Schools

Almost everyone who went to school in America after about 1880 ended up in a class photograph. That habit has left a huge and oddly moving record of children standing in rows outside buildings that, in many cases, no longer exist.

For most of the 19th century, rural schooling meant the one-room schoolhouse. A single teacher, often a young woman barely older than her oldest pupils, taught every grade at once. There was a stove for heat, a water bucket, slates instead of paper, and readers such as the McGuffey series that taught spelling and morals together. Massachusetts passed the first compulsory school attendance law in 1852, and other states followed over the next 60 years.

City schools looked very different. As immigration swelled the cities, big brick school buildings went up with classrooms of 50 or more children. In 1899 the photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston was hired to photograph the public schools of Washington, D.C., and her pictures show children doing lessons, gym exercises and nature study in carefully staged scenes. Lewis Hine photographed the other side of the story, children who were working in mills and mines instead of going to school.

The school pictures in this collection tend to fall into 3 kinds. There are portraits of whole schools gathered outside, classroom views with the children at their desks, and photographs of the buildings themselves, often taken when a new school opened and the town was proud of it.

Look closely at the children's faces and clothes. In a rural class picture you will often see bare feet in summer, hand-me-down coats, and a wide range of ages in a single row. Look at the walls inside the classrooms, too. The maps, flags, portraits of Washington and Lincoln, and penmanship charts tell you what the school thought every child needed to know.