Modern day public schools now feature air conditioning for the summer, warm heat in the winter, computers in many cases and all sorts of comforts. Many are spacious and have good lighting. It was not the case in Victorian times. The Victorian cats will mew about what they think school days might have been like in the past.

Many children learned to read and write in one-room schoolhouses in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Their primary textbook was the McGuffy Reader.

Content of McGuffy Readers (published from 1836 to 1922; 122 million copies sold)

Contained primer, speller, stories and poems Lord's prayer, the story of Joseph, the child' prayer

Impart moral lessons

For girls stories about untidiness, gluttony, and charity

For boys stories about the value of learning, mercy, pranks, charity, industriousness, honesty, courage, envy, alcoholism, insolence, and thrift

Governesses
Sent in by Servo and Jude

Until they were old enough to go away to a boarding school or college, or have a (male) tutor, upper- and middle-class children were taught in their homes by governesses. While many governesses relied heavily on Mangnall's Questions. a rote question and answer book, there were those who were quite well-educated. In Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Miss Pinkerton claims her girls to be "qualified to instruct in Greek; Latin; and the rudiments of Hebrew; mathematics and history; in Spanish, French, Italian, and geography; in music, vocal and instrumental; in dancing without the aid of a master; and in the elements of natural sciences."

Although a governess had to have the education and manners of a "lady," she was treated as a servant. However, the other servants did not accept her either because she shared a level of intimacy with the master's children. The life of a governess was a life of isolation. Even so, it was almost the only option for an unmarried middle-class woman who needed to earn her own living.

In 1843 the Governesses Benevolent Institution was founded for the placement and protection of governesses. In 1848 the Institution opened Queens College in London for girls over the age of 12. Queens' curriculum was its major achievement. Girls could choose from lectures or classes in modern languages, mechanics, geography, geology, English grammar, English literature, Latin, botany, chemistry, philosophy, and political economy.

With Bedford College, founded in 1849, Queens showed new possibilities for girls. It helped initiate an educational campaign as a gateway to other rights and opportunities. By the end of the decade, classes were being arranged for woman at University College in London.

Click here: Bankruptcy in Victorian England -- Threat or Myth? More on Bankruptcy...were Dickens' and Thackarey right?

Not all the Victorian era was glamorous. Here is somefing about children at that time, and of course, any reader of Dickens will be familiar wf these conditions.

Child "hurriers" working in mines. From official report of the parliamentary commision.

That the shameful practice of child labor should have played an important role in the Industrial Revolution from its outset is not to be wondered at. The displaced working classes, from the seventeenth century on, took it for granted that a family would not be able to support itself if the children were not employed. In Defoe's day he thought it admirable that in the vicinity of Halifax scarcely anybody above the age of 4 was idle. The children of the poor were forced by economic conditions to work, as Dickens, with his family in debtor's prison, worked at age 12 in the Blacking Factory. In 1840 perhaps only twenty percent of the children of London had any schooling, a number which had risen by 1860, when perhaps half of the children between 5 and 15 were in some sort of school, if only a day school (of the sort in which Dickens's Pip finds himself in Great Expectations) or a Sunday school; the others were working. Many of the more fortunate found employment as apprentices to respectable trades (in the building trade workers put in 64 hours a week in summer and 52 in winter) or as general servants -- there were over 120,000 domestic servants in London alone at mid-century, who worked 80 hour weeks for one halfpence per hour -- but many more were not so lucky. Most prostitutes (and there were thousands in London alone) were between 15 and 22 years of age.

Many children worked 16 hour days under atrocious conditions, as their elders did. Ineffective parliamentary acts to regulate the work of workhouse children in factories and cotton mills to 12 hours per day had been passed as early as 1802 and 1819. After radical agitation, notably in 1831, when "Short Time Committees" organized largely by Evangelicals began to demand a ten hour day, a royal commission established by the Whig government recommended in 1833 that children aged 11-18 be permitted to work a maximum of twelve hours per day; children 9-11 were allowed to work 8 hour days; and children under 9 were no longer permitted to work at all (children as young as 3 had been put to work previously). This act applied only to the textile industry, where children were put to work at the age of 5, and not to a host of other industries and occupations. Iron and coal mines (where children, again, both boys and girls, began work at age 5, and generally died before they were 25), gas works, shipyards, construction, match factories, nail factories, and the business of chimney sweeping, for example (which Blake would use as an emblem of the destruction of the innocent), where the exploitation of child labor was more extensive, was to be enforced in all of England by a total of four inspectors. After further radical agitation, another act in 1847 limited both adults and children to ten hours of work daily.

Pronounced As: man , 1796-1859, American educator, b. Franklin, Mass. He received a sparse preliminary schooling, but succeeded in entering Brown in the sophomore class and graduated with honors in 1819. He studied law, was admitted (1823) to the Massachusetts bar, and practiced in Dedham, Mass., and in Boston. He entered the state legislature in 1827, became speaker of the senate (1835), and was made secretary of the newly created (1837) state board of education at a time when the public school system was in very bad condition. Within his 12-year period of service, public interest was aroused, a movement for better teaching and better-paid teachers was instigated, school problems and statistics were brought to light and discussed, training schools for teachers were established, and schoolhouses and equipment were immeasurably improved. In 1843, Mann studied educational conditions abroad, and in 1848 he was elected to Congress as an antislavery Whig. He ran unsuccessfully for governor of Massachusetts in 1852. In 1853 he became the first president of Antioch College, where he also taught philosophy and theology. He died there, having achieved considerable success in demonstrating the practicality of coeducation and in raising the academic standards of the college. His second wife was Mary T. Peabody, sister of Elizabeth Peabody.

