The Irreparable Loss of the One-Room School

They are ubiquitous throughout small-town USA. Today they mostly serve as houses, sheds or chicken coops, but once they were a fixture, an integral part of every community. You can still usually tell them apart from other houses, sheds, or chicken coops by their rather unique structure.

I am referring, of course, to the one-room schools that once served as the backbone of middle American education. Generations of children, from colonial times through the middle of the twentieth century, were taught in these community institutions. They in turn built a nation the likes of which the world had never seen.

One only has to go back one generation in my own family to find someone who attended a one-room school. My father studied in the one pictured below, from 1954-1955.

Interestingly, the “Dad” captioned in this picture is not my Dad, but rather his grandfather (my great-grandfather), who studied in the same school in the last decade of the 19th century.

On my mother’s side, the one-room roots go even deeper. Her mother (my grandmother) not only studied in this one room school…

…she also taught in this one:

As the result of discussions in a recent class I took on educational policy here in Brazil, I have reflected much on the role these schools played in their communities, and in American society as a whole. And it struck me that the physical aspect of the one-room school was indicative of its societal function.

The middle-point between family and faith

Observe this recent picture of a remarkably preserved typical one-room school, located in Coventry, NY:

Pay special attention to the architectural style. It contains some elements of a church, but you can tell it’s not a church. It also bears some resemblance to a house, but it is also obviously not a house. Rather, it seems to be an architectural halfway point between the two. (This, by the way, is the same school as in the first picture, featuring my great grandfather.)

Whether purposeful or not, this aesthetic speaks to how the school functioned in those small towns. In short, they where faith and family met to form community. Brothers and sisters of different ages studied together, the church was heavily involved (though they were not usually “church schools”), and the curriculum was designed to make the students profitable members of their own community. It is noteworthy, I think, that they are often referred even today as “school-houses”. As I prepared this post, my Dad reminded me that these buildings also served as the scene of community meetings and social events.

So as centralized schools gradually took the place of the school house, what was the nature of their replacement? Once again, let’s look at the aesthetics of the modern school building.

From nurturing to mass production

Most American children, from the 1960s on, studied in something like this:

By definition, the centralized schools had to be large buildings in order to be able to serve all the students from the surrounding communities. Students no longer spent the day in an environment that resembled their homes and/or churches, but in impersonal monstrosities designed to look like the factories and offices in which they would one day spend the rest of their lives. Due to the physical distance from home, fleets of busses replaced troops of brothers and sisters marching (up hill both ways in the snow!) to school. They were not being prepared to live in their communities, but to move away from them.

Their new learning environment informed the students that, rather than being the next generation of the community to be nurtured and matured with love and care, they were products to be conformed to a centralized standard, then launched into the “job market”.

I don’t mean to suggest that the change in education venue was the sole issue that led to the decline of rural, small-town America. Many factors are to blame, such as industrialization, secularization, interstate highways, etc. Indeed, in a conversation with my grandmother before she passed away, she told my mother that in many cases the closing of the one-room school was the result of these phenomena, not the cause.

But while the modern school buildings are not the cause of the problem, they certainly don’t help at all. In fact, I contend that they contribute to it, perhaps even accelerate it. The alienation, over medication, and commercialization of the child is much easier to accomplish in a “building” than in a “house”. And the argument that the quality of education was improved by these centralized clearinghouses is, to me, laughable. My aforementioned grandmother, product of the one-room school, could do complex division in her head, well into her old age. What’s more, in the same conversation with my mother, she affirmed that, having taught in both one-room and centralized schools, she could think of no educational benefit whatsoever in switching to the new structures.

Is there a way back?

I don’t know. Homeschooling cooperatives perhaps come the closest to reproducing the dynamic of the old-time school house. But despite the post-pandemic uptick they are still a somewhat fringe operation, unlikely to be able to invert the national downward spiral in education. Real renewal would have to involve communities taking a serious interest in what is going on in school, having the courage to face up to state and national educational bureaucracies, the will to invest in the old system, and perhaps a re-repurposing of some of those old houses, sheds, and chicken coops.

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And be sure to read the action-packed adventures of Missionary Max: Missionary Max and the Jungle Princess and Missionary Max and the Lost City.