What was life like for school children during the Great Depression?

What was life like for school children during the Great Depression?

School. 1930s: School was considered a luxury for low- and middle-income children. Schools were overpopulated, underfunded, and an estimated 20,000 schools in America closed. Transportation was an issue—there were no buses or cars so children had to walk often long distances.

What jobs did kids do during the Great Depression?

Economically, many children worked both inside and outside the home; girls babysat or cleaned house, boys hustled papers or shined shoes, and both ran errands and picked crops. Yet the scarcity of jobs led record numbers of children to remain in school longer.

How did the Great Depression impact schools?

The effects of the Great Depression on schools began in 1932, prompting budget cutbacks that led to reductions in school hours, increased class sizes, lower teacher salaries, and school closings.

Why were children so hard in schools during the Great Depression?

Children from several grades sat in one room, often led by a teacher not much older than the students. The dust and heat or snow and cold sometimes made it hard for children to learn and for teachers to teach. Teenagers sometimes had to quit school to work full time on the family farm.

What problems did students face during the Depression?

What problems did students and other young people face? They were unemployed (didn’t have jobs), they were poor (poverty), they felt hopeless and had loss of dignity (did not respect themselves) and didn’t have spending $$.

Did kids work in the 1930s?

In the census of 1930, two million children aged 10-18 still worked and 700,000 were under the age of 15. Most worked in the agricultural sector during summer vacation (Feld, 4). Federal surveys said children worked twelve hour shifts on tobacco, beet and, cotton plantations, all over the country (Feld, 3).

Did teachers work during the Great Depression?

The Depression greatly transformed teachers’ working conditions. Educators observed the deterioration of school programs they had spent years building. Teachers had to try to teach undernourished children whose families had been devastated by unemployment and could no longer afford to eat well.

What problems did teachers and writers face during the Depression?

They were unemployed (did not have jobs), loss of dignity and felt hopelessness.

What problems did students face during the Great Depression?

How did children cope with the Great Depression?

Free public flophouses and missions in Los Angeles provided beds for 200,000 of the uprooted. To save money, families neglected medical and dental care. Many families sought to cope by planting gardens, canning food, buying used bread, and using cardboard and cotton for shoe soles.

What were the working conditions like for child laborers?

Young children working endured some of the harshest conditions. Workdays would often be 10 to 14 hours with minimal breaks during the shift. Factories employing children were often very dangerous places leading to injuries and even deaths.

How did the Great Depression help end child labor?

The Great Depression left thousands of Americans without jobs, and led to sweeping reforms under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal that focused on increasing federal oversight of the workplace and giving out-of-work adults jobs… thereby creating a powerful motive to remove children from the workforce.

What was life like for a teenager in the Great Depression?

Many teenagers of this period were known for “riding the rails.” Teenagers who felt that they were a burden to their families or were ashamed of their unemployment and poverty felt the need to leave their homes to find a life of their own.

Why were children put to work instead of adults?

Instead of paying higher wages for adults to perform the same duties, children could be employed at a much cheaper rate. They were working long hours, for little pay, in unsafe working conditions, not permitting them to be children and getting an education.

What did girls do during the Great Depression?

Women primarily worked in service industries, and these jobs tended to continue during the 1930s. Clerical workers, teachers, nurses, telephone operators, and domestics largely found work.