THE period from the dark days of the American Revolution to the close of the Civil War marks the beginning of epoch-making changes in public education in general and in the teaching profession in particular. It was during the latter half of this historical era that the great process of professionalization began and that public-school teaching was recognized as an occupation which demanded specific training in addition to native talent. Before the Revolution, individuals here and there had already advocated specialized preparation for teachers, sporadic attempts at initiating apprentices into the calling of teaching had been made, and isolated experiments in improving methodology of schoolmasters were not unknown. It remained, however, for men like Horace Mann and Henry Barnard in the thirties and forties to crystallize the sentiments of the more intelligent and farseeing citizenry before the real achievements of this period were realized.

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Because of the apathy of the public generally toward the training of individuals for an occupation which had previously been assumed to require no professional knowledge, it was necessary to spread propaganda widely before the normal school became a fixture. In the meantime private and semipublic academies, seminaries, and colleges provided the vast majority of trained teachers for the schools. It must be remembered that most of the teachers of this period still remained untrained and continued to use trial and error methods of imparting instruction. As late as 1833 Samuel R. Hall stated in a lecture on the necessity of educating teachers that "there is not in our whole country one seminary where the educator of children can be thoroughly qualified for his important work."

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The first attempt toward ameliorating the unhappy conditions confronting both teachers and pupils in the rural districts was the separation of the older children from the younger ones by establishing summer schools for the latter and barring them from school during the winter months. A woman teacher frequently taught the summer school and gave primary instruction to those who were too young to assist on the farm. This alleviated the task of the schoolmaster during the winter term, by reducing the range in the ages and achievements of pupils, and constituted a rough plan of gradation. The next step in the evolution of the elementary school was the employment of a female teacher for the younger and primary children and a male teacher for older and more advanced scholars.

The school laws enacted by the states usually designated the subjects to be taught in the common school. Reading, writing, arithmetic were fairly universal requirements from the beginning and other subjects were added as the state school system developed. This general core of common-school subjects was taught to all pupils and increased in difficulty with the advancing ages of children. To this degree, there always existed a measure of gradation even in the district schools.

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THE public has always looked upon schoolteaching as a part-time job and, in considering the salaries to be awarded, it has attached undue weight to the proportion of the year in which teachers were not formally engaged in the classroom. Even today, when schools are commonly in session for ten full months, there is an inclination for school boards and lay citizens to view the teacher's task as a relatively easy one, consisting, as it does, of a five-day week with generous vacations scattered throughout the year. The fact that teachers are heavily burdened with homework and their summers frequently spent in professional study is more often overlooked than recognized by those outside of the profession itself.

The situation at the beginning of the nineteenth century was quite unlike that which confronts the profession today. Statistics as to the actual number of days schools were in session are so scarce as to make generalizations unreliable for particular states. Historians are rather unanimous, however, in their conclusions that most teachers were employed in "keeping school" only a few months during the year and that some outside occupation was necessary to enable them to eke out an existence. Two sessions—a winter term and a summer term—were commonly held but were usually taught by different individuals. The latter session was designed for young children whose efforts could not be exploited on the farm, and constituted a relief to the already overcrowded winter schools which were more usually organized to care for the older pupils. Women frequently taught the summer and men the winter schools. There was a great variation in the length of the winter term even within the same commonwealth, depending upon public support and the general economic and cultural level of the taxpayers. The larger towns were usually favored with longer sessions than the rural districts. It is certain that the average length of the winter terms was considerably less than four months when all schools are grouped together. Johnson, in his book Old-Time Schools and School-Books, describes the prevailing practice in Massachusetts as follows:

In the larger towns, school kept almost continuously, but as a rule the towns were content with a master's winter school of ten or twelve weeks attended by the older children, and a summer term of equal length taught by a woman, chiefly for the benefit of the little ones. The poorer communities had to get along with a single term of two or three months, or possibly of only a few weeks

The winter schools opened immediately after Thanksgiving, when the harvesting was completed, and closed early in the spring, in time for plowing and planting. Schoolmasters were often occupied during the summer on the farms and Samuel Goodrich, the textbook writer, refers in his autobiography to one of his teachers, Lewis Olmstead, as "a man who made a business ploughing, mowing, carting manure, etc., during the summer months." The reader will observe that the general nature of the schoolmaster's outside employment had not changed greatly from that of colonial days.

No important advances were made in extending the school year until after 1840, when state school organization got under way and began to examine educational conditions with a view to improvement.