As children completed each primer, they would move farther from the teacher, so that everyone in a row would be studying the same book and could file forward as a class. In practice, this meant that the schoolroom was arranged from small to large, with the youngest children closest to the teacher and to the heat source. As the bigger children aged out of school in their early to mid-teens, the boys to farming, the girls to marriage or school teaching of their own, they moved closer and closer to the door, until finally they were free.

—Alexandra Lange, The Design of Childhood