This 1911 picture comes to us from the digital archives of Washington State.
I thought this picture was so interesting. It looks so different from our schools today. I haven’t been in school for a long time but when I was, there was a lot of images on the wall and a lot of little learning aids, props, activities, etc. Look how empty the walls and tables are! Yet the photo suggests the children are well-dressed and attentive. The other thing that stands out to me is what an advantage these kids had to be educated without the distraction and intrusion of technology.
A few months ago, one of our readers Jax Saggezza, dropped a link in the comments to a 1912 exam that kids had to pass as part of their eighth grade education. Do you think our children today could pass that? If not, what do we need to do to restore the advantages kids had 113 years ago?
old spirituals 
My first grade classroom in Olathe , Kansas, had the old fashioned wrought iron and wood desks, an American flag, a picture of George Washington, a long blackboard, and the alphabet above the blackboard. Washington Elementary School was a two storey brick building. Definitely no frills. My teacher, Miss Briggs, was a spinster and principal of the school. She was a lovely lady and a very good teacher.
My younger siblings attended a little two classroom red schoolhouse when we moved to Hickman Mills, Missouri.
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I guess the thinking is to have lots of stuff in the room that will capture and retain kids’ attention, but it does kind of feed in to our national case of Attention Deficit Disorder! Your description of your school sounds very endearing!
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Another thing about those classes was that there was no moving on until you finished and knew the book well, whether it was the reading primer, the spelling book, the math book, or whatever. You finished and knew the whole thing or else you stayed in that book. These days they just push you ahead into the next grade until you come out the other end possibly knowing nothing much at all.
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Yes, that’s true! It goes hand in hand with our lack of knowledge about how things work with our government. If you look at the link to the 1912 test, there was some emphasis on understanding how our government works, and schools taught more about your rights and obligations as a citizen. We are better off and more powerful when we understand those things!
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