An American Memory: The One-Room Schoolhouse

The little red schoolhouse makes a comeback as parents today strive for the values that enveloped these early institutions.

A one-room schoolhouse in Breathitt County, Ky., 1940. Public Domain

Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Henry Ford, and my favorite college professor Ed Burrows all had one thing in common. Each attended a one-room schoolhouse.

And so did millions of other Americans.

The one-room school that Abraham Lincoln attended in 1822. Public Domain

In 1918, more than 196,000 such schools dotted our nation’s landscape, the vast majority of them in rural areas and small towns. As late as 1959, close to 24,000 of these still remained operational. Today, there are fewer than 500 public schools that qualify as a one-room schoolhouse, though as we shall see, some private academies and learning cooperatives have adopted this model of education.

Generations of Americans entered and graduated from this mainstay of education. Until quite recently, these schools gave us the great bulk of the men and women who settled the West, fought in our wars, and kept this country up and running through good times and bad. Sometimes affectionately remembered as “the little red schoolhouse”—red was the cheapest paint in those days—the one-room school came from a belief in the power of education older than the country itself, strengthened traditional values, and helped forge America into the international powerhouse it would become following World War I.

A Day in the Classroom

Though these schools varied one from the other depending on their location and the teacher, the many reminiscences left by instructors, pupils, and parents reveal remarkable similarities. The school day usually began at 9 a.m. Either the teacher or an older student would arrive even earlier in cold weather to fire up the pot-bellied stove that heated the building. Ages 6 to 14, and sometimes older, the students would arrive on foot or horseback with their lunch pails and books, take to their desks, and begin the day, often with prayer or a song, or later, with the Pledge of Allegiance.

Rather than being separated strictly by age or grade level, the class was just as often divided by ability. The day might start with a reading lesson, during which the teacher would summon groups of students to the “recitation bench” at the front of the class to read under her direction while the others worked in silence. Penmanship was another subject that received careful attention, which explains the fine script of the letters and diaries remaining from this age. Math was basic, designed to give students the tools they would need in farming and commerce. Students worked out arithmetic problems on the school blackboards or on slate tablets. Other subjects included history, geography, civics, and nature studies.

Typically, the students were given recess in the morning and afternoon, and a longer break for lunch, often an hour. Then they availed themselves of the outhouse, played games like Red Rover, built forts in the nearby woods or in the snow, or simply got to know one another. Many of them lived on isolated farms and were involved in chores once the school day ended, so these opportunities to socialize with their peers were precious.

Memorization was a key learning tool. The times tables, historic dates and events, poems, snatches of famous speeches and Shakespeare’s plays, verses from Scripture: all were grist in these mills of memory. My friend and college professor once told me that in his one-room school, which he attended the late 1920s and early ‘30s, he learned from the older students as they recited their lessons, helping him to advance academically, while recitations from the younger crew reinforced what he’d already learned.

The Teachers

The great majority of instructors in these small schools were female. In 1918 in South Dakota, for example, 686 men and 6,044 women were teaching in rural schools. As time passed, and as what were then called “normal schools” graduated more teachers, those who taught in these one-room schoolhouses might have earned official credentials and an advanced education. For much of the 19th century, however, most of the teachers were young women who lived in the communities where the schools were located, or nearby. It was not at all uncommon for them to have just graduated themselves from these “little red schoolhouses,” exchanging their student desks for a podium while still teenagers.

An iconic, red brick schoolhouse in Dixboro, Mich. Susan Montgomery/Shuttersock

In “Little House on the Prairie,” for instance, Laura Ingalls is 15 when she wins her teacher’s certificate; she was, in fact, 16 and was, technically, still two years from the required age to teach. Like some other states, however, South Dakota was desperate for teachers, and the age requirement was often ignored.

To win that certificate, prospective teachers were usually required to pass some sort of county exam in subjects like reading, math, and history. Just as importantly, however, they needed to possess good moral character. Moreover, female teachers were usually required to sign contracts stating that they wouldn’t marry while in their posts. Concerns here were, in part, practical. A married woman at that time would likely soon become a mother, and in an age when daycare didn’t exist, pregnancy and her children would soon force her resignation.

Though not highly trained, these teachers deserve a great deal of respect. They taught an assortment of children at various levels, they had to plan lessons and keep track of the progress of each of them, and they were responsible for maintaining order in such an age-diverse classroom. Here, they had help from both the community and the siblings who sat in their classes. Older brothers and sisters often oversaw the behavior of younger ones, and news of disturbances in the classroom soon reached the ears of parents, whose punishments at home were far more severe than those at school.

Moreover, lessons in self-discipline and a code of behavior were part and parcel of the education of the time.

Principles to Live By

From their inception, American schools focused on teaching morality along with academics. In the middle of the 17th century, the Massachusetts Puritans required towns of any size to open schools so that all students would learn to read the Bible. In 1785, the Land Ordinance governing the newly won Northwest Territory required that each township set aside a specific amount of land for public education, a feature unique for its time, while Article 3 of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 declared: “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

Several factors acted as allies in this advocacy of moral teaching. The communities that founded and supported these schools were generally united on customs and a moral code, so much so that many schoolhouses served also as meeting places for the community and as temporary quarters for churches. A strong biblical faith was therefore intertwined with the 3Rs, reading, writing, and arithmetic.

A collection of McGuffey Readers, 19th-century educational primer books used in many one-room schools. Dreamstime

Not to be underestimated was the influence of the McGuffey Readers. Developed in the 1830s, these readers, which began by teaching phonics and then proceeded to instruct students not only in reading but also in spelling, history, and more, became immensely popular with more than 120 million copies sold by 1925. Using examples ranging from fables to passages from Shakespeare, the readers handed down traditional Western values to countless numbers of the young. They remain in print today and are used in some homeschools and private academies.

Trade-Offs

In the 20th century, the system of centralized schools practiced in the larger cities began taking hold in rural America. With the rapid changes in transportation, bussing students to school became possible. Consolidating the one-room schoolhouses of a county into two or three elementary and high schools broadened the number of subjects that could be offered to the young, like foreign languages and advanced sciences. They also created more extracurricular opportunities, like sports teams and school clubs, and made education more standardized.

As with so many things, these changes brought losses as well as gains. With school consolidation, the intimacy of the one-room schoolhouse, for all its faults, gave way to classes stratified by grade level, a necessarily more rigid daily schedule and program for advancement, and weakened student-to-student and student-to-teacher relationships.

For better and for worse, America outgrew what some had called the little red schoolhouse.

The Past Becomes the Future

In learning pods, or microschools, small groups of families take turns teaching children, or pool resources to hire a teacher. Andrii Medvednikov/Shutterstock

For many reasons, ranging from a desire to incorporate religious faith into their children’s academic learning to dissatisfaction with the performance of public schools, the last 40 years have seen growing numbers of parents and teachers trying innovative approaches to education. Nearly all of these, it turns out, have roots in the American past.

Homeschoolers are following in the footsteps of mothers who, in the 18th century, taught their children at home without giving it a thought. Homeschooling co-ops—where parents with common values gather every week or so, and where those with special talents or training teach classes—reflect the spirit of the one-room schoolhouse, as do hybrid schools, which more formally blend the classroom with homeschooling. Microschools, where a group of parents typically hire a teacher, essentially function like the old-time one-room schoolhouses.

Just as advances in teacher training and transportation brought about the public schools we know them today, today’s digital technology with its wealth of information and resources is breathing life into the concept of smaller schools and more intimate classrooms.

In this way, the one-room schoolhouses of yore are passing the torch to parents and educators of the 21st century.

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