Morning
9.00 - 9.10 Assembly and prayers
9.10 - 9.40 Scripture reading or recitation
9.40 - 9.45 Register (roll call)
9.45 - 10.45 Writing and dictation
10.45 - 11.00 Recreation
11.00 - 11.45 Arithmetic
11.45 - 12.00 Dismissal

Afternoon
1.30 - 1.45 Assembly and registration
1.45 - 2.00 Repetition
2.00 - 2.30 Geography
2.30 - 3.00 Object lesson
3.00 - 3.15 Recreation
3.15 - 3.45 Composition
3.45 - 4.00 Home lessons, prayers and dismissal

The above would have been a fairly typical day for the ordinary pupil of a Victorian school.

TEACHERS
Our vision of Victorian teachers, alas, is often based upon Dickens’ Dotheboys Hall, or Jane Eyre’s experiences. Payment by results did produce excesses and both teachers and less able pupils were placed under great stress. But many teachers and inspectors tried to gauge work to suit the needs of children; to reward good work and attendance; to meet pupils’ social and health needs; and to arrange enjoyable activities and outings. "Strict discipline and a high moral tone did not always mean severity and unkindness."

ABSENCE
It was not always easily accepted that all children must attend regularly. Reasons for absence included illness, no boots, beating for the squire, harvest time, gathering blackberries and acorns etc., taking father his dinner, half-time employment, and so on.

PLAY
Play included games of hoops, may poles, skipping, football, cricket, marbles, five stones, "giant strides", horses, balls, kites, races including egg and spoon, sack races, wheelbarrow etc. There were many rhyming and chanting games. Toys, bird nesting, butterfly collecting, fishing, cards, sewing , knitting and many others.

There was no national school system in England in 1800, and no one in power seemed to care. The poor were apprenticed at an early age or sent to work in the fields.

The rich had a governess for their daughters and a clergyman tutor for their sons until the son was old enought to go to Eton or Oxford. The great "public" schools were so named because originally they had been open to all boys. These public schools were founded with money left by wealthy donors to teach Latin and Greek grammar ("grammar" schools) to boys in Eton or Harrow, or wherever. Later they began to take rich children and by Victorian times were what Americans considered private schools.

Eventually members of the Church of England became appalled at the thought of lower-class children growing up in godlessness because they couldn't read the Bible. In 1811 the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church throughout England and Wales to spread the Word of God by teaching people to read the Bible was formed. At first they only had Sunday Schools, but slowly weekday elementary schools developed. In 1839 Parliament created an annual grant to subsidize these "national" schools.

Most were based on a monitorial system that was promoted as having an efficient and cost-saving pupil-teacher ratio of 500 to 1. In the monitorial, or mutual, system a teacher taught the monitors who were students and then the monitors taught students while the teacher was teaching more monitors. This developed into the pupil-teacher system in which pupils were apprenticed to a teacher for a time and trained in teaching techniques after which they could take an exam for "training college" (a teacher's college). After training college, they could get a certificate allowing them to teach.

This was the only way a poor person could could get a education in Britain in the nineteenth century. It wasn't a very good education, though, since it mostly was memorizing facts.

Elementary education wasn't compulsory until 1880, but beginning in 1862 the government set standards for pupils in subsidized schools. By the end of the sixth standard, boys and girls were required to be able to read and write simple paragraphs and to do arithmetic. Girls also had to be able to do needlework.

In 1871 more than 10 percent of men and 26 percent of women getting married could only make an "X" beside their their names in the parish register. By 1891 this had dropped to 7 percent each.

My human great grandmeowmie went to school in the Victorian era in Watertown, Massachusetts. She told Meowmie all sorts of things about the school and how different times were back then.

Great Grandmeowmie was one of six children born to immigrant parents from Nova Scotia, Canada. Education was a very important thing in that family. Great Grandmeowmie's father insisted that the girls as well as the boys be educated. That was very progressive thinking at that time. A good portion of girls were only educated to the point of reading, writing, and simple math. As they were groomed to be wives and mothers and nothing more.

Great Grandmeowmie and her siblings went to a one room school house. They had to walk about 3 miles to get there and 3 miles back. She brought her lunch in a tin pail. She did chores before school and after school as well as her homework. The teacher was a stern woman and didn't put up with nonsense from her students. Great Grandmeowmie was what we would term today as the class clown. She said she was forever being brought out to the wood shed for a paddling (times have changed in Massachusetts where you are no allowed to hit a student). Despite her acting up, she learned quickly. She was promoted regularly and at the appropriate age, she graduated top in her class from 8th grade. She continued her education at home with tutors as did her sisters. Her brothers went on to higher level schools. When her education was complete, she continued to learn all though her life. She was an avid reader. She even helped meowmie with her college studies.

Learning was a way of life back then, just as it is today. The only difference was how the individual families felt about educating their children beyond the required 8th grade.