Little Red Schoolhouse
Education historian Jon Zimmerman talks to host Brian Balogh about why Americans romanticize 19th century one-room schoolhouses, and describes what they were really like.
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Excerpted from: School Days: A History of Public Education
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School Days: A History of Public Education | BackStory With The American History Guys :
[...] Little Red Schoolhouse Education historian John Zimmerman tells 20th Century Guy Brian Balogh why Americans romanticize the one-room schoolhouse, and what they were really like. [...]
Quote -- September 16, 2010 @ 10:41 am
I enjoyed the interview and am eager to read Jon Zimmerman’s book. I must disclose that I have my own book, Making the Grade: The Economic Evolution of American School Districts (Chicago 2009), in which one-room schools figure large, and Jon seems to have the facts down pretty well. I would only add one thing to this interview, which is that the pedagogy of one-room schools was an adaptive technology. The recitation method was simple to apply by relatively untrained young adults (or adolescents–Laura Ingalls was not exceptionally young when she took up teaching at age 15), and the basic box of a school was easily reproduced. The recitation method of rote memorization and disgorgement to the teacher is unappealing, but it allowed children to attend school on a part time basis, as many–perhaps most–rural children had to do. A child could miss a month of school and come back without having to have a lot of remedial education to fit into his or her grade. Up to about 1870, there were not age-specific grades, so the returning child could just pick up where he or she had left off. The big drawback of the one-room school was not the shack-like condition of the school or the harsh discipline, both of which simply reflected contemporary home conditions. The drawback was that the child typically had the teacher’s attention for only a few minutes a day. With so many different recitations to hear, the teacher could not get much beyond the reading-writing-arithmetic trilogy. This was fine in the nineteenth century, but could not prepare children for the twentieth-century’s high school education.
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