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4 - The prospects of youth: school leaving in eight Essex County towns

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2010

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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 Press
Print publication year: 1980

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