Victorian English teachers were paid according to their pupils' test results
From 1870, when England made state schooling compulsory, elementary teachers' pay depended on whether children hit exact targets: reading a short newspaper paragraph, writing from dictation, working out sums and fractions. One teacher often ran a huge class with older pupils acting as monitors. London's schools did not lose their last gas lamps until 1955.
Primary education, the first formal stage after preschool, typically lasts three to six years, though in the United States the first seven to nine years may count. UNESCO's international classification once promised a sound grounding in reading, writing and arithmetic plus a basic grasp of other subjects; by 2011 that second part had been dropped in favour of building a solid foundation for learning.
For most of history, schooling was a privilege. In the classical world boys learned from their mothers until seven; Spartan boys then trained at a military academy until twelve, while Athenians studied the laws of the city, music, athletics and Homer. Girls were taught at home. Rome called its primary school the ludus, and Quintilian, writing in AD 94, urged teachers to hold attention by making lessons interesting instead of using the cane. In medieval Europe the church controlled learning: the King's School at Canterbury dates to 597, and a council in Rome in 853 told every parish to teach reading and writing in Latin. Bede entered the monastery school at Jarrow aged seven.
Merchants endowed English grammar schools from the 13th century, and when the dissolution of the monasteries in 1548 cut their funding, many petitioned Edward VI. Shakespeare probably attended one in Stratford between ages 7 and 14. Across the Atlantic, Massachusetts became the first colony to require schooling, and from 1690 children learned to read from the New England Primer, nicknamed the Little Bible of New England.
England's Board schools taught children from six to 14, with the emphasis on the three Rs. Before 1944 about 80% of pupils stayed in elementary schools to 14. The Education Act of 1918 abolished elementary fees and raised the leaving age from 12 to 14, and the 1944 Act split schooling into primary, secondary and further stages. Britain's first school television broadcast went out in 1957.
Source: Primary education
