A One-Room Schoolhouse for the 21st Century
This back-to-basics educational venue, made famous during the 1800s, is surprisingly feasible today — even in the center of Manhattan. Could it get students learning again?
Once upon a time, an American public school student was expected to be able to name principal parts of speech; define and give examples of verse, stanza, and paragraph; write an intelligible one-page composition; compute interests, discounts, and tax rates; describe major events in U.S. history; have an understanding of the U.S. government; and be sufficiently familiar with geography to be able to talk about climate, its causes and effects, and to identify and locate continents, major rivers, and important world capitals, in order to graduate.
If you follow that link, you’ll see that is a somewhat abbreviated list of what was really contained in the test for graduation from the eighth grade in Salinas, Kansas, in 1895. The link I’ve given is to the Snopes.com article with both test questions and commentary, and which correctly notes that a lot of the specific questions might not apply very well today. But I think that misses the general point. You could construct a test of similar difficulty, considering miles per gallon and substituting the Middle East for South America. It would still be an unusual eighth grade public school student who could pass that test.
Not that we don’t spend the money. The average cost per student per school year in the New York Public School system is $14,119. This would correspond to about $612 in 1895 — which is roughly the budget for an entire county school in Kansas at the time.
This comparison occurred to me a while ago, while I was visiting the Adams County Colorado Historical Society, which has a preserved one-room school house. It wasn’t prepossessing by any means, just a one-room building about thirty feet by forty, with a small cloakroom and a cast iron stove. There were books and blackboards, desks for the teacher and for students, and not much else. But schools like that graduated eighth graders who could pass that test.
I began to wonder: could we simply re-create that one-room school in today’s world? Could it be done economically?
So, as a thought experiment, I constructed a proposal for a revived one-room school. Since I had a cost per student for New York, I’d develop a plan for New York City — in fact, for midtown Manhattan, using midtown Manhattan rents. Could I pay a teacher enough to live on, with a one-room school, based on New York costs per student?
The full details are on a page on my own blog Explorations, but here are the basics. The Adams County school has room for 24 students, so we assume 24 students in Manhattan, and a one-room school built in quality office space in midtown. I laid out a floor plan and discovered we could fit it nicely into 1,050 square feet; equip it with good quality desks and chairs and with one iMac computer for every two students, plus one for the teacher and a Mac Pro as a classroom server; and add Internet connections and $1,000 per student for books and supplies. How much remained to hire a teacher?
$230,000. Almost a quarter of a million dollars.
I think we’ve solved the problem of recruiting good teachers. For $230,000 a year, it would be the rejects from elementary teaching who would go to Harvard.
Well, what about the education, then? Can we teach kids effectively in a one-room school? Or would the children suffer from that environment?
Historically, it seems unlikely: after all, the kids who were passing that Salinas exam spent most or all of their lives in one-room schools. In fact, there are several reasons to think one-room schools might be more effective than today’s schools, not less (reasons beyond the apparently different outcomes.) In a mixed class one-room school, the older students are expected to study independently while the teacher helps the younger students, a skill that will help them in academic life later. On the other hand, older students were expected to help teach the younger ones, and as every teacher knows, it’s hard to beat teaching a topic as a way to be sure you’ve learned it.
There is one more reason, though, that I think the one-room school might be better. The conventional model of schools today was heavily influenced by the progressive pragmatists like Dewey, by the industrial engineering of Galbraith, and by Henry Ford’s assembly lines. They have an essentially industrial model, where students are grouped into age cohorts and moved through their grade levels like workpieces through an assembly line. But there’s an old saying that a school is “a log with a teacher on one end and a student on the other.” Traditional (as opposed to conventional) schooling, or apprenticeship, operated on a model we might call a mastery model: when one was apprenticed to a potter, the potter was going to teach you to make pots or else. It wasn’t the job of the one-room schoolmarm to move the students through the grades; they were expected to get results.
If they didn’t get results, the schoolmarm’s employers — the parents — would know the reason why. The schoolmarm’s continued employment was directly conditional on satisfying her students’ parents, which meant the teachers taught for the students mastery, not for their “age appropriate progress.”
