Myron T. Pritchard
Boston schoolmaster who compiled Stories of Thrift for Young Americans with Grace A. Turkington in 1915.
Biography
Myron Thomas Pritchard (1853 to 1935) was an American public school educator in Boston, where he served as master of the Everett School. His name appears on the title pages of school readers compiled in the early twentieth century, and the little that is recorded about him comes from those books rather than from any biography.
With Grace A. Turkington he compiled Stories of Thrift for Young Americans in 1915, a school reader gathering short narratives and biographical sketches meant to teach saving, industry, and the careful use of money. It belongs to the American school thrift movement of the 1910s, when savings banks, teachers' associations, and civic groups pressed for thrift instruction as a regular part of the elementary curriculum. He was later one of the two editors, with Mary White Ovington, of The Upward Path: A Reader for Colored Children, published in 1920 as an anthology of writing by Black authors assembled for use in schools.
Why Pritchard Matters
Pritchard's importance is documentary rather than personal. Stories of Thrift for Young Americans is a clear specimen of how American schools of the 1910s taught economic character: not through abstract instruction in finance, but through short narratives about identifiable people, followed by questions that pushed the pupil to apply the story to his own habits. Thrift in the book means more than putting coins in a bank. It covers the use of time, the care of health, the avoidance of waste in food and clothing, and the treatment of small resources as things held in trust.
That framing tells a reader now what the period expected schooling to accomplish. Elementary education was understood to form habits as much as to transmit information, and the reader was the instrument for doing it. The same assumption stands behind The Upward Path a few years later, a collection assembled on the premise that the material a child reads in school shapes what he understands himself to be capable of.
