In Chapter 3 (don't know the page) of A Hard Country and a Lonely Place:
Schooling, Society, and Reform in Rural Virginia, 1870 - 1920 (University of
North Carolina Press, 1986) author William A. Link writes:

"Late nineteenth-century teachers had little, and in some cases hardly any,
formal education.  As one teacher observed, Virginia schools paid such
paltry wages and their terms were so short in duration that for those who
spent their "time and money in acquiring a classical education," teaching
was hardly worthwhile.  In 1885, only 27 percent of all teachers held either
a high school or higher diploma, and only about 6 percent had received a
college degree.  Undereducation of teachers was a feature of rural schools
that persisted well past the turn of the century.  One survey conducted in
the early twentieth century revealed that in spite of expanded normal
facilities, about four-fifths of the Virginia teaching force had no training
beyond high school and about a third had no education past elementary
school.  During the nineteenth century, most teachers in rural Virginia were
undereducated out of necessity, simply because facilities, or access to
them, did not exist.  Instead, most during this period became teachers
through a system of apprenticeship, in which district boards hired teachers'
assistants, usually older pupils, many of whom eventually became teachers. "

My grandmother attended the State Normal School at Fredericksburg  (now
University of Mary Washington) for two years in 1913 and then taught in
Cumberland County until her marriage.  However I have found records for
other family members who taught school in the same time period and they do
not have the same amount of education. 

Mary O'Brien Vidlak

 

 


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