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 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.

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.

Students were expected to learn complex arithmetic before they left school. Younger students learned simple sums in addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, then graduated to weights, measurements, and problems. Note the different measurements given in this arithmetic book from 1882. Do you recognize all of them? Do we still use these measurements?