The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT More About the One-Room School By William E. Bohn I am sure no one is proposing to go back to the one-room schoolhouse about which I talked nostalgically in The New Leader of...
...I had my first job when I was four years old...
...And now I sit in the same old chair playing the keys of my typewriter...
...In the end, I would grow skeptical...
...Seventy years from now...
...I have children who belong in four grades crowded into one, and I can't give many of them what they ought to have...
...Life was better for us back there, not just because the school was in some ways better, but because the home was a work place where we learned by doing...
...She honestly taught four or five grades in the same room...
...Inevitably, I become suspicious of myself...
...The teacher could readily promote a bright pupil into a higher grade, for, since the recitations all took place in the same room, it was likely that the new pupil already knew almost as much about the subject matter of the higher class as did the others in that grade--so the transition was a simple one...
...Everywhere I see people struggling out of the city...
...life may be as varied and lively as it was seventy years ago...
...My father used to sit rubbing the arms of his old chair, telling over and over the tales of his youth...
...Livingston will agree with me about another thing...
...When a fellow gels along in years, he naturally gives more and more definite shape to his memories...
...But this apartment-house life with its enormous bee-hive educational adjunct has become an inhuman horror...
...I, too, attended for some eight or nine years a one-room country school, where the teacher taught all eight grades with the youngsters reciting in the same room...
...To recapture the sort of good living we used to have, we must redesign this urban world...
...Pupils are promoted without regard to achievements--until one grade is made up of youngsters who should be in three or four...
...Livingston has restored my confidence by bearing witness to the very things which I experienced seventy years ago: "No doubt partially because my background is in some respects similar to yours (I was brought up on a farm in Michigan), I have peculiarly enjoyed your articles about country life in the pre-automobile era...
...One of the most agreeable echoes which has returned to me in a long time came from John W. Livingston, a consulting engineer of Manhasset, N.Y...
...One teacher said to me: "Your Georgia Thorpe was better off than I am right now...
...There was no compulsion about anything...
...The teachers seem to agree that we had some good things back there which have been lost in our present shining and complicated pedagogical outfits...
...She went on to explain that this grading in the modern school is largely a pretense forced upon the administrators by the mechanics of the system...
...Any child would have felt hurt if he had been omitted from the family's activities...
...THE HOME FRONT More About the One-Room School By William E. Bohn I am sure no one is proposing to go back to the one-room schoolhouse about which I talked nostalgically in The New Leader of December 26...
...Most of the arts and crafts which are now taught by experts were then taught by masters who had received their degrees from grandfather and grandmother...
...Don't gasp that it is impossible...
...And it is practically impossible for the most conscientious teacher to give them the various sorts of training and instruction which they should have...
...It was not difficult, either, to hold back a dull pupil...
...he must have told a dozen times how the German revolution failed in 1848...
...But you would be surprised to learn how much approbation has come my way for that little essay which I wrote about the primitive educational institution in the shadow of the woods...
...And they were properly, accurately and happily learned...
...No old fellow expects dreams like that to come true...
...Now Mr...
...My father was one of the best teachers in the world, and so was my mother...
...Did things happen this way--or am I, in part, creating these imposing pictures of the past...
...As you pointed out in your column, this country school which many educational 'experts' regarded as a relic of a barbarous age had a number of important advantages over present-day schools...
...These included, of course, your discussion of the country school in a recent issue of The New Leader...
...I wonder if Mr...
...It was far more flexible in fitting the varied requirements of individual pupils...
...A start is being made right now...
...Everyone worked...
...Perhaps he was adding romance to realism...
...In the country school, this problem did not arise, and it often happened that children of quite different ages preferred to work and play together...
...Another advantage of the country school was that the youngsters of one age associated with those of other ages...
...Whether the children were promoted or retarded, they still went to the same school and played with the same youngsters, and no social disgrace or other complication resulted from their change in grade...
...Since children of the same age often differ considerably in maturity, it must be more than a little trying for some of the students in modern schools to associate exclusively with children of their own grade and age...
Vol. 39 • January 1956 • No. 5