In many ways, the one-room school environment was more like homeschooling now, and while I don’t know of any well-controlled statistical studies, anyone who listens to the news hears stories fairly commonly about homeschooled students winning the national spelling bee or maxing out their SAT scores. There are plenty of reasons that could affect that — perhaps parents who homeschool are more motivated, and perhaps they start out better educated and more intelligent than average — but given the relatively small number of homeschoolers in the general population, we have to be suspicious that homeschoolers have some inherent advantage.
When I started this project, it really was just a “modest proposal,” although I wonder if it wouldn’t work. But the real purpose of a thought experiment like this one is to test some other idea. I think the most important point this thought experiment makes is this: we spend amazing amounts of money per student, while school administrators complain they can’t pay teachers well and they need more money to run their schools, and while students’ educational outcomes seem to get worse and worse.
We’ve seen that we could go back to the model of a hundred years ago. It’s not only possible, it would make teaching into one of the most well-paid jobs in the country, even the world, and still save money. As a close friend put it, “where is the money going?”
I don’t know. But I think it might be nice if someone found out.
Charlie Martin is a Colorado computer scientist and nearly-successful screenwriter who contributes to the Flares Into Darkness political blog as ‘Seneca the Younger,’ and blogs under his own name at the aggressively non-political Explorations blog.
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43 Comments
1. One Room Schools for the 21st Century | Explorations:[...] Which was published today. [...]
May 31, 2008 - 6:06 am 2. marty nickel:The school my kids attend (http://www.poetrychristian.org/) is a kind of modern day version of the same. About 200 students, kindergarten to 12th. Except, being a private school, we don’t have anything like $14,199 per student to work with!
May 31, 2008 - 6:53 am 3. Gringo:I knew a retired Botany professor who was emphatically in favor of the one-room schoolhouse education he had received as a child, for essentially the same reasons you have outlined.
It worked in rural communities with intact families whose parents supported teachers in discipline problems with children.
Today, that parental support of teachers occurs much less often, for two reasons. First, there are proportionally many more one-parent households.Second, many parents today, even in intact affluent households, view their duty as defending the child against the bureaucracy, instead of getting the child to behave in school.
Peer pressure in helping younger students is perhaps a wash, as rural households were often fairly isolated.
That being said, I have observed older students assisting younger ones even in todays fragmented urban environment.
The one-room schoolteacher had to juggle many balls at one time. much more so than today’s single grade classroom.
Could this be tried in some pilot project?
May 31, 2008 - 7:08 am 4. Monkeydarts:We educated our 3 boys at home. The idea isn’t much different than the one room school when you think about it. We had books, computers, plenty of time to study without disruption, and an orderly day. Where it differed was that our property tax money still went to the district– we got next to nothing in return, including a $230,000 salary. But, by having our thousands of dollars go to the district we were, essentially, left alone to do the best for our kids. But we did get three exceptionally smart and prepared boys. Not everyone can do what we did and the second best thing would be a one-room school house.
May 31, 2008 - 8:05 am 5. Phillep Harding:We hear about “students per teacher” ratios, has anyone figured out a “students per educational system employee” ratio?
May 31, 2008 - 8:38 am 6. Charlie (Colorado):Gringo (¡compadre!) honestly, I suspect that protecting your kids against the bureaucracy is an important part of the job in modern schools; I’m suspicious — with no evidence besides my antediluvian experience in schools — that a fair number of the “behavior problems” come from kids who are either bored to death because they can’t move on to the next thing, feeling self-hate for not being quick enough to stay with the class, or simply ill-suited to the regimented environment. (See some of Dr Helen’s posts about the redefinition of normal little-boy behavior as a “behavior problem”.)
That said, there really are some kids who really are discipline problems. I wonder what the effect would be if the teachers and the parents both understood it was the parents’ money, and had a longer-term relationship with some sense of there being a relationship? It seems to me that modern schools leave teachers with a sense of near-immunity, and parents with a sense of impotence.
Honestly, I would love to see it tried; I’m very suspicious that an attempt to try it with public funding would be fought to the death by teachers unions and school districts.
