The Hoosier Schoolmaster

In the humbler setting of rural Indiana recreated by Eggleston for Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871), we can easily see that passage of more than a century (and the replacement of rich kids by farmer’s sons and daughters) hasn’t altered classroom dynamics:

Fifty children of different ages are teaching each other while the schoolmaster hears lessons at his desk from older students. An air of quiet activity fills the room. A wood stove crackles in the corner. What drove the nineteenth-century school world celebrated in Edward Eggleston’s classic, The Hoosier Schoolmaster, was a society rich with concepts like duty, hard work, responsibility, and self-reliance; a society overwhelmingly local in orientation although never so provincial it couldn’t be fascinated by the foreign and exotic. But when tent Chautauqua with its fanfare about modern marvels left town, conversation readily returned to the text of local society.