1940s

Even the relative idyll of the classroom was not untouched by World War II. Students at New York City public schools had to perform periodic air raid drills; some required high school students to gather in a building’s central corridor, while in others, younger students, grouped by where they lived, were escorted home by teachers.

At 11 a.m. on Nov. 13, 1941, three weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the entire school system, all 1.1 million students at 1,000 schools, participated in a simultaneous drill.