20 Forgotten Events That Built The American School Day

In 1848, Boston opened the Quincy Grammar School, the first American school building designed for children grouped by age instead of one big room holding every grade. Gridley James Fox Bryant designed the four-story building, while principal John Philbrick split students into single-age classes of about 55 kids each. Henry Barnard designed individual desks, bolted in rows facing the blackboard, replacing shared benches around a stove. And the modern classroom began there.

The first statewide compulsory education law in the country was passed in Massachusetts in 1852 when Governor George S. Boutwell signed it into law. Reformers were concerned about a lack of literacy in the United States, wanted to reduce the number of young children working in factories, and hoped that schooling would aid in the assimilation of immigrants’ children. The Massachusetts law applied only to school-age children, required attendance for only a few weeks of the year, and included penalties for noncompliance. It took until 1918, when Mississippi became the 48th state to pass one, before compulsory attendance laws covered the entire country.

In 1873, Susan Blow, a teacher working under William Torrey Harris, then the superintendent of St. Louis schools, opened the first permanent public-school kindergarten in the United States at the Des Peres School. Borrowing from the play-based method of German theorist Friedrich Fröbel, she taught five-year-olds using hands-on toys, outdoor play, and songs. The St. Louis program was sufficiently successful that the district extended its reach throughout the city. Other districts soon adopted the idea, and kindergarten became the standard entry grade across the nation.

One of America’s first female doctors, Dr. Marie Zakrzewska, feared children in the dense urban areas of Boston had nowhere to play. In 1885, she dumped sand in the yard of urban mission houses to create the nation’s first sand gardens. This concept soon gained popularity, with Joseph Lee, a leader in the playground movement, advocating the installation of public spaces for children to play. In the 1890s, school boards began setting up playgrounds in schoolyards and added recess to the daily schedule.

In 1892, Francis Bellamy, a Christian socialist minister and magazine editor, penned a short pledge of allegiance for The Youth’s Companion, a children’s magazine based in Boston. The pledge was to be used in a school campaign celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage, and schools around the country had their students recite the pledge en masse that same fall. School boards liked the idea enough to make it an official, daily morning ritual, acting as a way to unite a country full of immigrant schoolchildren.

By 1892, what was being taught in high schools varied greatly from town to town. In response, the National Education Association established a committee with Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard University, as chair. Its report, commonly referred to as the Committee of Ten, released in 1893, called for all students to be required to take courses in English, math, history, a foreign language, and science. In response, high schools began structuring faculty into subject-based departments and scheduling students in rotating classes each day. This organizational structure remains in place today.

Grading students with a hundred-point scale accompanied by handwritten notes wasn’t working out well enough for Mount Holyoke College, a women’s college in South Hadley, Massachusetts. So in 1897, it began assigning letter grades from A to E and added F for failing the next year. K-12 schools across America adopted the scheme in subsequent decades. They eliminated E so parents wouldn’t think it stood for Excellent, leaving us with the A-B-C-D-F scale we use today.

In the late 1890s, as school buildings grew larger and more congested, hand-rung brass gongs couldn’t synchronize all of the classrooms within a single building. Electric master-clock systems solved the problem. Clockmakers like Henry Warren, inventor of the Telechron master clock, began installing these systems in schools across the country. They would send low-voltage signals to ring bells at preprogrammed times to signal when classes should change.

In New York City before 1902, medical inspectors didn’t do much with sick kids, but simply sent them home for illnesses such as ringworm, leaving them untreated and fueling truancy. Lillian Wald, who founded the Henry Street Settlement, advocated placing a trained nurse in the schools. Her efforts led to the hiring of Lina Rogers, who became the first school nurse in the United States on October 1, 1902. Her work, addressing small problems in person and conducting house calls, helped reduce absences related to illness by nearly 90 percent in one year, and other cities quickly adopted the concept.

Andrew Carnegie’s foundation created a pension plan for college faculty in 1906, stipulating that participating institutions admit students who graduated from “approved” secondary schools. The foundation determined that one unit of high school credit equals a set number of hours annually. To meet this requirement within a conventional school year, high schools established daily classes of approximately 50 minutes. This pension program is responsible for the length of today’s school classes.

