So far we’ve looked at the first public school in the U.S., what education was like in the Massachusetts Bay Colony circa 1635, and what the Bray School tells us about education around the time of the Revolutionary War. We also looked at the Lancaster Monitorial system from the early decades of the 19th century before shifting to the Common School Movement and how it shaped U.S. Education. Today we’re talking about the one-room schoolhouse and how things changed (or didn’t) for students in the latter half of the 19th century.
Bunert School, Michigan, 1876; image in the public domain
If you grew up reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books (or watching the TV series in the 1970s) you can probably instantly call to mind the basic layout of a one-room schoolhouse — the rows of desks, the cast iron stove, the slates, the teacher with her bell to call the students to lessons. The one-room school house has an enduring place in the American historical imagination, so much so that we tend to think of it as an essentially American phenomenon. One-room schoolhouses, though, appeared all over the Western world in rural areas too thinly populated to support a larger institution. They followed hard on the heels of compulsory education laws, wherever they were enacted, and they have lasted in many places until the present day. As of 2020, nearly 400 one-room school houses were still in operation in the U.S., all in either extremely rural areas or areas with Amish or Mennonite communities. The rise of the one-room schoolhouse just after the Civil War, however, straddles a set of important shifts in education. If we look at it closely, we can see bits and pieces of earlier educational ideas and systems and some foreshadowing of educational ideas to come, and we can lay to rest the widespread modern idea that we are still adhering to the calendar in use when the one-room schoolhouse was the norm.
Waldron School 1879, Oregon. Image in the public domain.
The fact that one-room schoolhouses existed at all grew out of the same philosophy that drove the Boston Latin School and even the Bray School; the idea that education should be accessible for all students. The first major shift here is that “all students” now included girls*; an idea that arose from Horace Mann’s efforts in the 1830s. These threads come together around and after the Civil War as rural communities more widely accepted the idea that all students should be provided an 8th grade education. The steady and alarming uptick in immigration — something that affected even small communities as waves of immigrants migrated west — reinforced the need to “Americanize” new arrivals. A common education seemed to be the perfect solution.
There was very little change in what was taught. The curriculum was essentially the Common School curriculum of the 1840s. Students still learned the 3 Rs along with mathematics (still the four basic operations) but geography became standard. There was a heavy focus on “training the faculties,” or building students’ mental capacities. The three main faculties were the will, the emotions, and the intellect. Acquiring knowledge (memorizing) trained the intellect and developed reasoning (the logic here is unclear, at least to me). The brain was a muscle and memorization was how one exercised it. Training the will and emotions led to both self-control and an appreciation of beauty. All the developed faculties together produced a student’s good character. Moral instruction was still woven throughout the curriculum, with reading passages full of exhortations and axioms and regular Bible readings and scripture recitations. All of this was believed to produce good citizens.
Learning still took the form of memorization and recitation, as it had when the Boston Latin School opened in 1635. ‘Writing’ in the curriculum actually meant spelling or penmanship. But in the midst of what we would now call drill and kill, we can see another shift: the beginnings of small group instruction, particularly in the one-room schoolhouses. Teachers began working with small groups of students, grouped by the material they were working on, to help them complete their work. There was still a lot of memorizing, but the seeds of small group instruction and individual attention were there.
Salem Normal School graduates, circa 1880. The class is evenly split, male/female. Image in the public domain.
One very obvious shift was that teachers were increasingly female. The first normal school for women opened in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1839, but teachers were overwhelmingly men right up until the Civil War. When male teachers enlisted to fight, communities were forced to hire women to keep schooling on track. After the war, it was easy for men who found they didn’t much like teaching to quit and find more lucrative white collar work. Educated women, on the other hand, had only teaching and not much else open to them. They were paid less than their male counterparts because they were required to be single and thus didn’t have families to support (which would require a higher salary). If they married, they had to leave their positions.** It was a system that both enforced and exploited their singleness, but it was a popular choice for young women, probably because it was virtually the only respectable choice available. By 1900, female teachers dominated the teaching profession — a domination that continues today in the elementary grades. Children educated in one-room schoolhouses more often than not were taught by women.
First Geography Book, 1860; the information is split into short lessons of lists of facts designed to facilitate memorization and recitation. Image in the public domain.
One-room schoolhouses were still lacking a lot of things that might surprise us, like Kindergarten. The first kindergarten was opened in the U.S. in 1856, modeled on the Kindergartens established in Germany 20 years earlier, but this model wasn’t really practical in the one-room schoolhouse. Kindergarten would remain an urban phenomenon until well into the 20th century.*** One-room schoolhouses (and most Common Schools) still didn’t have anything that really resembled science, though high schools were increasingly teaching specific natural sciences — biology, zoology, and physics. Although Massachusetts^ mandated at least one year of algebra in high school in 1827, it wouldn’t be widely recommended for 65 more years (1892), so students still learned only the four main operations. Math concepts by the end of 8th grade now are vastly more advanced than what a typical 8th grade student came away with in the late 19th century.
The other thing that becomes immediately obvious is that the typical school calendar in rural areas in no way resembles our current school calendar with its long summer break. Up to 1900, the rural school year occurred over two terms: a summer term from May to August and a winter term from November to April. This allowed students to be home at key points during the farming year: planting (and perhaps calving or lambing) in April, and harvesting (and food preservation) from August to the end of October. In contrast, urban schools often had students year round. Eventually, as there was a push for standard school calendars, the two schedules converged. What we generally follow now was a compromise between two very different calendars. Our big summer break stems from a late 19th century belief that learning in hot weather was particularly bad for students.^^ This belief happened to coincide with the need to provide teachers with additional training and professional development, thus the big summer break.
The real breakthrough represented by one-room schoolhouses — and by the Common School movement that spurred their creation — was access. Many children who would otherwise never have been educated — girls, poor children, immigrant children — now had access to at least basic literacy and math skills. Women now had access to higher education and to a profession that allowed them to support themselves. That represented a sea change from attitudes about who could or should be educated when the American Colonies were formed.
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*It did not, however, fully include people of color except in their own, completely segregated schools. These schools were often — usually — even less well-supplied than the one-room schoolhouses.
**Preventing married women from teaching was not completely illegal until 1964. And only after 1974 were women allowed to teach while pregnant.
***Some states were really late to the party with kindergarten. Mississippi was the last state to finally offer publicly-funded kindergarten in 1986.
^Have you noticed that Massachusetts keeps popping up at the leading edge of educational reform? Me, too.
^^There was a lot of concern in the 1800s that people might overwork their brains. Early in the century it crops up a LOT in discussions about educating women, with the prevailing idea being that too much study, reading, and thinking would overtax the fragile female body and result in collapse. Out of this idea came the “rest cure” for women (well…wealthy women) in which they were allowed no mental or physical activity whatsoever. Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote chillingly about this in her famous short story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. Eventually, the idea extended to children and then to people in general, though men were less susceptible to it because of their supposed masculine superiority. Weirdly (or conveniently; take your pick) there was no concern about poor people working too hard in hot weather in factories or on farms, something that actually could result in heat exhaustion or heat stroke .