Teaching out West was important to settlements with five or more children. Despite some of our images of the Wild West, education was important to help the future generations expand the western United States.

Children would receive a free education (first-eighth grade) and needed to be between the ages of four and twenty-one. Twenty-one? Since most of the communities were rural, children had responsibilities at home, especially at harvest time and could only attend school when chores at home were completed.

These youngsters would often walk a mile to school and a mile back home. I know. Today we wouldn’t think of having a five-year-old walk a mile alone, especially in the city! However, we would let today’s teenager join a sports team or we run a mile through a safe park or neighborhood. Kids back then received their exercise by just walking to school.

Although we have some photos of schoolteachers at the turn of the twentieth century, we’d like to think of them looking more like these ladies

Below are Rules for Teachers in 1872 I found in a museum in Buena Vista, Colorado.

1. Teachers each day will fill lamps, clean chimneys.
2. Each teacher will bring a bucket of water and a scuttle of coal for the day’s session.
3. Make your pens carefully. You may whittle to the individual taste of the pupils.
4. Men teachers may take one evening each week for courting purposes, or two evenings a week if they go to church regularly.
5. After ten hours in school, the teachers may spend the remaining time reading the Bible or other good books.
6. Women teachers who marry or engage in unseemly conduct will be dismissed.
7. Every teacher should lay aside from each day goodly sum of his earnings for his benefit during his declining years so that he will not become a burden on society.
8. Any teacher who smokes, uses liquor in any form, frequents pool or public halls, or gets shaved in a barber shop will give good reason to sudspect his worth, intention, integrity and honesty.
9. The teacher who performs his labor faithfully and without fault for five years will be given an increase of twenty-five cents per week in his pay, providing the Board of Education approves.

I personally like #4 as it has my name in it. In #6 was marriage also unseemly conduct? Perhaps that sentence needs editing. #7 was good advice for anyone. #8 must have been hard for men who couldn’t handle a razor or didn’t own a mirror and needed a barber! #9 was a shaky promise when it came to your salary. 

How did a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse educate their charges if they ranged so differently in age? The teacher would gather the children up front in a small group that were at one learning level, e.g., third grade. Meanwhile, the remainder of the class would read a book or work on problems given them ahead of time.

Here are some pics of one-room schoolhouses that are still standing in Colorado.

So, the next time you send your children to school via school bus or drive them by car think about  how easy it is for them. Times sure have changed!

“Start children off on the way they should go,, and even when they are old they will not turn from it.” – Proverbs 22:6 (NIV)