In Collinwood, Ohio, on March 4, 1908, a blaze at Lake View Elementary School killed 172 children and two teachers when students rushing outside in fear became bottlenecked inside a narrow interior vestibule close to the building’s exits. An investigation determined that the outer doors of the school had been unlocked and swinging outward the entire time, debunking speculation that janitors had locked and barred the doors. The true culprit, in other words, was the hallway. In response, states passed legislation mandating outward-swinging panic bar doors, as well as regular unannounced fire drills.

Frank Parsons, a civic reformer who has been called the father of vocational guidance, started Boston’s Vocation Bureau to get young people into the industrial job market. Boston public schools adopted his model, designating teachers as advisors. Within a couple of decades, guidance offices were in place at high schools across the country, along with a daily homeroom period in which a teacher would take attendance, make announcements, and dispense advice. Early guidance was about finding jobs, not the kind of psychological counseling that the term implies today.

In the early 1900s, schools in cities operated on extended calendars in stifling brick structures with no air conditioning, while rural schools had short terms built around farm life. But within 30 years or so, state superintendents and school boards standardized the school year at 180 days from September to June. Cities abandoned summer school due to high rates of child absenteeism from the summer heat and teacher burnout. Rural districts stretched out their terms due to new state requirements on how school funding was allocated. It had nothing to do with the harvest season, despite popular belief.

Amos Neyhart, a professor of industrial engineering at Penn State, became concerned about the number of young drivers killed in cars. In the spring of 1934, Neyhart started the first high school driver’s education course in the United States at State College High School in Pennsylvania. Students took classroom lessons on traffic laws, and then practiced in Neyhart’s 1929 car equipped with double brakes so that he could take over if necessary. The American Automobile Association then began offering the course nationwide as a credit-bearing elective.

Motorized buses were proliferating in the 1910s and 1920s, allowing rural counties to shutter well over 100,000 one-room schoolhouses and pack students into bigger graded schools. The buses themselves, however, remained an assortment of horse-drawn carriages, trucks, and retired city buses until April 1939, when Columbia University’s Frank Cyr held a conference in New York. At that gathering, 44 safety standards for school buses were established, and the color yellow-orange was selected because black lettering showed up most clearly on it in the predawn hours.

In 1943, two Jehovah’s Witness kids, Marie and Gathie Barnette of West Virginia, got kicked out of their local public school for not wanting to say a pledge Francis Bellamy had written decades earlier. That year, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that kids couldn’t be forced to say the pledge or even salute the flag at school, overturning the Court’s own decision three years prior. Kids still could go through the motions at school. They just didn’t have to do it anymore.

During World War II, roughly 15 percent of young men were rejected for physical defects that originated in early childhood malnutrition. With national security at stake, as well as excess farm produce, President Harry Truman signed the National School Lunch Act on June 4, 1946, sponsored by Georgia senator Richard B. Russell Jr. It established permanent federal funding and farm allocations for schools to offer students nutritionally complete, hot meals, forever institutionalizing the school lunch.

When the USSR tested its first atomic weapon in 1949, the Federal Civil Defense Administration initiated a school safety drive in January 1951 with the help of Bert the Turtle, an animated protagonist in several educational films. The movies instructed schoolchildren to get down under their desks and put their hands over their necks if they heard an air-raid siren or saw a flash of light. Throughout the 1950s, schools conducted unannounced duck-and-cover practice drills in order to provide comfort and shielding against glass and other debris.

The Special Milk Program was added to farm legislation passed in 1954 and signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It was designed to address a dual problem: milk production had outstripped demand, and children’s diets were lacking in nutrition. Under the program, elementary schools were reimbursed for providing subsidized half-pints of milk during the morning recess, not at lunch. Over the next two decades, the amount of milk consumed by schools increased tenfold. The little carton became a ubiquitous feature of classrooms.

A study led by Dr. Hans Kraus and fitness researcher Bonnie Prudden found that 58 percent of American schoolchildren failed basic strength tests, while only 8 percent of European children tested did. The numbers prompted President Dwight D. Eisenhower to issue an executive order in 1956 that created a national council to pressure state education departments to adopt physical education programs. Consequently, daily physical education and standardized fitness testing became a staple of the K-12 school schedule, the final piece of a day put together piecemeal over more than a century.

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