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There are six pages in this section on education in the early 1900s
Page 1 of 6: The school system
Page 2 of 6: Classrooms
* This is Page
3 of 6: The curriculum *
. Page 4 of 6: Extra-curricular activities.
Page 5 of 6: Less pleasant things
Page 6 of 6: Education after elementary
school
All based on experiences at
Silver Street School,
Edmonton which was built in 1900 to earlier Victorian specifications.
One of my earliest memories of school in the early 1900s was being given a tray of sand to write out my letters with my finger. It had the advantage that there was no serious rubbing out to do. To start afresh, we children only had to shake the tray.
Later came slate and a 'slate' pencil, which made a horrible scratching noise and was very dirty because we would spit on the slate to rub bits out.

Double-sided child's slate from the early 1900s, from the effects of Anne Davey's mother-in-law. The left-hand photo shows one side of the slate which is plain and the right-hand photo shows the reverse side which has lines scratched onto it to guide children's writing. The photo also shows the special pencil for use with the slate. I have been unable to confirm what the slate pencils were made of. The most likely information on the internet suggests that they were of a soft slate composition or soap stone. The writing on the slate came out white.

A girl in the early 1900s, showing her drawing on her slate.

This folding children's slate was photographed in Salisbury Museum and labelled as made in Germany for the English market, 1910.
Later still came pens with nibs which had to be repeatedly dipped in ink, and the nibs got twisted and had to be replaced quite frequently.

China ink well set in a hole in a school desk. Note the indent alongside or pens and pencils.
Each child's desk had an inkpot made of white china which was set into a specially made hole. Ink pots were filled each week by children who the teacher designated as class monitors.

Nib pen and spare nibs. Photographed at the Tilford Rural Life Centre. Nibs could be eased out and new ones or ones with a different stroke thickness could be eased back in their place.
I was also taught to write with such a pen in the 1940s. Later we graduated to fountain pens which stored ink so didn't need to be repeatedly dipped in an inkwell. Ball point pens were strenuously disallowed on the grounds that they ruined handwriting Pat Cryer
The ink never seemed to stay where it was supposed to. Somehow it always travelled up our second fingers and we had to be very careful indeed not to get blots onto our clothes or our exercise books, which was very frowned upon. We also had chalks which seemed to me to be even more trouble. This was because I, like most girls, wore a pinafore over my dress. Pinafores were white and sleeveless with frills round the armholes. Some were embroidered, some had a ribbon threaded through them and were very pretty. One day I got my pinafore in an awful mess at school with the chalks, and I was afraid to go home. The girl who lived next door and was much older than me found me crying. She took me home and went in to my mother with me.
Reproduction Victorian and Edwardian school writing tools - as displayed in the museum shop at the Museum of Reading - bottles of ink, china ink pots. pens with replaceable nibs, writing slates with slate pencils.
It would not be advisable to use the ink pots without first securing them in the hole of a desk - see photo above - as they would easily get knocked over, and ink stains badly.

Boys taken off school - particularly from English lessons - to work in the fields as part of the war effort to produce home-grown food during World War One. A computerised mock-up based on a photograph from a TV showing Andrew Marr's The Making of Modern Britain.
My future husband, who was in the same year as me, but who I didn't know at the time because of boys and girls being segregated, always complained that his class seemed to be taken off to work on the fields whenever there was an English lesson. He was an able man, but never grasped the rudiments of punctuation and grammar until our daughter, Pat, explained them. He asserted that the school teachers themselves didn't understand. How true this was, I can't say.
I suspect that there was never any intention to give girls much education in grammar as we were expected to become housewives and mothers. Nevertheless basic spelling was considered important.
Anyway English was not my strong subject although I always liked jotting things down. Altogether I felt that the general grounding given by the school was very sound, although basic.
There was no such thing as maths, but being able to do quick and accurate calculations in one's head was deemed as good education for future housewives. I was always good at mental arithmetic, and when the teacher gave us children a question, my hand was always the first up from my sixty odd class mates.
I remember that we were taught how to make a hay box and we cooked a rice pudding in it. I suppose it was a war-time effort on how to make best use of resources but it wasn’t successful as far as I was concerned. Although the rice pudding was edible, anyone would have to be very pushed indeed to bother with it. I much preferred the baked rice puddings that my mother made. We children were also shown how to grow mustard and cress on pieces of flannel in a saucer of water. I suppose that taught us some elementary biology as well as preparing us for self-help with feeding a family. We also had needlework classes making pillowcases by hand, using what was called a 'run and fell seam'.
The school also paid attention to the wider curriculum. In one year, for example, we were taken once a week to Burrowell Green open air swimming baths at Edmonton Town Hall. The idea was to teach us how to swim, but I never did learn. I hated the swimming costumes provided by the school. They were long with blue and white stripes and frills round the arm holes, and, as they were made of cotton, they stood away from the skin, making us feel colder than ever when we got out of the water.
There were also extra-curricular activities.
This page of childhood recollections from around the time of the 1911 census is one of a set of pages on elementary schooling for working class children in north London (then Middlesex). This page reports on the curriculum.