It may sound great to only have to go to school for three months of the year, but what if you’re ambitious and want to be a doctor or lawyer instead or working on a farm? What if the children’s parents or guardians really needed them at home? Do you think all children should have been required to go to school for nine months in the 1880s? Should Anne Shirley have been allowed to quit school in Anne of Green Gables?

Many well-read, intelligent people in the 19th century didn’t have much formal education. How do you think they would become well-read? How would people educate themselves?

Why would women teachers be paid less than men? Is it legal to do so today?

The Province provided funding for two-thirds of the cost of a school. Costs included teachers’ salaries, equipment, and repairs to the schoolhouse, but the school district provided the other one-third through taxes or voluntary subscriptions to the teachers’ salaries. That meant that poorer districts, where people didn’t have as much money, couldn’t afford a large salary for the teacher. What do you think the result would be?

Do you think sixteen-year-olds were old enough to teach in the 19th century? Do you think sixteen-year-olds today could do so?

What are the advantages of a one-room schoolhouse with all grades in one classroom? The disadvantages?

School Licence Transcript here

High school wasn’t free in the 19th century, and you had to pass an entrance exam to get in. To pass the examination for Prince of Wales College, for instance, you had to study extra subjects like Latin, algebra and French. If you did manage to pass – the entrance exam results were published in the paper, so everyone knew how you’d done – you could earn a teacher’s certificate. A second-class certificate took a year of study; a first-class certificate at least two years. But if you passed and could get a school, you had an independent income.

As a teacher, you had great responsibilities. Not only did you have to manage nine or ten grades in the same room and the full range of subjects, but you had to plan one of the most important social events of the year: the Christmas concert. All students had to sing or recite or act in dialogues (short plays); the school had to be decorated; and the teacher was judged on the quality of the concert. Many teachers and students have fond memories of great concerts and greater catastrophes.

Rural students had to stay with relatives or board in town to go to high school or its equivalent. Few students had their own apartments; they’d stay at a boarding house where their meals were provided, and like Anne at Queen’s, they had a small bedroom. If callers came, students could use the parlour to entertain. My mother (in Ontario, not PEI), said that in the 1940s, high school still wasn’t available to everyone. “One of my friends used to bike five miles in and out every day,” she said. “But if you stayed in town, what a life! No farm chores to do, lots of stores, your friends right there, and plenty to do in the evenings.”

Imagine being a teacher at the age of sixteen, like Anne Shirley and her friends, or eighteen, like my mother. Some of your students would be as old as you. And, like real-life teacher Lucy Palmer, you’d get invited out to tea, dances, meetings, and all kinds of social events. Education was highly respected, so teachers were important members of the community. They weren’t well paid, but ambitious teenagers could save money to put themselves through university.

Do you think you could cope with unruly students if you were a teacher? Lucy Palmer, a teacher in Malpeque, found a clever way to discipline her male students. Discipline could be a real problem, especially if the students were the same size as the teacher.

The laws at the time didn’t say that men and women had to be paid the same wages, so women were often paid less than men. Teaching was one of the few occupations where women could earn an independent income, so many did earn certificates – including L. M. Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables.

My Mother, The Teacher

I always thought one-room schoolhouses disappeared in about 1920. Until, that is, I was working on this project and happened to ask my mother if she knew anything about one-room schools.

“Oh my goodness, yes,” she exclaimed. “Why, I taught in one!”

“You did WHAT?” I asked. “Where? When? How old were you?”

“Oh, I was eighteen,” she said. “I finished high school and they were so short of teachers in Ontario – this would have been around 1951 – that I took a summer course and earned a certificate. I was really lucky, too – I sang in the choir at church, and someone from one of the schools heard me sing a solo. They wanted someone who could teach the children music and games as well as the subjects, so I got hired.”

“The first year, I had fourteen students in seven grades. The second year, we had so many students they had to hire another teacher, and I taught four grades in the morning, then we all went home, and the other teacher taught the other four grades in the afternoon.”

My own mother, a teacher in a one-room school for two years! But I was in for more shocks.....

Driving Out the Teacher?

I went to the library in my home town of Flesherton, Ontario (population 600 on a good day), and asked for books about one-room schools. Georgina, the librarian and older sister of a school friend of mine, smiled. “We don’t have many books,” she said, “but I went to a one-room school. Most of the schools around here were one-room until the 1960s, when you moved here. You just missed them by a year!”

It turned out that everyone in the library had gone to a one-room school but me.

My high-school boyfriend’s older brother told me that when he went to a one-room school, they drove out the teacher in a matter of months.

“How did you do that?” I asked, fascinated.

“Well,” he said, starting to laugh, “we realized that if we went up into our tree house at lunch, she couldn’t make us come down. So we didn’t go to school in the afternoon. And then we took snakes in with us, and frogs, and mice, and well.... you know.”

No, actually, I didn’t. That poor teacher! The new teacher tamed them, though.

"It was winter when she came," said Oliver, "and every time we acted up, she sent us outside to play snowshoe baseball. We thought it was great to be sent out to play during lessons, but you try playing baseball on snowshoes and doing a few face-plants -- falling flat on your face -- whenever the snowshoes cross and trip you up. That teacher never had any difficulty with discipline – we were too tired!"

One-room schoolhouses were phased out in Prince Edward Island by the mid-1970s, so lots of teachers and students can probably still remember the days when they went to a one-room school. Try asking your friends and neighbours for their memories.

