Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Preface
- 1 Education and social change: Massachusetts as a case study
- 2 Trends in school attendance in nineteenth-century Massachusetts
- 3 From apron strings to ABCs: school entry in nineteenth-century Massachusetts
- 4 The prospects of youth: school leaving in eight Essex County towns
- 5 From one room to one system: the importance of rural–urban differences in nineteenth-century Massachusetts schooling
- 6 Education and social change in two nineteenth-century Massachusetts communities
- 7 Trends in educational funding and expenditures
- 8 The politics of educational reform in mid-nineteenth-century Massachusetts
- 9 Conclusion: the triumph of a state school system
- Appendix A Statistical tables
- Appendix B Definition of the variables contained in Tables A2.1 through A2.5, Appendix A
- Appendix C Discussion of adjustments, estimates, and extrapolations made in calculating Tables A2.1 through A2.5, Appendix A
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - The prospects of youth: school leaving in eight Essex County towns
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Preface
- 1 Education and social change: Massachusetts as a case study
- 2 Trends in school attendance in nineteenth-century Massachusetts
- 3 From apron strings to ABCs: school entry in nineteenth-century Massachusetts
- 4 The prospects of youth: school leaving in eight Essex County towns
- 5 From one room to one system: the importance of rural–urban differences in nineteenth-century Massachusetts schooling
- 6 Education and social change in two nineteenth-century Massachusetts communities
- 7 Trends in educational funding and expenditures
- 8 The politics of educational reform in mid-nineteenth-century Massachusetts
- 9 Conclusion: the triumph of a state school system
- Appendix A Statistical tables
- Appendix B Definition of the variables contained in Tables A2.1 through A2.5, Appendix A
- Appendix C Discussion of adjustments, estimates, and extrapolations made in calculating Tables A2.1 through A2.5, Appendix A
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Introduction
In Chapter 3 we analyzed a situation in which educators quite unanimously wanted young children out of school, while many parents demonstrated a persistent desire to have them in school. After 1860 this conflict was gradually settled at the local level by rules prescribing the minimum age of entry to schools. Because most parents, it seems, still wanted schooling as early as possible, the minimum age requirements tended to result in most children entering school at about the same age, five or six. In other words, the initial transition from family to school was postponed but became nearly universal and was accomplished within a narrow age range.
To illustrate, we may arbitrarily define the duration of this life-course transition for a whole population as the number of years between the age at which 20 percent of the children were enrolled and the age at which 80 percent of the children were enrolled. Using a large sample of children who resided in eight diverse Massachusetts communities in 1880, we calculated the transition time as about three years in 1880.
In this chapter we shall use the same files of census information to analyze school leaving in the teen years, a transition that was more spread out than school entry. The transition from 80 percent enrolled down to 20 percent enrolled took between four and five years in 1880 and, as we shall see, was clearly associated with individual family and community characteristics.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1980