As schools prepare for this challenging new semester, these special measures and the subject of class size prompts a retrospective look at how schools have evolved over the centuries. While the current cohort of students and their teachers will go to school with concern for their health looming, different concerns have circulated through previous generations, particularly for students attending rural schools.
In the mid 1800s, many students in small towns and rural areas across Canada would go to one-room schoolhouses, where pupils from a large age range (between grade 1 and grade 8) would be taught by the same teacher, though not necessarily at once. Rotating schedules were applied to distribute lesson times. In Ontario, class sizes could range from 12 to 80 pupils. After grade 8, continuing one's studies at a grammar school was not compulsory, and accessible primarily to children from wealthy families.
In terms of the school buildings themselves, the facilities were dark and cold. Students worked by the light of lamps or whatever light came through the windows. Students could be asked to carry wood from home, to contribute to the classroom's wood burning stove. In the 1840s, education activist Egerton Ryerson brought reform to implement designs with more windows and ventilation, improving the quality of school facilities.
In Estonia, literacy was advocated for relatively early on by the Lutheran Church. As a result of this, a majority of kihelkonnad (“parishes”) had schools by the end of the 1600s.
By 1867, for every 300 adults, it was legally required for there to be a school with a qualified schoolmaster. The year before, decisions on school life became the domain of peasants, rather than manor owners; though the manor had to provide land and construction materials for schools to be built. In the Tsarist era, a design standard was applied to the construction of schools, which we can see in the layout of the koolimaja (“schoolhouse”) in Kuie, Järvamaa, built around 1877. The schoolhouse building, which was relocated to the Eesti Vabaõhumuuseum in the year 2000, has a large classroom with several windows, three rooms for the teacher to inhabit, a kitchen, two pantries, a dressing room, and an entrance room. Outside was a garden, barn, sheds, and an outhouse. In the depth of the school year, from October to April, walking to and from school and to the outhouse in the snow offered an unpleasant experience.
While a facility like this is better quality than the aforementioned Canadian one-room schoolhouse, these schools came with language restrictions in the curriculum. Arithmetic, earth science, writing, and singing were all taught in Russian. Reading and religion were allowed to be taught in Estonian.
Class sizes were also high, with an average of 70 boys and girls from age 10 to 17 being taught at one time. School was compulsory throughout the week for children from the ages of 10 to 13.
In both Estonia and Canada, these old schoolhouses were multi-purpose spaces. In Canada, schoolhouses could serve as community hubs and spaces for social interaction. In Estonia, schoolhouses could be used to detain parents of children who were not present at school, and did not pay the requisite fines.
Notwithstanding the realities of small schools, limited resources, and curriculum limitations, disease was also a concern for Canadian and Estonian school age children in the past. In 1910, Canada experienced its first outbreak of polio. Before Jonas Salk's polio vaccine was approved and circulated in 1955, quarantines and school closures were periodically enacted to control the rampant spread of the disease among young children, who were most vulnerable.
In 1958, a lastehalvatus (“polio”) epidemic swept through Elva, Otepää, Põltsamaa, and Tartu. 986 cases of polio were registered in Estonia in 1958, a dramatic increase from previous years.
It's astonishing how dramatically schools have adjusted their format and become regulated since the dawn of formal education. Now, as we approach back-to-school time in Canada, we once again see how schools adapt to larger global changes.
This article was written by Vincent Teetsov as part of the Local Journalism Initiative.
