Learning about maths today can be an exciting, colourful and rewarding experience, particularly if you explore the NRICH website! A hundred and fifty years ago life was very different for the majority of children. Not everyone went to school, and those who were lucky enough to get an education had to learn things the hard way. We decided to find out what it would have been like to learn maths at school in the Victorian period. So, we went to visit a school where you can still see classrooms that were designed and built in the 19th century, and experience a day in the life of a Victorian child.
The British School in Hitchin first opened in 1810. It was opened by a local solicitor who believed that the best way to help the children of the poor was to give them an education. At the time this was quite a controversial point of view – many people thought that to educate poor people would give them ideas above their station and would be a complete waste of time. We take it for granted now, but in those days an education was a mark of status and self-improvement and something that people had to fight for.
The main classroom that survives today in Hitchin was built in 1837 – yes, there was just one classroom for 300 boys (girls were taught seperately in another part of the building). It wasn’t even that big – about the size of an average assembly hall nowadays, so conditions were a little cramped. The picture at the top of this page shows a similar classroom at a school in London. There was only one teacher, so how did he manage to teach so many boys of different ages and abilities? The answer is, he didn’t. Instead he would teach each lesson to about 30 of the brightest children in the school. Each of these pupils, known as “monitors”, was then responsible for teaching a group of 10 other boys. The group would stand in a semi-circle around the monitor, facing one of the teaching boards that were hung around the walls of the room.
A lot of the maths they learned was basic arithmetic and calculations involving money, which in those days was all in pounds ( £), shillings (s), pence (d) and farthings (1/4). Unlike today’s simple system of 100 pennies in a pound, adding or subtracting sums of money involved a bit more thinking back then. First of all children would have to memorise the rules for how many pennies were in a shilling, how many shillings in a pound and so on. They did this by reciting them out loud over and over again.
