In reply to:
years ago
Interesting to read about your grandmother. My grandmother was an interesting example of the possibilities of education. She was born in 1883, the second of six children in a dirt-poor farming family in rural Pennsylvania. (Excursus: the reason they were so poor had to do with a sad romantic story from the time of the Civil War, which I may get to on these boards someday.) She started school at the age of 8. The school was the typical one-room rural school of the time, and it was 9 miles from her home. She only attended school in the winter, since she was needed at home in fall and spring to help with harvesting and planting, and school was closed in the summer. She went to school only 4 years, at which time, having reached the age of 12, she, like her siblings, left home, in order to reduce the number of mouths to feed, and made her own way in the world. (She went to the nearest large city, Harrisburg, and found employment as a housemaid with a wealthy Jewish family who treated her like a daughter until she left them after 15 years to marry my grandfather.) How well was she educated? She know little history, little geography, no foreign languages; she knew arithmetic well and could add up a grocer's bill and balance a checkbook; she could read any non-technical text quite well, and had read through the AV (King James) Bible innumerable times and knew it forwards and backwards. She could write a letter with correct grammar and spelling and in a hand which, while not elegant, was clear and not at all illiterate-looking. When I was in college, she used to write me letters which were as correct as any which I wrote. How to account for this with the rudimentary schooling she received? I suspect that some of the culture and learning of her employers must have rubbed off on her (she had exquisite table manners and knew all about how to set an elaborate table, as you would expect from her old employment), but there must have been a truly remarkable foundation laid in that long ago schoolhouse in the country. We don't seem to be able to recapture that now.
