Historic Communities

A One-Room School by Bobbie Kalman, 1994.

The book begins by saying that there was a time when not all communities had schools at all. In areas where the population was low, children had lessons at home or from a neighbor, if they had lessons at all. Towns and villages needed enough children living there to support even a small school. (The book doesn’t describe exactly when or where they’re talking about, but it’s implied that this is the United States or the American frontier.) When there were enough settlers in an area for a school, they might make a small log cabin for the school. As populations grew and there were more students, they would build better schools.

Requirements for teachers were different back then than they were today. Most teachers were men because married women were not allowed to be teachers. Only single women could teach. Teachers were also often required to handle rough students as well as teach them, and all ages and grades of students would study together in one-room schools. The teacher would manage the different grade levels by having them dividing them into groups based on their levels and having the different groups take turns reading aloud to her while other students did quiet work, like practicing writing. The teacher would set some students quiet tasks to do while focusing on a different group, and then, they would switch. Teachers were also responsible for the cleaning and maintenance of their school, but they typically assigned students chores to help with that. Local families would provide room and board for the teacher of their community, and they would also contribute toward the teacher’s salary.

Lessons were basic and focused mostly on the “three Rs” – reading, writing, and arithmetic. (Those three subjects contain the letter ‘R’ near the beginning, even if they don’t all start with that letter.) There was often little time to teach anything else, and these were the subjects that were most important to people with the most common jobs, such as farmer, craftsperson, or storekeeper. In schools that taught a wider range of subjects, students would also learn history (mainly focused on the United States), world geography, and grammar.

Small schools often had few books or supplies. Because paper was often in short supply, children would memorize lessons and verbally recite them back to the teacher and would practice writing on slates (small blackboards). When students were able to buy paper, they bought a blank notebook they called a copybook. The paper in the copybook wasn’t lined, so if they wanted lined paper, they had to draw the lines themselves, using a ruler.

A small school might also only have two books for the students to study: a primer for beginning readers (which showed the alphabet, numbers, and some basic spelling words and poems) and a copy of the Bible. The most popular series of books for building reading skills in the 19th century was McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers. The series started with a primer and continued with six readers, each one at a higher reading level than the last one to build more advanced reading skills. In the small, one-room schools, students would work through these books at their own pace. (Since all ages and grade levels were together in one room, there was little concern about each student moving to the next grade at the exact same time as their peers since they were all still going to be in the same room with the same teacher anyway. As long as a student was continuing to come to school and make progress, it didn’t really matter how fast or slow the progress was.)

The book describes the daily routines of students at small, one-room schools, including how they would get to school each day and what they would do at lunchtime and recess. Most children simply walked to school, although they often had to walk long distances to get there. Sometimes, they might ride a horse to school or get a ride from an adult in a wagon or sleigh, if it was winter. Children brought their lunches from home, but some schools also maintained a school garden. Most of the children from these small schools would grow up to be farmers, so gardening was a valuable skill for them to practice, and the students would also eat what they grew in the school’s garden. During the winter, they could make a soup with vegetables they grew on the stove in the schoolhouse (which also kept the schoolhouse warm) that everyone would eat for lunch. The schoolhouse stove could also be used to heat up foods that the children brought from home. Besides their lunch break, the students would also have two short recess breaks during the day. During recess, they could walk around outside, talk to their friends, play games, or play with toys they brought from home, like marbles. Toys were often homemade or easily improvised, such as using string to play Cat’s Cradle.

Sometimes, students would play pranks on their teacher or fellow students, such as hiding bugs and spiders to scare someone, pouring water on their seat if they got up, or covering the schoolhouse chimney to fill the school with smoke and smoke everyone out of the school. The last prank was dangerous.

Punishments for pranks and misdeeds, such as being late or falling asleep in class, were at the teacher’s discretion. They could take whatever form the teacher thought was appropriate for the situation, and they could be as harsh and strict as the teacher thought was necessary. Sometimes, they could be a form of poetic justice, designed to fit the crime. We aren’t told why one misbehaving boy was told to put on a girl’s bonnet and sit with the girls in class, although it might have been a fitting punishment if his misdeed was teasing the girls. (That was just a guess of mine, that the teacher might have decided that, if he wanted to tease girls, he should try sitting in their place for awhile.) Some punishments were meant to teach lessons and reinforce the idea that children should not repeat certain behaviors, such as having the children repeatedly write lines, sentences that spelled out what they were supposed to do or not do. (For example, a student who was late to school could be assigned to write, “I will not be late to school” or “I will be on time to school from now on” a certain number of times.) Other punishments were purely for humiliation, like having a student wear a cap that labeled them as a “dunce”, in the hopes that the embarrassment would keep them from misbehaving again. (This could also be the goal of making a boy wear a bonnet and sit with the girls.) Punishments could even include physical punishments. Teachers were allowed to whip their students, if they though it was necessary, and some teachers even punished children who were physically fighting by making them take turns whipping or hitting each other with a stick. The book doesn’t explain the motive for doing this, but I think that they were probably emphasizing the idea that people who fight get hurt and that getting hurt is unpleasant to discourage them from fighting more in the future. I also suspect that the point of making them take turns hitting each other was to make it equal, so it wasn’t just one person beating up on the other, but that’s just a guess. When the students got home, and their parents found out about what they had done at school that day, they might even get a second punishment, on top of whatever punishment the teacher assigned them!

Sometimes, schools had special events for holidays or academic events that involved members of the wider community. For example, schools sometimes had spelling bees, including some where adult members of the community would watch or participate. Schools often had Christmas pageants, where children would sing songs or recite poems they had memorized or perform a play written by the students themselves. At the end of the school year, students would have oral exams in front of their parents and other community members, followed by a picnic with games.

The book ends with a section of games and activity suggestions designed to show modern kids what it might be like to be a student in an old-fashioned one-room school and compare their own schools to old-fashioned schools.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

Books in the Historical Communities series focus mostly on the 1800s in the United States, but they don’t always mention exactly what time period they are describing. It’s often more implied than stated, and that’s true of this book, too. The book mentions the 19th century once or twice, but it doesn’t mention any specific date or date range.

The pictures in the book are a combination of drawings and photographs of real people in historical costumes, reenacting scenes at schoolhouses and the lives of the students. I liked the combination of real people and drawings to illustrate different concepts about life and education in old-fashioned, one-room schools.

There are some concepts of education in a one-room school that fit with the educational concepts of the modern Montessori system, such as having students of different levels being taught together and having students progress at their own rate in different subjects. In a way, I think that the Montessori system hearkins back to this one-room school style of education, and that’s examined in more detail in the classic children’s book Understood Betsy, which is by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who was an early advocate of the Montessori method of education in the United States.