those students, the path chosen for you at 14 becomes your permanent destiny.