Going to School in 1876

By: John J. Loeper

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Synopsis: Ten-year-old Jim Porter lives in Broxbury, Massachusetts. He does chores before breakfast and before going to school. School begins at eight o'clock. And by law Jim must attend for twelve weeks a year. Patrick Doherty is also ten years old. He works ten hours a day, six days a week in a coal mine. His only school is one run by the church, which he attends on Sunday. The Millville Academy is in the home of Mathias Wilson, the schoolmaster. Parents pay Mr. Wilson one hundred and eighty dollars a year for each child. He claims to teach all branches of science and classical learning. School is held six days a week and there are vacations in December and August. Miss Robin's school in Nebraska is a sod hut. Six pupils go to the school. In spring wildflowers bloom out of the sod bricks. The time is 1876. The United States is one hundred years old and most states have laws that say all children must go to school. But the students learn reading, writing and arithmetic and not much more. For some, school is a matter of a few days a year. For others there is no real school at all. Yet education is becoming more important, and our schools today grew out of the school systems that were beginning then. This book is designed as a companion to the author's Going to School in 1776 and shows how much schools had changed in the country's first one hundred years.