Do kids carry their textbook back home in the 19th century?

First of all, that “evolution” is stupid. I graduated class of 2019 and everyone still had backpacks. graduated college 2021 and guess what…backpacks. Not one used a freaking handbag? Books are heavy af and even though most are digital, you still have a laptop and/or notebooks.

Also, It’s not a stupid question. I would just imagine it is a mix. Most people probably used the strap if they had a lot of books. Maybe some just carried it. Similar to now. Some people have actual backpacks, but some people use smaller sized backpacks.

In my Dad’s time, 1930’s, they carried their books, usually just one or two.

When I was small, we had bags similar to brief cases, carried by hand.

My older son carried his laptop and books in a wheeled case like airline employees used. It never caught on, and the other kids nicknamed him “the pilot”. He only went to public school a couple of times, to try it out, but he preferred homeschool.

That’s what you see in paintings of school kids in the 19th century – kids carrying their books by hand held together by a strap. I don’t know if that was everywhere in the US or not but it is a convention.

@SergeantQueen Backpacks are ubiquitous now on campus, but when I was in high school in the early 70s, no one used them. Day packs, as they were marketed, were hardly available except at some place like REI, which at the time was mail order except for the one store in Seattle.

I had a day pack that I used for hiking when I was in high school, and I used it to carry books to school. But back then, most kids only took home one or two books, the rest they left in their locker overnight.

Book starps were common until the 1940s. But if you look at pictires from the mid centiry, you wll see kids just carrying their books.

This TV show clip shows how kids in 1972 carried stuff to high school

Paper was expensive in the 1800s, so students wrote on thin slabs of slate. They took notes with slate pencils made of clay. Paper was only used for penmanship lessons when kids dipped their quills in ink bottles and practiced their cursive.

Textbooks were equally scarce. Students had to bring books from home, often borrowing used textbooks from older kids. Members of a class never had matching copies.

https://blogs.ancestry.com/cm/how-school-was-different-in-the-1800s/

The 1800s was the 19th Century,

According to my great grandad, schools didn’t have textbooks like we do now. They didn’t use notebook paper either. When the very first child in the family was enrolled in school, they were bought a book as a reward for going to school. That book was passed down from student to student. Often time, the original book came from one of the parents or an aunt or uncle. In place of using notebook paper, they used slates with a slate pen. Since most families couldn’t afford to replace the books or slates they had, many used a strap to hold them together in order to keep them safe – not because they were heavy.