May 31, 2008 - 8:46 am 7. Charlie (Colorado):We hear about “students per teacher” ratios, has anyone figured out a “students per educational system employee” ratio?
Phillep, I tried for this article. The NYC Department of Education doesn’t make it easy; someone with better diging skills than I might have more luck.
May 31, 2008 - 8:48 am 8. Alletis:I am a public school teacher and I would love the one room school house concept. I also believe that students should not be placed by age or grade level but by interest and ability but the ADA took that option away. So you do have kids that would benefit from a slower pace in a classroom with kids that would benefit from a faster pace, and a teacher trying to juggle it and make everyone happy. A one room school house would cut down on class size and students could work more at their own pace and would be located in their own neighborhoods and it would be much easier to actually teach instead of babysit all day.
May 31, 2008 - 9:49 am 9. Teri Pittman:Get rid of the computers until high school. There’s absolutely no reason for them to be in the classroom. They inhibit learning and are the primary reason that we waste so much money on education in this country.
Keep in mind too that in that 1895 classroom, the teacher would not have had a degree. They tended to use students that had just graduated or maybe attended a teaching college. No reason for us to have teachers with masters degrees for elementary school.
May 31, 2008 - 10:00 am 10. An Intrigueing Idea To Fix Our Educational System « Tai-Chi Policy:[...] Fix Our Educational System May 31, 2008 Posted by taoist in Education. trackback How about returning to a single room educational system? As someone from a large family who was homeschooled, I can see the potential benefits of this [...]
May 31, 2008 - 10:51 am 11. Dave:During the 1940’s, I attended a series of one room schools with three grades in each building. Moving into the new consolidated district – three rooms, nine grades, not to mention indoor plumbing, somewhere around 1947, was a monumental step up in the world.
In my opinion, there were two major advantages of those schools:
May 31, 2008 - 11:49 am 12. Night Owl:First, by the time a student was ready to move on to the next room or school, he or she had been exposed to every lesson in every grade three times.
Second, at any given time, a student in a higher grade could sit in on a class below his grade level to review an area of weakness or even take an advanced lesson if the subject was his or her strong suit.
I like to read about proposals for improving our educational system, that are more creative than just writing a check. I think we now know that just throwing money at a problem does not solve it. Bravo for thinking outside the box.
Just tossing this out as further food for thought:
After 8th grade graduation, require (or allow the option for) youngsters to get a job, apprenticeship or internship for one year, before going on to HS. It you think about it , there are enormous benefits for the youngster. Most kids at that age are full of enthusiasm, and energy, and want to show they are ready for the adult world. The self-confidence boost of earning an income, and being a productive member of society, would aid in fostering a sense of personal responsibility, and hastening their maturity.
Sitting in a classroom at that age, often succeeds at nothing more than unnaturally prolonging their childhood and dependency (especially in their eyes), squashing their enthusiasm, demoralizing them, and in turn encouraging pessimism, insolence, and rebellion.
May 31, 2008 - 1:51 pm 13. WR Jonas:What a terrific idea.I have often wondered why smaller more personal educational environments wouldn’t work. I think you may be onto something here.
May 31, 2008 - 1:59 pm 14. Believer:I also liked the idea/comment which suggested restricting computer use.
I also attended a one room school with grades 1-8 taught by a single schoolmaster. It can be done if the objectives are realistic.
Without a doubt, this is the most exciting idea I’ve heard in a long time. This is “change” I can get behind. My congratulations to Charlie.
The teachers’ union is the problem that occurred to me too. But wouldn’t there be many private funds available?
I hope more teachers, like Alletis, hear of this and share their ideas. And I hope you keep us up-to-date and let us know if there’s anything we can do to help it along.
My daughter is returning from England – masters and phd. in education techniques – and has actually thought of starting a school. I’m pretty sure she wrote more than one grant application in her years at Oxford.
I’ve been inspired in recent months to go visit Berea, Kentucky. There was a small, one-room school that developed into a wonderful learning environment for him and many other young people.
May 31, 2008 - 2:15 pm 15. Believer:That was my dad’s school in Kentucky, now a college — don’t know how this got posted – I wasn’t anywhere near the submit button!
