Education in the 1930s, USA

[mha_chan]

Finding out any details about this is impossible. I've googled variations of the title of this post, and the most useful thing I've come up with was a blog, which wasn't particularly relevant

Comments

[twilight2000]

Some starting sites:

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3468301121.html Description of 1930's education
http://ruthlace.blogspot.com/2007/02/going-to-school-in-1930s.html Great blog about what it was like from a kid's perspective

Also? Try "curriculum usa 1930" rather than "education" for a closer match to what you're talking about above.

[donutsweeper]

Possibly helpful, but probably not, you can browse 2 different yearbooks of Brooklyn high schools here:

http://stevemorse.org/sjtilden/yearbooks.htm

http://www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/Jefferson/yearbooks.htm

Tilden High School's are from 1934 and Jefferson's from 1927.

[vaznetti]

You might look up the history if the Regents' Examinations, which will tell you exactly what high school students in NY were taught at any given time. Look at this document, for example, around page 5 or 6:

http://web.njit.edu/~cjohnson/research/pprs/history.regents.pdf

[mha_chan]

Regents was a fantastic idea! They actually have papers from the 1930s! Thank you very much :D

[vaznetti]

Glad to help! My impression is that not everyone was expected to pass the exams, but at least you can see what the goals were. If you made a certain grade on them, you were guaranteed a place in NY's public university system.

[stickmaker]

Lesee... Probably nothing about space travel. Pluto was discovered in 1930, so depending on *when* in the Thirties you mean it could be ignored, a major topic, or simply mentioned.

Aviation was *huge* in the Thirties.

A lot will depend on socioeconomic group, grade level and to some extent the tastes of the individual teachers.

[rosefox]

The entire archive of Popular Mechanics is in Google Books going back to 1903, so you can look up the magazines from that era and see what was hot in science and engineering.