Subscription Schools, Half Terms and Going Back Later

In the two articles she wrote for Arthur's Home Magazine in 1887, Rosella Rice set down how schooling actually worked in Green Township before the free school law of 1838. In First Day of School she says there was no law providing for common schools and no tax levied. A schoolhouse went up because the neighbors cut the logs, and a master was paid because fathers signed a paper promising to pay for one, two, three or four scholars at about four dollars a child a year. Children went when the family could afford it and stayed home when it could not. That pattern, learning in fits and starts as money and the harvest allowed, is the subject of this piece, and so is its modern echo: the adult who left college once and is thinking about going back.

The house and the paper

The Berryhill school-house, as Rice describes it in Our Schools, No. 1, was built in 1816 of notched logs, chinked and daubed with clay, and cost nothing but labor. Light came through a log left out on each side and covered with oiled paper. The desks were the first slabs off sycamore logs, pinned to the wall, and the older scholars sat at them with their backs to the master, feet swinging because no seat was made for feet to reach the floor. It was used summer and winter until 1835, when a frame building with nine glass windows and a Franklin stove replaced it almost on the same site.

The economics were simpler than the carpentry and harder on the families. In Rice's words, "In all these years schools were subscription schools; the fathers paid for the one, two, three, or four scholars, whichever they had signed on the paper." A poor man with five or six children of school age would sign for three and divide the time among them, each child getting half a term. Sometimes a neighbor who could afford it took over the heavy end of a poor man's bill, and the debtor worked it off clearing, grubbing, breaking flax or plowing new land. At the end of the term the master sent each child home with a slip of paper. Rice reproduces two of them, misspellings and all, including one addressed to a widow for two dollars.

What the money bought and who taught

A master was hired at a district meeting after notices went up on the store door, the blacksmith shop and the big tree at the crossroads. The winter term ran four or five months. The pay was ten dollars a month, with the teacher to board round a week in each family, and for convenience the agreement specified wheat to be delivered at named mills, because wheat was considered as good as money. Rice says the new master was sometimes the highest-learned man in the district, sometimes a lame or sickly man whom the neighbors wished to help, and quite often simply the applicant who would teach cheapest. Occasionally he was a stranger, a Yankee or a Virginian or a young student of divinity, law or medicine who took the school to earn a little money.

The same arrangement appears, with the same figures, in her fiction. In The Yankee Schoolmaster a meeting on November 18, 1820 chooses a young man from New Hampshire at ten dollars a month and eleven teaching days in every two weeks, after the directors ask him where the Bay of Fundy is and whether he would treat on Christmas. In First Day of School she quotes an actual article of agreement she kept: ten dollars a month, paid in wheat at fifty cents a bushel, oats at twenty and corn at twenty-five, with a raise to eleven dollars after three months because the employers were pleased. Books were dear: in Our Schools, No. 1, a speller with a wooden back cost forty cents at a store fifteen miles away. In A Pioneer Talk she tells of a Green Township boy who trapped rabbits in deep snow and sold the skins at a cent apiece, because forty skins would buy a spelling book.

Learning in pieces

What strikes a modern reader is not the hardship so much as the shape of it. Schooling in these sketches rarely ran on without a break. A child got a half term, then perhaps another if ginseng and columbo roots sold well. In Log School, Blockhouse and Indian Village her father describes what happened before there was a schoolhouse at all: somebody taught in somebody's house for three months a year, and when there was no school the young people met once a week to read pieces, write on slips of paper and compare them, and talk about arithmetic and geography, "and kept learning a little something all the time." In Log Cabin Life, an old man who scutched flax for the family by day taught the children spelling, reading and writing in the evenings once the tow had been picked off him.

Rice also records who was left out and who came late. Hiram Blazer, in Our Schools, No. 2, is seventeen and not yet out of Cobb's spelling book. The father who says bitterly that he got along without learning and his children can do the same is answered by a mother who promises to pay for one scholar somehow. And in the second article Rice makes the point that ties the whole thing together: there are, she writes, not many school boys and girls past middle age who do not remember the brawny-armed master who whipped into them what little book lore they possess. Schooling was something most people had a little of, got unevenly, and carried with them as a mixed memory into adulthood.

The same pattern, a long way on

Strip away the log walls and the wheat delivered to the mill, and the situation of a Berryhill scholar is recognizable to a great many adults now. They started. Money ran short, or work needed them, or a family arrived, and the half term ended. Years later the question comes back, usually at a kitchen table rather than a district meeting, and it sounds much like the father's complaint: I managed without it, so why go back? The pioneer answer, which Rice puts in the mother's mouth, was that schooling was about all a poor family could leave its children, and that one scholar would be paid for somehow. The modern version of that argument is set out plainly in a piece on returning to college at forty, and it rests on the same ground: the years will pass either way, and a term finished late is still a term finished.

The money question has changed more than the motive. The Berryhill families paid by the scholar and in kind, and relied on a neighbor to carry part of the bill. An adult student today usually has to deal with forms rather than neighbors, and the first of them is the federal aid application, which does not care how old you are or how long ago you last sat in a classroom. A clear walkthrough of financial aid for adult students covers the parts that confuse people who last filed as a dependent, such as whose income counts and what independent status means. The principle underneath is still Rice's: find out what the schooling costs, find out who will share the burden, and sign for the scholars you can carry.

What the old schools suggest

A few things in Rice's account translate directly. The first is that interrupted schooling was normal; the half-term child was the rule, not the exception, and the sketches are full of people who got by on very little schooling and did well. The second is that the learning did not stop when the school did. The weekly meetings her father describes, the old flax-scutcher teaching geography in the evenings, Hannah Gwin teaching a term or two in the lower part of Father Gwin's old house around 1820: these were ways of keeping a hand in between terms, and an adult who reads and writes a little every week before enrolling is doing the same thing. The third is that the teacher mattered more than the building. Rice remembered the Vermont master who put her into grammar at eight going on nine, and she remembered the men who governed by main strength with pity and bitterness. Choosing a program for its teaching rather than its name is advice the Berryhill directors would have understood.

And the last is the school law of 1838, which Rice records as a glad day, with the Berryhill legislator writing home to his nieces and nephews and the children celebrating by sliding on the ice. The thing the pioneers wanted most was for the cost to stop being the reason a child stayed home. That is still the thing to settle first. Read the series introduction for the two articles together, then the stories about schoolmasters alongside them, and the pattern is hard to miss: people learned when they could, in pieces, and the pieces added up.