THE WORLD OF PEOPLE, THINGS, AND IDEAS AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 20TH CENTURY. ADULTS.
The world our children are born into today, the world where they grow and mature, is constructed, organized and managed by adults. As adults, we see this as both normal and natural, and as the only way our world could ever be.
Over the past 100 years, the lives of adults have changed just as dramatically as the world around them. In the context of our education discussion, we are interested in two groups of adults – parents, who comprise the vast majority of adults on Earth, and teachers.
If, by some magic or some means of science-fiction travel means, we were transported into a city or village street a century ago, we would be amazed to find just how different every aspect of life was for ordinary people like ourselves.
100 years ago, mothers typically gave birth to their first children very early, usually before the age of 20. This made their lives pretty hard, much harder than what we can imagine. However, at the time, this life route was often the only choice for many women. Contraceptives were practically non-existent. Condoms already existed, but their quality was terrible, and hormonal contraceptives, what we now refer to as “the pill” would only appear after the Second World War. I personally knew a man who was the youngest of his father's 26 children. The first wife of this father died giving birth to their fourteenth child, so he remarried. In the new marriage, another 12 children were born. In total, 14 survived.
Interracial and interethnic marriages were rare, almost as rare as marriages of love; legends of local Romeos and Juliets lived on through generations. Talk of happiness and what a person "deserves" was heard only in fashionable salons and political gatherings; others had no time for such things. There were no psychotherapists, and psychology in general did not exist, so there was no one to complain to about "toxic parents" except family and friends; depression was considered melancholy; women, children, and servants in families of all levels of wealth were beaten mercilessly.
By the beginning of the 1950s, the average life expectancy – taking into account two world wars, epidemics, and high female and child mortality – was 44 years. Of course, it is important to adjust our mental optics correctly. This life expectancy does not mean that there was no one around who was 45 years old or older. There were very few of them. Potential grandmothers died in childbirth before their first grandchildren were born. Potential grandfathers perished in wars, died from industrial injuries and drunken brawls. Many children were born, but many did not survive to adulthood (which was around 15 years old). In some countries, infant mortality was so severe that 1 in 2 infants did not live to see their fifth birthday. (This, unfortunately, is still quite common in some parts of the world today.)
Life at home and at work was full of risks and dangers. However, there was no medical insurance until the end of the 1920s, almost no unemployment or disability benefits until the Second World War, and no paid vacations until the 1950s. Pensions existed only for civil servants, military personnel and employees of some large corporations. Given the life expectancy at that time, very few people lived to receive these pensions.
Government regulation of working conditions and wages was yet to be implemented. Ford Motor Company introduced a five-day, 40-hour workweek for its workers only in 1929.
In addition to life spans and working conditions, the way people managed their money at the time would likely surprise us modern people as well. Cash remained the primary means of payment for everyday purchases, while checks were used for larger purchases. In the United States, salaries were directly deposited into workers' bank accounts starting in 1975, and in other countries even later. At the beginning of the century, salaries were mostly paid in cash and delivered to distribution points in sacks. It was already possible to transfer money by telegraph, but many people still trusted envelopes and the postal service for small sums. The average annual salary for wage workers in America was two to three thousand dollars, but prices were correspondingly low: a gallon of milk, for example, cost $0.52, a pound of flour $0.04, a pound of potatoes $0.02, a pound of sugar $0.09.
Society was fortune-structured organizing the rich, the poor and everyone in between in a pretty strict hierarchy. The "old money" of the large landowners, though already declining, was still significant while the "new money" of factory owners, newspaper tycoons, and steamship magnates was growing and multiplying. At the bottom of this pyramid, where the soup was thin and there were no pearls at all, people barely made ends meet.
However, new and growing capital soon allowed for the creation of more museums, universities and libraries. Cinemas were built and public parks were established. The world of culture gradually democratized and became more accessible to the wider public.
Rural and urban life rapidly diverged in many respects: quickly growing cities offered young people many more opportunities for work, education, and entertainment. Luck was not common even then, but persistence in the city was rewarded much faster and more often than in the countryside.
In the cities, different strata intersected and mixed in the most diverse ways: old and new money, as well as the emerging middle class, tried to hire help whenever they could afford it. Laundresses, housekeepers, secretaries, wet nurses, nannies and governesses, cooks, stokers, and gardeners all worked in homes to meet the diverse needs of large families. Poor people had to handle all these family matters and tasks themselves. Families stayed together and divorces were extremely rare, as one simply could not survive alone.
Travel for leisure and recreation was only affordable for people of considerable means. But relocating from country to country for work, education, new opportunities, and security for the next generation, was more democratic and involved the most active people from the most diverse layers of society. Emigration was not tourism; people had to make enormous sacrifices and endure hardships to move to another country and completely restart their lives. Courage and adventurousness alone was not enough; perseverance and readiness for daily efforts to overcome obstacles was required. Europe and America experienced several major waves of migration in the 20th century, triggered by catastrophic events, and it was never easy.
For an increasing number of adults, the importance of at least some education for children gradually became obvious, literally visible to the naked eye. Education was a key to a social lift, an opportunity to transition from a world of poverty and servitude to a world first of blue-collar, and then, if lucky or intensely persistent, white-collar workers.
It’s not that compulsory schooling in the early 20th century had absolutely no basis. In wealthy families, the upbringing and education of children from the child’s birth was entrusted to wet nurses, governesses, and then private teachers; teachers were often hired from abroad. There were already, although in completely unsatisfactory numbers, primary schools, secondary schools, and universities, both private and public. There were rare trade, commercial, and military schools, and in many countries, ministries of education existed.
At the very beginning of the 20th century, teachers (both private tutors and schoolteachers) were mainly graduates of gymnasiums and students; for boys, young men, and for girls, young unmarried women, usually not very well educated and without any professional training to work with children. Such training was not considered necessary, although by the beginning of the century, the first teacher training programs (for women - as short term courses, for men - in universities) had already appeared. Elementary literacy and some special skills, like playing a musical instrument or drawing were practically sufficient for working with children. Upon marriage, a female teacher usually left this field forever.
There was no professional certification, and so there were no professional standards. Teachers' earnings were low. At the beginning of the century, in rural areas, and in some cities, teachers lived at the expense of the community: they were accommodated in free rooms at the school and were provided with food and gifts for religious holidays. By the late 1920s in the United States, it was proposed to universally raise teachers' salaries to $2,000 per year, equivalent to only about $32,000 today.
Overall, even by the 1950s, the share of the world population with completed secondary or higher education was still extremely small, less than one per cent. Until the late 1960s, that is, before the beginning of the total automation of industry, it was widely believed that adding a year of schooling to workers’ basic training increased industrial productivity by four percent. Automation changed the ways to both assess and increase labor productivity, breaking their immediate connection to years of schooling. Nowadays, over a half of the world’s population has completed secondary or higher education programs that last ten to 16 years. Has it changed us? And if it has, then how?