Small clapboard buildings, often painted white or red. Pot-bellied stoves. Blackboards and chalk, slate tablets and ink wells. McGuffey Readers and recitations. Dunce caps and hickory switches. Bespectacled schoolmarms. Calicoed girls with pigtails and tousled, mischievous boys.
Blend these images together and most likely a one-room schoolhouse pops to mind. Some of us may have never personally stepped foot in one of these buildings, but they appear in Western movies, in television shows like “Little House on the Prairie,” and in novels ranging from Mark Twain’s “Tom Sawyer” to Catherine Marshall’s “Christy.” They’re part of Americana, and we know them.
Self-Sufficient Schools
In the 19th century, such one-room schools were as common as churches in our nation’s communities. As late as 1919, 190,000 such schools were still operating in rural America, most often with one teacher offering instruction to students in grades 1–8. In the years since, rapid urbanization, improved roads that allowed the use of school buses, and ever-increasing state funding and supervision shuttered these schools and gave us the consolidated system we know today.Unlike our modern campuses, however, which are supported by property taxes and state and federal funds, the one-room schoolhouse was very much a community enterprise, a grand example of our ancestors’ code of self-reliance and independence. Many of the earliest of these schools were built and sponsored by churches, and as Americans moved west, just as often a settlement would join together, erect a schoolhouse, and raise the funds for a teacher, desks, books, and other supplies.
Students and Teachers
In the beginning, many of these teachers were male—young men with an education recruited by the town or by relatives who could vouch for them. As time passed, more and more young women also took up teaching. Unless they were from the community, these teachers often moved from home to home, thereby decreasing the burden of bed and board on any one family. In addition to their instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic, these teachers were usually responsible for seeing that the building was heated and for undertaking janitorial duties. They also practiced the self-reliance shown by their neighbors, as they had sole charge of the school and so acted as both teacher and principal.
For their students, learning by rote and recitation was common. They were aided in their memory work by hearing again and again the lessons taught to older and young students. For the mischief-makers, discipline was often harsh. The line from the old song “School Days”—“Reading and ’riting and ’rithmetic / Taught to the tune of the hickory stick”—was more often than not the rule.
Though the schools were built to service communities, students often walked long distances to take their desks and receive instruction. In many cases, usually because of work or chores at home, attendance could be sporadic. Abraham Lincoln, for example, sat in a schoolroom for a week here and there, receiving in total only about a year’s worth of formal education. Others faced this same dilemma, and some of them, like Lincoln, furthered their education by reading books on their own and learning skills on a job.
Benefits
Clearly, today’s young people possess many academic advantages over their predecessors: the number of subjects available for study, extracurricular activities, and electronic devices unimaginable to a Kansas farm kid in 1900.
Yet those tiny schools offered their own set of advantages. The teachers truly knew their students and their families. In the classroom, older students often helped the younger ones with their lessons, thereby reinforcing what they had already learned. Most of the students who graduated from eighth grade came away with the equivalent of today’s high school diploma. Schools grounded their pupils in the basics of civics and American history, and the history and literature textbooks offered as a by-product a fundamental course in morality and good habits. The “School Days” song mentioned earlier contains these two lines—“School days, school days / Dear old golden rule days”—which refer to that inculcation of virtues.
Incredibly, the individuals and communities who founded and maintained these tens of thousands of schools, plus the private academies that sprang up across the nation, relied largely on their own powers and resources. In fact, until 1930, nearly all of these schools depended only on local government for their funding, with some small help from state government.
The Dream Didn’t Die
Today, we may be tempted to wonder whether Americans are still capable of such self-sacrifice in the education of their children.The answer to that question is a resounding yes, with the evidence everywhere around us. Homeschooling continues to blossom, its growth spurred by the pandemic closures, and hundreds of homeschooling co-ops enrich the lives of these students. Pod schools, which in some ways resemble the old one-room schoolhouse, are gaining in popularity. Many private academies are flourishing, while parents whose children attend public schools are keeping closer watch these days on the subjects their sons and daughters are being taught and on the academic standards by which they are guided.
The little red schoolhouses, as many call them, have for the most part disappeared, but the aspirations and love that created them remain in the hearts of mothers and fathers.
This article was originally published in American Essence magazine.