May 31, 2008 - 2:18 pm 16. Believer:Night Owl’s on to something here.
I wasn’t finished telling about that school in Kentucky when it posted. They required the kids to make crafts, etc. – learn carpentry skills – that are so valuable and not appreciated enough today. These items were sold in a store with the money going to the school.
In this way, these kids helped pay for their education and maybe even too the room and board that many were offered.
May 31, 2008 - 2:31 pm 17. AnAverageAmerican:From the time my eldest child was subjected to what passes for public education in a well-heeled NYC suburb, I’ve been appalled at the state of public education (err, indoctrination).
Despite earning below the median income in my area, my wife and I immediately pulled our child out of public school and have sacrificed significantly to send our children to private schools. Whilst being forced to contribute to public education tax-levies, which provide around $15K per year, per-student, to public education, we decided we would not allow our children to wallow in the sea of public education mediocrity. Instead, despite my atheism, I accepted my spouse’s proposal and enrolled our children in Catholic private school. This has been the most profitable investment I have ever made. My sons are well educated, well behaved, well spoken, and have the ability to think critically, seek truth and persuade others of their positions. Both are leaders of the debate team, and mock trial, at their respective schools.
I am convinced that the underfunded Catholic schools in our diocese, and underpaid Catholic school teachers, evidence a much stronger commitment to student achievement than the overly unionized, and politicized, public school teachers and administrators of the US 21st century.
In my opinion the important differences between public, and private, primary schools is quite apparent:
1) Parents who send their children to private schools are more invested in, involved in, their children’s education than those parents who settle for public primary education.
2) Teachers accepting lower paying positions in private vs. public schools care more about the success of their students than their “tenure”.
3) There are far fewer administrators at private schools than at public schools. Public schools could offer $250K a year positions to teachers if they were allowed to cut the administration by 75% … how many vice-principals of diversity does a public high school need?
4) Private schools can be selective and expel students that are disruptive, public schools have a mandate to teach (indoctrinate) all students.
5) In my experience private schools achieve success by having high expectations and holding students to those high expectations … public schools are more committed to “feel good” policies that convince students that they are worthy in spite of their lack of achievement. I have no problem with that if their aspirations are to become a cashier, or a sales person in a department store, but to push an agenda that a lack of achievement counts for something has more to do with a school’s desire to not be accountable, than any possible motivation for the students.
Sorry for the length of this comment. I guess my public school education didn’t prepare me to be concise.
May 31, 2008 - 3:37 pm 18. Charlie (Colorado):Believer, everyone, thanks for the kind words. Honestly, I think the question of computers or no is not as important as the point that somehow we are managing to spend a lot of money that, clearly, doesn’t get to the classroom. Somehow.
That said, I’m a professional geek; my inclination is that kids need to understand and use computers from much earlier than 8th grade. There are just too many opportunities for enrichment and too many chances to find other information on the Internet. I’ll point out, however, that I don’t necessarily think the computers should be on the student desks….
Similarly, there are a lot of curriculum ideas I’d love to see tried. (I tried to take Home Economics in junior high; not only did I like to cook, but all the girls were in home ec. I wasn’t allowed. I’d like to see kids exposed to cooking and basic sewing, basic woodwork, and so on. But I don’t want to fall into the trap of having a common curriculum; as I said, the major issue ought to be that we agree on the outcomes we want. Certainly at first.
May 31, 2008 - 4:12 pm 19. Question to readers « Ww - Wolfville watch - Ww:[...] Education ideas [...]
May 31, 2008 - 5:20 pm 20. Night Owl:Excellent point by Mr. Martin and Alletis about kids being able to learn at their own pace in the multi-grade environment of a one-room school setting. The faster learning kids benefit from exposure to the more challenging material, and the slower kids don’t have to feel the stigma of being left back a grade. A win/win.
AnAverageAmerican said:
“In my experience private schools achieve success by having high expectations and holding students to those high expectations ”
Another excellent point. Public schools presently seem to expect so little from kids, and fail to challenge them. Little wonder many get discouraged and cut class or drop out.
