A journalist for McClure's, Adele Marie Shaw, wrote six "muckraking" articles on urban schools in 1903-1904. This December 1903 excerpt from the first in the series describes the stifling teaching style present in one school:

The tone of continual exasperation in which more than one class is addressed would blight the forthputting powers of a Macaulay. Truancy from some of the classes should be imputed to a child for righteousness. In one room where a geography recitation was in lumbering progress, I volunteered the beaming comment, "These seem like nice boys." "I haven't found them so," answered the teacher sourly, and a sudden animation and-general straightening lapsed into stodginess. . . .

In one school where I spent the better part of two days I did not once hear any child express a thought in his own words. Attention was perfect. No pupil could...