The School as a Setting for Consultation

Abstract

In the early 1800s, children who were fortunate enough to receive an education typically did so in a one-room schoolhouse. Attendance was sporadic and often depended on completing one’s responsibilities around the home or farm. Together with a small number of friends and neighbors, the children who were present each day would be instructed in the fundamentals of reading, writing, and arithmetic using whatever materials were available and at whatever pace was necessary to accommodate their divergent skills. Following the industrial revolution of the late 1800s, it became fashionable to view schools as “factories” and children as “raw materials” who one day would become products capable of meeting the demands of an industrialized society (Cubberley, 1916). Compulsory education, child labor laws, and waves of immigrants entering the United States in the early 1900s produced staggering increases in school enrollments and corresponding increases in state and federal expenditures on public education (Fagan & Wise, 1994).