Teaching with Primary Sources: School History in Brooklyn

Brooklyn Connections is the education outreach program in the Brooklyn Collection, focused on cultivating 21st Century learning skills in students and supporting teachers on the incorporation of archives materials into curricula.

This blog post is part of a series from the Brooklyn Connections team, sharing skills and ideas for using archives primary source material in the classroom. As part of our work, we create freely available Primary Source Packets to help students and teachers access primary source material from the Brooklyn Collection about local history topics.

Now that school is really back in swing, we thought we’d take a moment to stop and think about the history of schools in Brooklyn. Has the public school system always looked like it currently does? Have students always learned about the same subjects? Who picks school names? Our primary source packet on school history has a few of these answers!

Looking at a wide variety of primary sources helps us dive into the history of schools in Brooklyn. We can start with photographs, which show a very different type of schoolhouse in early Brooklyn:

It’s hard to imagine what school was like inside buildings like this! A list of suggested textbooks from 1892 can help us understand what subjects were on the daily schedule:

While early school buildings may have looked a little different from today, innovators like Charles Snyder helped create buildings that look a little more familiar. Snyder, New York City’s Chief of the Building Bureau of the Board of Education, reimagined school buildings to create healthy spaces for learning and growing. He toured Europe to look at building designs, and came up with building dimensions that would allow maximum light in the center of the classroom – a welcome relief for students who lived in cramped, dark tenement buildings. Many of Snyder’s buildings still stand today:

Early reports to the Board of Education give us a fuller picture of what was going on inside Brooklyn's early schools:

Here are a few excerpts from this article:

A meeting of the Board of Education was held at the Hall in Red Hook Lane yesterday afternoon.

A communication from G.W. Watson was submitted requesting the board to add “Monteith’s first lessons in geography,“ price fifteen cents to the list of text books.

Upon the subject of writing the committee complained of great deficiency among some of the most prominent teachers, their own writing being sufficient to condemn them as teachers, and the fact was forced upon them that the pupils learned to write not from the instruction they received but in spite of them. This state of affairs forced upon the mind of the committee the necessity of adopting a new mode of instruction.

Dr. Thorne, from the visiting committee, submitted his report of observations during the past month:

No. 1 was doing well. The outside departments and grounds were disgraceful to the city, and they urge the Board to have the nuisance abated--recommend purchase of land immediately adjoining.

No. 2, in Gowanus, doing well.

No. 3, on Bedford Avenue, in good order and doing well.

No. 4 – Boys department in good order. Attendance thin in other departments.

No 5 – Doing as well as can be expected, considering the mean state of the furniture generally. Hope that steps will be taken to repair the building.

Colored school No. 1 with one principal and two assistants is commended by the committee for efficiency. Repairs to yard recommended.

Colored School No. 2 at Weeksville is doing well and in good order.

The report of the committee was accepted.

Reading through this report with students will hopefully raise a lot of questions about what a Colored School was. We've got primary sources to help us learn more! Let's start our inquiry into the story of Colored School No 1 by examining maps, and by reading about them in the newspaper:

Schools today often have names that are more interesting than “Number 1” or “Number 2,” and we can read articles from the Brooklyn Collection’s newspaper clippings files that shed light on decisions to choose school names that would honor notable people or draw attention to special skills that students could learn at these new schools:

And finally, what kinds of skills could students learn in Brooklyn's schools over the history of our borough? Today’s learners might be amazed to see photographs of classes in watchmaking and house building if they search the Brooklyn Collection’s Digital Collections.

Find these items and more amazing glimpses into the history of Brooklyn’s schools in our primary source packet on School History in Brooklyn! This isn't the only place to find information about school history, though; in addition to a few school-specific primary source packets (ask us about those), we also have great information on school desegregation in our Civil Rights in Brooklyn primary source packet. 

Have you studied the history of your school with your students? We'd love to hear about it! Feel free to leave us a comment below.