Educational Sprawl
Horace Mann never seemed to have been indentured, but he did have to earn outside wages and perform labor services at home. After his father died, his mother struggled to make ends meet. If, as he claimed, he only went to school for 8-10 weeks a year, it is likely that his parents either could not afford to spend more on his tuition or needed his labor for the rest of the year. Other factors may also have played a role. Children in rural areas had more difficulty accessing their schoolhouses during bad weather, which kept them home more than students in cities. Additionally, farmers, more than workers in other occupations, viewed what they called “ornamental” learning suspiciously and had greater reluctance to increase the time devoted to their children’s education. Census data revealed these trends. I found in a one-of-a-kind school census from 1798 for New York state that children living in more newly-settled, low-density, high-fertility agricultural areas attended school for a significantly fewer number of days than did children living in more urban and less agricultural counties. All in all, the average attendance in those counties ranged from 9-13 weeks, not too different from Mann’s recollection and very near the one quarter of a year found in many of the poor relief records.
The most distinctive feature of the primary schooling offered in this period was its short duration but long extent. Because of the need for child labor, few boys or girls enrolled for a full academic year or the equivalent of three quarters, and even fewer attended even 90% of the time. Because the majority of North American households engaged in agriculture, boys could be utilized for fieldwork and animal husbandry most months. However, having only a quarter year of schooling meant that children had to constantly re-learn material the following year before they could be presented with new lessons. I found no pedagogical justification put forward for this educational sprawl. Youth often kept returning to a school or moving to a city where evening schools existed, even in their late teens, for instruction in handwriting and basic arithmetic that they must have felt would improve their chances in life.
Demographic circumstances played a big role in determining the amount of primary schooling early American children received versus how much labor they performed, and that reminds us of the relationship between years of schooling and the age structure of a society. But it also should be noted that the burden of hard agricultural labor in place of education did not fall equally on all segments of the population. Neither the throwing off of a colonial power and more representative institutions, nor Protestantism, nor local autonomy in school decisions produced an egalitarian system.