School Certificates of Merit For Good Little 19th-Century Boys and Girls

The digital archive of The Henry Ford has a group of 60 examples of rewards of merit given to 19^th-century schoolchildren. Early certificates were sometimes hand-produced, while later in the century, they were more commonly preprinted featuring colorful chromolithographed images of flowers and animals or small humorous scenes.

Between 1830 and 1860, historian Carl F. Kaestle has written, American schools, influenced by theories stemming from European educators Joseph Lancaster and Johann Pestalozzi, began to favor the inculcation of “internalized discipline through proper motivation.” In practice, this kind of discipline might include positive reinforcement, like these certificates, as well as corporal punishment. 

Schools that wanted to teach children to be “obedient, punctual, deferential, and task-oriented,” Kaestle writes, were responding to the exigencies of a classroom environment that could easily descend into chaos. (Nineteenth-century schoolrooms might be crowded with large numbers of students or be required to serve a wide variety of ages and abilities; teachers were sometimes young and inexperienced.) 

This range of merit certificates shows what kinds of behaviors were valued in 19^th-century students: selflessness, “correct deportment,” and diligence.