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In the traditional one room school house, once the student was beyond the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, teachers did very little teaching as we know it. If you think about it, that is completely obvious. How could one person prepare lessons in all topics when the students range all over the ages 7 to 15? The answer: they did not even try. In fact, you can look at older text books and see they were designed around the idea of a lot of self-teaching, perhaps with only a few pointers here and there (and if you were very bright and dedicated, you did not even need pointers). The teachers primary job was to assess. The children were assigned lessons and expected to read that lesson several times until the teacher could get around to quizzing them. Good students the teacher might deign to allow to ask questions afterwards. If the student did poorly but was clearly trying hard, the teacher might offer corrections and advice. Otherwise the teacher had a free hand to beat the student for the crime of being stupid or lazy or both. In the 19th century, there was nothing weird about so-so students dropping out at the 4th or 5th grade level. Even the dedicated were done at age 14 or 15, unless they intended to be a teacher, doctor, lawyer, etc. The normal means of learning was through formal or informal apprenticeships: you were supposed to either educate yourself, or ingratiate yourself to a highly competent adult and learn at their elbow. It is a modern fad to obsess over the teachers. In the old days of the one room school house, the teachers had to only meet a rather low bar of competence, and then the onus for learning was put on the student. |