The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM
THE HOME FRONT One-Room School Wasn't So Bad By William E. Bohn The great White House conference on education which recently closed in Washington has set me to thinking back. It was in 1883 that...
...Everybody except me seems to agree that this is a consummation devoutly to be hoped for...
...No one told her what to do...
...That was seventy years ago...
...Despite all the yammering that goes on about the lack of teachers and schoolrooms and equipment, I know that there has been great improvement in many features of our school system...
...We learned them by living in a decent and humane society...
...let's go and see what we can learn in the woods...
...She had never attended any sort of teacher-training school...
...It would have seemed very strange for the teacher to try to teach a thing which everyone understood and practiced from the start...
...We did not learn these things which they have emphasized in Washington by having them included in a program or taught by a teacher...
...There was no one over her...
...This school of mine had the great advantage of flexibility...
...But I note in the program of the White House conference four subjects on which special emphasis is laid: democracy, cooperation, civic rights, and appreciation of human values...
...Now only some 40,000 are left standing...
...We never used to hear-as we do nowadays in our cities-of big boys teasing, striking or torturing little ones...
...In the winter, when the biggest boys could be spared from the farms, there would be great fellows in attendance who found it difficult to accommodate their long legs to the biggest seats...
...She knew all their parents and the homes from which they came...
...The money to pay the teacher and buy the simple equipment was paid in the form of real-estate taxes by the neighboring farmers...
...The notion of helping one another, of living together decently and kindly, was developed naturally...
...During the two years that I absorbed my learning at this simple fount, the teacher was Georgia Thorpe...
...I revisited the old place last summer...
...No one can tell me that it was bad...
...This resulted from no sort of planning...
...In connection with the Washington conference, the news agencies have been sending out items intended to indicate improvement...
...She was not afraid of anyone...
...But she had several advantages over the most elaborately trained teacher in one of our most up-to-date schools...
...While the progressive administrators are rapidly tearing down these old places, I hope they will remember that in them we learned democracy, cooperation and the basic morals about which they talk so much-and we learned them without much talk...
...She knew every pupil...
...New generations of young people are sitting in the old seats, playing ball in the old schoolyard, and, I am sure, knocking down the nuts in the October woods...
...Through their Committeeman, they hired and paid the teacher, and the teacher ran the school...
...Everything is just as it always was, the building, the grounds-and, especially, the brook and the woods and the pawpaws and wild grapes which helped to make school a joyous place...
...Her techniques, as I recall them, were simple in the extreme...
...Our physical outfit back in 1883 was on the primitive side: a big-bellied stove, a water-bucket, two blackboards, some wall-maps, and a Webster's dictionary...
...The seats and desks, which were joined, accommodated two pupils each and were arranged with those for the little fellows in front and those for the older pupils in back...
...We lived in a community, and the teacher had the support of every member of it...
...There are, of course, disadvantages about having four or five grades studying and reciting to the same teacher in the same room...
...It was in 1883 that my short legs first carried me over the mile that separated our farm from the little red-brick schoolhouse...
...Twenty-five years ago, we are told, there were about 150,000 one-room, one-teacher schoolhouses in the land...
...The executives of the great get-together joyously foretold that in practically no time at all these relics of the barbaric past will have disappeared...
...That one-room, one-teacher school-house is one of the few thousands still remaining...
...I have great admiration both for the new buildings and for the new teachers...
...It grew out of circumstances...
...And often big boys or girls would help the little ones with their lessons...
...And so, if there came an especially sunny afternoon in October and we knew that the pawpaws or butternuts were ripe, the teacher would probably say: "Well, we have learned enough from books for one day...
...But there are great advantages about having all of the youngsters from 6 to 18 working and playing together from morning to night...
...Often when we were covering the distance between school and home in snow or rain, the stout six-foot boys would carry the little fellows over the rough places...
...It is hard to imagine in these days, but there was absolutely no supervision...
...From the beginning, children felt at home and safe in the world...
...On that schoolground, I never heard a boy utter a curse, I never saw one try to cheat in a game, I never saw an instance of cruelty...
Vol. 38 • December 1955 • No. 51