Tryon Consolidated School
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Imagine that you're going to school with Anne Shirley and her friends somewhere in rural Prince Edward Island in the 1870s or 1880s. What would your day be like?

Well, let's start with getting dressed to go to school. You probably don't have much choice of clothes. If you're a girl, you might have two dresses, like Anne does in the book, with a pinafore (a sleeveless apron) to go on top. Underneath, you'll be wearing a vest, drawers (underwear), and probably a petticoat. If you're a boy, you're probably going to pull on knickers (knee-length pants that buckle at the knee) and a shirt, though older boys got to wear full-length trousers. In the winter, you'll wear long underwear and long stockings (yes, the boys, too) to stay warm. Girls have long hair, so it has to be combed and braided before breakfast. There isn't any running water, so to wash, you'll pour water from a pitcher or bucket into a basin. (If it's winter, you might have to break the ice first.) Your mother will cook breakfast on a woodstove, and if it's winter and dark in the morning, the house will be lit with lamps or candles.

Cars aren't invented yet, so you have to walk to school. If you're lucky, you live close by; if you don't, you might have to walk up to two or two-and-a-half miles to get to the schoolhouse. But if your friends live near, you can have a wonderful time exploring the woods and fields, or throwing snowballs and jumping in mud puddles. You'll have your lunch with you in a pail or basket - maybe plain bread and butter, and perhaps a treat like raspberry tarts. You might also have a bottle of milk. It's a long, cold walk in the wintertime, too long for smaller children sometimes.

By law, you only have to go to school for twelve weeks of the year, or about three months. (If you don't, your parents will be fined $20. That was a lot of money back then!) That doesn't mean you can stay at home and have fun. If you do stay home, it probably means that your father needs you on the farm to help with chores, or your mother needs you to help with the washing or mind your younger brothers or sisters. Even in 1916, Wesley Turner, a real-life teenager growing up in PEI, stayed home from school a lot to work -- but he liked it.

Lunchtime, just like today, can be great! You hurry through your lunch, then rush outside to play on fine days. Girls might read books out loud or play house in the trees, and the boys might climb trees or pick gum from the spruces. Or the whole school might play a game, like ball or tug-or-war. It's like one big family, though, because everyone, big and small, gets to play. The teacher might even join you!

At four o'clock (if you've behaved yourself), school is dismissed, and you and your friends can run off home with the books you need, your slate, and your empty lunch pail or basket. School's out for the day - but if you live far away, you still have that two mile walk home.

Macdonald Consolidated Schoolbus, ca. 1905-12
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The 19th-century schoolhouse looked very different from the one you probably go to. For one thing, the playground was just a field or clearing. For another, the schoolhouse only had one room that held about 30 students comfortably; the whole school was about the same size as one of today's classrooms. It was probably a wooden building, simply built, with a small gable. No running water meant that the toilets were outhouses behind the school. No electricity meant no refrigerator to put your milk in to keep cool in the summer, so like Anne Shirley and her friends, you had to put it in the brook to stay fresh.

If you're a 19th century student, then at nine o'clock, your teacher rings a hand-bell to tell you it's time to start lessons. You sit down at the desk - which you have to share with another student - put down your slate (a small, portable, washable blackboard) and books, make sure your pen is filled from the inkwell in your desk, and pay attention to the teacher. There are no electric lights, so the only light comes from the windows, or perhaps from an oil or kerosene lamp in the winter. Heat comes from a wood or coal stove, and if it won't light on a stormy winter day, then school is closed for the day. The school doesn't have much equipment: a blackboard (boards pained black) on the wall, perhaps a map or two, and of course, the strap. If you don't behave, the teacher may punish you by hitting you with it.

Paper's expensive and so is ink, so you use your slate and slate pencil to do exercises that can be wiped off later with a damp rag. If you're a bit bored, you might carve your initials on the desktop, as generations of students have before you.

Tryon Consolidated School. Schoolmaster Fred Bell is in the center of the photo.
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In your one-room 19th-century schoolhouse, all the grades from one through nine or ten share the same teacher and the same room, so you have to learn to concentrate, because another class is usually up reciting their lessons to the teacher. Your teacher sets you a lesson to learn - so many pages of geography or history to memorize, so many sums to work out in arithmetic, so many words to learn to spell, a certain length of composition (writing). When your class is called, you go to the front, stand before the teacher, and answer the questions in turn. If you answer the most questions correctly, you're "head of the class." Reading, writing and arithmetic are the main subjects, but you aren't taught to "discover" or "question" unless your teacher is exceptionally good (or original). Instead, you learn by "rote," or by memorizing. You also take geography, history, grammar, agriculture, and other subjects. If you're thirteen and old enough to study for the "entrance" exam to high school, you might have to stay after school to study extra subjects like algebra, Latin and French.

The teacher's so busy that the older students often help the younger ones by hearing them read or spell. It's an honour to be chosen. Students didn't have to be the same age to be in the same grade or even in the same subject. They progressed through a set of readers, and depending on their abilities, were placed with other children with the same abilities. You didn't necessarily get promoted to the next grade at the end of the year, either. If you did well, you would just move up to the next class or the next reader at any time during the school year.

If you're done your lessons (or don't feel like doing them), you can get up to mischief. You might draw pictures on your slate or talk to your seatmate or try (as one of Anne's classmates did) driving a team of crickets up the aisle. A good teacher will notice and might keep you in after school - or give you the strap.