When I Was a Boy: Schools & Teachers

When I was a boy the school teacher had other duties than teaching, She usually walked or rode horseback from her boarding place to the one-room building in which she did her work. According to the terms of her contract she arrived early enough to have a good fire in the stove when pupils began to arrive. She also kept the water bucket serviced, the floor swept the woodbox filled, and the ashes carried out.

Most of the schools had at least 50 pupils, which was quite in contrast with the 5 to 12 rural teachers iiow have. The small enrollments in these later years have been due to two causes. First, the steady drift of families from the farm. Second, steady decrease in the population of rural counties. In the Washington district six miles north of Paris, for instance, there were more children of school age, 110 years ago, than at present. There are just as many farms and homes now as in 1840, but most of the homes either are childless or have only one or two for the near-by school. 

The pay of rural teachers when I was a boy back in the middle eighties was only $20 to $35 a month. The teacher could not go from home every morning, as now is possible with cars and solid roads. She usually paid $8 to $10 a month for room, board and laundry. Money was so scarce among farmers that there was considerable competition for the position of host to the teacher, even at that low charge.

Many men, most of them with long whiskers, taught school during that era. Some of them were university graduates. Most of them were more or less addicted to drink. One of them, the late Cum McBride, grandfather of America’s most famous radio woman, Mary Margaret McBride, taught one of our rural schools. On one occasion he was called on the carpet by the district board and soundly lectured for the liquor habit. When the scolding was over, he calmly remarked:

“Well, gentlemen, you can’t expect all the cardinal virtues for $30 a month.”

The late Gus Bower of Paris figured in an exciting episode in his home district out in the country. The bewhiskered teacher kept a shotgun in one corner of the school room and would sally forth for a shot or two when game would appear in the nearby woods. On his return, he would creep to a place where chinking had been removed from between two of the logs and scan the interior for evidence, if any, of pupils who were misbehaving. On one occasion, just as his countenance was being pressed against the opening, a boy on the inside hurled into it a shovel full of hot ashes from the near-by fireplace. The outraged teacher, with singed whiskers and agitated voice, dashed into the schoolroom, demanding to know who did it. When nobody confessed, he undertook the job of whipping every boy in the room. A fight ensued when Gus Bower was reached, in the course of which the latter’s arm was broken. 

School authorities in those days were thoroughly sold on the idea that to spare the rod was to spoil the child. A teacher would no more have thought of equipping her school room without an ample supply of switches than without maps and textbooks.

An established custom in our rural schools until comparatively recent years was the demand by pupils for a treat at Christmas time, the penalty for refusal being a ducking in the nearest pond. Teachers usually prepared for the day by buying a bucket of cheap mixed candy. Many of them would hide it in their buggies or some other inconspicuous place, then pretend that no treat was to be given, only to surrender when shouting students had hustled them almost to the pond’s edge. Much merriment followed as they all ran back to the schoolhouse and retrieved the hidden candy. Once in a long time, however, a belligerent male teacher would refuse to give in, whereupon, after a terrific struggle, he would be heaved into the water.

No college training was needed by the man or woman who aspired to be an educator when I was a boy. Practically all who taught rural schools had gone no farther than the nearest high school.

Whether local high schools and the one-room rural schools do a better job is a matter of considerable debate between old-timers like myself and those of the present generation. Here at Paris since I graduated in 1887 there have been added to the high school a Home Economics Department, a Commercial Department, a Music Department, a Vocational Agriculture Department, athletic coach and other things. These gains have been offset by the removal of courses like psychology, astronomy, geology, trigonometry, political economy and ancient history from the high school curriculum, all being studies which opened new and broader worlds of thought to the student.