A major impulse of the mid-nineteenth century was the urge to make common schooling free so that more children could attend and so that those who did attend could do so regularly and for longer periods of time. Connected with this impulse was the demand for larger schools. In such schools, pupils could be classified according to age, achievement and sex, new equipment could be bought, innovations undertaken in the name of educational reform, and advanced studies begun. The single schoolmaster or mistress could be replaced by principal, masters and assistant teachers who specialized in the various levels of schooling and the school building could be divided to accommodate them and their new divisions. All of these changes, it was believed, would attract more children to the common schools. The nineteenth or early twentieth-century "consolidated" school shown here must have been a considerable distance from the homes of some pupils, for the school bus, whether motorized or horse drawn, was apparently already part of the life of the school. The number of grades in the school may be guessed at by estimating the number of teachers in the picture, or the number of rooms that could be accommodated in the building.
