Posted on 06/29/2009 7:52:37 PM PDT by oblomov
Tacked to my wall is a lithograph of the famous Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington. For many years, it graced my mother's one-room schoolhouse in Lime Rock, N.Y. Antiquarian relic or enduringly relevant image? The same question may be asked of the "little red schoolhouse" itself, whose reality and legend are the subject of "Small Wonder." Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor at New York University, sets out to tell "how -- and why -- the little red schoolhouse became an American icon." Mr. Zimmerman proves a thoughtful and entertaining teacher.
First, the chromatic debunking: One-room schools were often white and seldom red. The teachers were usually young unmarried females, pace the most famous one-room schoolteacher in literature, Ichabod Crane. They swept the floor, stoked the stove, rang the hand-bell and taught their mixed-age students by rote and recitation. The schools could be a "cauldron of chaos," in Mr. Zimmerman's alliteration, as tyro teachers were tormented by Tom Sawyers dipping pigtails in inkwells and carving doggerel into desks.
.Yet these one-room schools, Mr. Zimmerman notes, were "a central venue for community life in rural America." They hosted plays and dances and box socials and spelling bees and Christmas pageants.
In 1913, Mr. Zimmerman says, "one-half of the nation's schoolchildren attended one of its 212,000 single-teacher schools." By 1960, progressive educationists, growing cities and the centralizing pressures of two world wars and a Cold War had reduced the total to just 1%.
The attempt to abolish one-room schoolhouses, whether by the carrot of state aid or the stick of government fiat, set off one of the great unknown political wars of U.S. history, pitting farm people who "invoked classic themes of liberty and self-rule" against the "mostly urban elites" who "would wage zealous battle against the rural one-room school."
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
OK, but I don't think I'm the only one wondering why you bothered to post this.
What do you mean?
I’ll spell it out for you: Y-A-W-N
Not every posting needs to be on the FRONTPAGE you know.
Read the entire article, it’s a good mini-history of our education system. Speaking of the simple way, years ago we homeschooled with some friends of ours for a few years, our local HS was a disaster at the time.
When the boys went back “mainstream” after the HS got back on track, our friend’s son was Valedictorian of their class. It did NOT required mega-bucks per kid to educate them. We kept some of the textbooks, they are excellent sources on American history that is hard to find under one cover, we still refer to them to double check some of the History Channel’s slant on things.
Can you imagine? A rural school just a couple miles from Silicon Valley?
For those of you registered with the Merc, you can read more at Montebello School in Cupertino hills shuts down after 117 years
Except, of course, when it came to Standard Oil, Union Pacific, etc.
That's period and local dependent. Ichabod Crane would have been teaching, if he'd been real, circa 1790. While the vast majority of those white schoolhouses were out on the frontier, or what had been the frontier and was still rural rather than urban. Those date from the first great push west, not long after the revolution, until the 1950s and even 1960s. But many would have been establish from the 1870 to early 1900s. Those generally had a woman teacher, often with no post high school education herself, later with a year maybe two of "normal school". They had no principal, no "coordinators", no secretaries, and no janitor. They usually had a county superintendent of schools, but that was it.
Many of my first cousin's, the majority in fact, attended such schools, usually through eighth grade. My mother, her siblings and my grandparents also attended such schools, but that's as far as grandpa got, eighth grade. The rest went on to "town school" for high school. My mother lived with her grandparents, themselves the first generation to be born in the US, during the week, going home for the weekend. It wasn't all that far, but in the Nebraska winters, and part of spring and fall too, with no car and mostly with unpaved roads, anything more than a mile or two was "far".
The schools both families of cousins went to were white, as was the school across the road from some other cousins' (3rd on Dad's side, 5th on Moms). That one was no no longer in use circa 1964, but was still in very good condition, it's gone now.
My wife's father also attended one of those white one room schools. That building still exists, or did as of last summer anyway, although it's been moved to a farmstead nearby. We have one of the desks from it, albeit with a new top, made by my father-in-law, who got it when the school was moved. We used to buy eggs from the farmer's wife who bought the building.
The year I graduated from high school, one of the state's two Presidential Scholars had gone to one of those one room school houses, and then to one the county's two "town" high schools, the other one from the one my father in law had attended. The other went to my high school over 100 miles away, which was and is in the largest size "class" of high schools in the state.
Oh... I didn’t intend it to be front page news. I tagged it as an editorial. It was in the Opinion section at the WSJ.
I had forgotten that LBJ was a teacher. Whatever his merits or demerits as a Senator or President, I think he would have been quite an excellent teacher.
You are making a fairly common mistake here. The article is a book review. As such, it necessarily includes the opinions of the author/book critic, but it was not written as an op/ed piece. A lot of newspapers seem to include book reviews like this one in the opinion section of their web pages. Nevertheless, I'm betting that it did not appear on the second or third to last pages of the first section of the WSJ print addition. It most likely appeared somewhere in the "Personal Journal" section.
Earlier, I pointed out that the column did not belong in FRONTPAGE, and you correctly responded that it was posted to EDITORIALS. What I meant to say was that it did not belong on the SIDEBAR, which is where it goes when you post it to EDITORIALS (where it was posted, incorrectly). Normally I wouldn't care, except that you happened to post it on to of two editorials that I posted which were more timely and relevant. Also, they were both EDITORIALS. At the same time you did this, some joker was in the process of posting every column on IBD's opinion page, and then pinging every person he knew individually, plus a ping list that he created. The result was seven or eight columns that immediately buried my posts and the posts and several other more interesting posts. So I and the other posters wasted our time. I'm sure that was not your intention, just as it is not my intention to be scolding anyone.
When you post to NEWS/ACTIVISM, highlight topic is not always essential, let alone appropriate. Peace.
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