Grammar school
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My post "The discovery of Dr. Syntax" (4/11/2008) ended like this:
No one today would think of calling a schoolteacher “Dr. Syntax”, even in areas where primary schools are still called “grammar schools”. I’m inclined to see this as a loss, though an ambiguous one. The image of Syntax in the 18th century may have been largely a negative one, but at least the name recognition was high.
Several readers wrote to set me straight: "grammar schools", they explained, are secondary schools, not primary schools.
But the school where I started first grade, one of two public elementary schools in the town of Mansfield, Connecticut, was called "Storrs Grammar School"!
Then we moved a few miles away, and through the end of the sixth grade I attended the other elementary school in town, called the Buchanan School. Grammar was not part of this school's official name, and we certainly never learned much grammar there (except for a little random sentence diagramming now and then), but all the same, the generic term that everyone in town used for the first six grades, as far as I can recall, was "grammar school".
Nevertheless, after informing us that a grammar school is "A school for teaching grammar", the OED gives this as the first sense:
1. The name given in England to a class of schools, of which many of the English towns have one, founded in the 16th c. or earlier for the teaching of Latin. They subsequently became secondary schools of various degrees of importance, a few of them ranking little below the level of the ‘public schools’. Since the Education Act of 1944, any secondary school with a ‘liberal’ curriculum including languages, history, literature, and the sciences, as distinct from technical or modern schools.
OK, so that's England. But the OED then attempts to cover U.S. usage, and I'm afraid that the result is an uncharacteristically complete failure, at least with respect to usage during much of the 20th century:
2. U.S. ‘In the system of graded common schools in the United States, the grade or department in which English grammar is one of the subjects taught’ (Cent. Dict.).
In support of its sense 2., the OED offers these citations, which suggest that "grammar school" in the U.S. once meant something like what is now called "middle school":
1860 WORCESTER, Grammar-School..2. A school next in rank above a primary school and below a high school. (U.S.) 18.. Amer. Cycl. VI. 424 (Cent.) After passing through the primary grade..the pupil enters the grammar school.
But according to the Mansfield Historical Society's "A Brief History of Mansfield's Schools", the Storrs Grammar School was constructed (and presumably named) in 1929, and from the beginning, it enrolled children from the first grade upwards.
Certainly by the 1950s, grammar school meant "elementary school" to Americans, at least in the area where I grew up. I never suspected, before now, that it ever had another meaning.
The American Heritage Dictionary's entry for grammar school refers us to "elementary school" for the first meaning, and then makes an appropriate nod to British usage in the second place:
NOUN: 1. See elementary school. 2. Chiefly British A secondary or preparatory school. 3. A school stressing the study of classical languages.
The entry for elementary school completes the circle:
NOUN: 1. A school for the first four to eight years of a child's formal education, often including kindergarten. 2. The first four to eight years of a child's formal education. Also called grade school, grammar school, primary school.
So it seems that at some point between 1860 and 1929, the standard U.S. meaning for the term "grammar school" changed. A few minutes of poking around on the internet didn't help me to figure out when and how the change happened. If you know more, please tell me.
[Off-topic fun fact: I learned from the history of Mansfield's schools that if I had started first grade a dozen years earlier, I would have attended a one-room schoolhouse. In contrast, because of the postwar baby boom (and some other, more local, demographic changes), they had to hang curtains in the school gym to divide it into multiple first-grade classrooms, with 35-40 kids in each.]
[Update — Roger Shuy writes:
I'm with you on "grammar schools." Maybe that term is somehow related to Connecticut, since I grew up in the Western Reserve (land in NE Ohio given to Connecticut soldiers who served in the Revolutionary War). The one I went to in Akron from (1936-43) was Pfeiffer Grammar School, a/k/a Pfeiffer Grade School. It may have been called elementary school too, but if so, I don't recall that. All grammar schools were K-8 at that time. We didn't have junior highs until the 50s and middle schools for another 15-20 years after that.
I suspect that this was true all across America.
Aidan Kehoe writes to point out that "grammar school" is not the only ambiguous term here:
A small thing; in your explanation, you say ‘… from the beginning, it enrolled children from the first grade upwards.’ To those of us with limited personal exposure to the US school system, this means very little–cf. that I personally started “first year” at 12, “first class” at 6, but school (not kindergarten) at 4, and I’ve every reason to think that the US system is as complex. Giving age ranges at the same time as grade numbers would be clearer.
(Yes, yes I can go look this up in Wikipedia now, but I thought I’d send on the feedback anyway.)
OK — in the U.S., "first grade" is normally for kids who are six years old in the fall. I'll leave the rest of it to Wikipedia, for now.
Erin Ogden writes:
Well, I don't know how, when, or why the shift occurred in the usage of "grammar school," but I do know that it can't just be a regional usage. I grew up in Washington state, and prior to that, my father grew up in Texas and Kansas (from the 1950's until the mid-80's when I was born and we moved to WA). He always called it grammar school, and I always called him old-fashioned for it.
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