Accompanying this month's column you will find a photograph. It shows the interior of a 1-room country school with the entire student body present. The school is Eden Center School, District 75, LaSalle County, IL. One of the students is the author of this piece. I'll leave it to the reader to guess which one is me. Hints: the date of the picture is around 1939. I was in the 3rd grade.
My children are always urging me to write an account of my life, which they seem to think has been very unusual and interesting. It seems to me that my life has been very uneventful. One thing they always mention is the fact that I attended a 1-room country school for 8 years. They find that interesting though at the time I thought it was what everybody did.
Looking back at that time, I have come to the conclusion that uneventful or not I received an excellent education in that little building at the cross roads that has been gone for 50 years. People have had a habit of looking at the old country school as being educationally and culturally, a wasteland. I might have thought at one point in my life that that was true but now I have turned 180 degrees on that.
Count the people in the picture. There are 6, right? The year before there had been only 4. Until I hit 7th grade I had almost always been the only one in my class. The last 2 years I acquired a classmate. The people in the photo were the stable group. From time to time other students enrolled but they were mostly the children of men who worked by the month for some farmer. The traditional "hired man". These families usually had many children and were from southern Illinois or Missouri. We of Eden Center welcomed them warmly as new playmates. Unfortunately, they were usually very transient. The maximum enrollment at Eden Center was about 12, and that only briefly. The point of all this was that I was, in effect, tutored going through grade school. I was fortunate in having good teachers especially the first 3 years and the last 3. A bad teacher in this situation would be a disaster.
Since there were so few of us we usually had to play together. Girls, boys, and an age range of 6 to 13. This sounds like not much fun but it was. Occasionally boys and girls would split off and do their respective things but as I recall we mostly played all together. A favorite game in warm weather was softball. School started at 9 AM, had a 15 minute recess midmorning, lunch from 12 to 1, a 15 minute afternoon recess and dismissal at 4 PM, We played before school at the recesses and a long time during the lunch hour. How did we pull off a baseball game with the age range we had? I don't remember it as a problem. The little kids did the best they could and it seems to me we always made sure they got to hit the ball. My last teacher was a Phys Ed major and liked sports so she pitched to both teams. We kept score and when it was tied it went back to 0. I believe Mrs McCartney kept control of the score. I know when we big boys came up she quit lobbing the ball and fired aspirin tablets at us. We had several games we played when it was to cold for softball but not to cold to be outside. In real cold weather we stayed inside and played blind man's bluff and other games. One Christmas I received a board game called Invasion that had 4 players and moves similar to chess. We played it the rest of the winter. Sometimes there was a perpetual Monopoly game going on for weeks. Winter was always great fun when you had snow and warmth enough to be outside. We built snow men and snow fort which were used in fierce snowball fights.
Some memories were not very pleasant. The plumbing consisted of two little houses in back. Water was dipped out of a bucket and we each brought our own cup. The bigger boys had the responsibility of seeing that the water bucket was full. They also were responsible for bringing in the coal in the afternoon to bank the fire and be on hand for morning. The whole school worked at clean-up on Friday or whenever needed. One night a month the "Eden Center Social Club" met . Then we had to have everything spick and span when adults from the district came for a pot luck supper with a program afterward. If there was no program there was card playing. I learned to play Euchre in 1st grade.
Before writing this I looked on the internet to see if they had anything on one room schools. Would you believe there were over 100,000 sites, most of them telling about some specific school somewhere in the US. The writers all had similar stories to mine and the same attitude. One fellow, Andrew Guilford, had written a book analyzing the education received in one room schools. He points out that the children were exposed to what the older children were learning all the way through. He called it peripheral learning and counted it a powerful educational tool. I agree. Also a pair, Marvin Minsky and Seymore Pepert, from effete, Eastern Massachusetts Institute of Technology are studying how to educate the rural people in undeveloped countries. They propose doing it by computer in ways utilizing the teaching in "The Little Red Schoolhouse" as they called it. My schoolhouse was white. Anyway, it seems by humble start to education wasn't so humble after all.