Elijah and Crystal

Education in the 1930’s
Back in the 1930’s there was the Great Depression and families suffered property taxes and schools. In schools they had one classroom, one teacher, and all grades in the class. Many teenagers left school to either work on the family farm or they left home to find other jobs. Some of the teachers weren’t older than their students.
One of the goals of the schools was to teach students literature or to read and write. Many children learned to read from the Dick and James books. Outstanding fiction and poetry was produced by American writers like Ernest Hemingway, Thornton Wilder, Raymond Chandler, John Dos Passos, Carl Sandburg, Ogden Nash and Wallace Stevens. People read the mysteries of Agatha Christie and detective stories by Dashiell Hammett. African-American writer Richard Wright described the racial prejudice in his native South. Sinclair Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in literature. John Steinbeck's Dust Bowl epic The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939. The novel had a Nebraska connection when Hollywood made it into a movie staring Nebraska native Henry Fonda in 1941. (Ganzel, 2003)
Usually one room schoolhouses was heated in the winter time by coal and wood stove.
Works Cited
Ganzel, C. R. (2003). Going to school. Retrieved March 28, 2011, from livinghistroyfarm: http://www.livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe30s/life_21.html