In fact, in the 1976 Satyajit Ray film “The Middleman,” which was meant to be contemporary to the time in which it was made, there is a scene in which university students are sitting for examinations, and the main character is writing in his exam booklet with a dip pen and ink bottle.
So, it’s possible that those were being used as late as the 1970s in India.
When I was a kid visiting India in the 1970s, most of the adults I knew used fountain pens with bottled ink, but maybe there were still people using dip pens as a cheaper alternative. Ball-point pens/biros (locally called “dot pens”) were in use but were still considered a little bit of a new thing, and serious people doing serious work would always pull out their fountain pens.
I don’t think I ever encountered any inkwell desks in my classrooms (Southern California, 60s-70s), but I did see a number of them around the old Auditorium (built 1903). They were used mainly as stage props.
1950’s - we used dip pens in Grade 3, and switched to fountain pens later in the year. No ballpoints allowed until Grade 6 or 7 (early 60’s).
The original (1920’s-built school) screwed-to-the-floor desks with flip-up seats had ink “holes”, but gradually got replaced with movable desks and chairs. The new desks still had the ink “holes” which held our ink bottles perfectly. I’m sure some of those desks are still around - they were solidly built.
I started school in 1948. The first few years we used ink from ink wells and nib pens. We learned to be very careful in writing; as you can imagine there is a great potential for messes when young children use these!
It wasn’t until high school that we used ball point pens for our school work (except math which required pencils - a good thing for me in my early math years.) And calculators weren’t common until college. If only we had word processing programs and computers, and not only that…
Schools are often underfunded and use equipment until it falls apart. We used the same desktop computers at my job for at least 4 to 5 years before money was budgeted for new ones. We were still using 486 computers 3 years after the Pentium processor hit the market.
I bet some schools got 25 or more years out of student desks. I remember the wooden desks with the hole in elementary school. We had slick Formica desktops in junior high and high school.
British, finished high school in the late 90s.
My primary and secondary school desks mostly had a hole for a ink well IIRC, some with a sliding metal cover. The desks were good quality, so I don’t blame the schools for not throwing them out.
Unlike some of the other brits though, I never encountered any specific rules about which kind of pen to use, and most pupils chose to use biros.
My elementary school was built in 1926 (I had to look it up). I attended from 1957-1964, and our desks had no ink wells even though we were required to use ink pens (the cartridge kind) once we moved from printing to script. They didn’t even have the hole to fit an ink well in. We did have a narrow indentation at the top of the desk to hold a pen or pencil.
I guess they probably replaced the desks sometime before I started attending?
It occurred to me to wonder what dimensions do good inkwells have? How much ink should they hold? Should they be shallow, square, or deep? Cylindrical, cubical, bottle-shaped, boot-shaped, something else? Also, where do you rest your pen? And how many of these desirable properties, if any, did school inkwells have?
Surely there is many centuries of market research on this, as inkwells long predate steel pens.
I came in to say something similar. The first time Schulz drew a school desk into a comic strip, that likely locked in what desks looked like in the Peanuts universe forever.
As for myself, I started kindergarten in 1969. Never saw or used an inkwell. I do recall some desks had the circular indentation where they once went.