Re: a one year job after 8th grade- there could be a partnership between business and schools; especially useful in the hi-tech fields. The kids could also then see if the field they pick is really something they like.
Like Believer said, I too hope articles like this one can inspire those in the field of education. And if there is something an average person can do to help, ( ie. writing a letter to some particular person) please let us know.
May 31, 2008 - 6:05 pm 21. Alletis:Again a lot of the low expectations are not the teacher. In my school and district administration will not hold back a failing child after 3rd grade! All of my colleagues as well as myself find this appalling. The students know that they have no accountability if they do not do anything…so a lot of the time they don’t and we have to promote them to the next grade because some idiot decided it would permanently damage them to be held back. However it won’t permanently damage them when they can’t read. This ass-backwards theory is what causes teachers to quit after a few years because it just becomes very frustrating and demoralizing.
May 31, 2008 - 6:59 pm 22. AnnieB:Some comments on your math.
You will need to attach a bathroom – or in commercial space ( where the bathroom is down the hall ) provide a second adult to ‘oversee’ children. Lost children can ruin your whole day. [However, this person does not need to be a 'teacher' - so I assume you could get one for a reasonable salary. Plus they would be able to handle other light tasks such as cleaning and perhaps lunch delivery.] There would need to be ‘lunch’ space. [ Older students could go out, but that is a supervision problem with the younger children. They could eat at their desks, but you would still want to add a corner for a fridge and microwave.] Also, art and music classes would require more workspace then you currently allow. Then there is insurance, possible transportation needs…. etc.
That said? This could work. Allowing another $20,000 per year for a second ‘work room’ and perhaps $60,000 for a teacher’s assistant (generous – but this is New York) and whatever for incidentals…. you still have a DARN good salary for a teacher.
Plus? You might well get good people at LESS than the current rate, if they didn’t have to put up with the current *crap*. (Or if – perhaps – you went with the old compensation style and included living quarters. That would add to your rent costs but the reduction in commute and increase in work time could be worth it.)
May 31, 2008 - 9:05 pm 23. Charlie (Colorado):Annie, I’ll admit I thought about the bathroom and decided it was more complexity that the sort of back of the envelope thing I was doing needed. I like your idea about adding living space to the project — it wouldn’t work in midtown, but I’ve had friends living in “office” space lofts elsewhere in the city. I’m not at all sure about the art and music part, though — remember, the example one room school I started thinking about had roughly similar amounts of space; kids did eat at their desks, and they managed to do what art etc the did in the room they had. Again, it’s been a long time since I was last in an elementary classroom, but it seems to me we didn’t get any special space at our desks for art projects until I was in Junior High anyway.
And the stone tablets and chisels we used to class work were a lot less wieldy than pencil and paper.
May 31, 2008 - 9:44 pm 24. Jed:Great idea. Implement the idea as a charter school.
Jun 1, 2008 - 7:27 am 25. Phillep Harding:Charlie, “can’t find out how many” seems a pretty good hint there’s useless people involved there.
I tried to take home ec too, but it was girls only. I think that was near the end, after household book keeping was removed from the curriculum. To me, baking cookies seems a bit less vital than learning how to budget for the household, but I was not making the decisions.
Jun 1, 2008 - 8:22 am 26. wGraves:The curricular support for your ideas exists today, but the public school system isn’t interested. My kids attended Montessori Schools through about third grade. The elementary school was a combined class spanning six grades, with about thirty pupils. Its curriculum consisted of a set of graded materials which could be worked through independently. Each morning, there was a group meeting where the day’s written assignments were published. Each student had an individual set of tasks. (Example: Johnny…Math, Unit 2.1.125; History, 2.6.34; Literature, 2.5.28). The students then worked on their own assignments. If they needed a desk or a computer, there were some of those available. The teacher, not having to lecture, was available to circulate and help individuals with their lessons. If your kid was good at math, he could rip through the math curriculum as fast as he could take it. With some help from EPGY, my older boy wound up studying Calculus in the 9th grade in a public school. The boys are both in engineering now, at good universities. So this is known to work, but the public school folks fear it.
Jun 1, 2008 - 10:52 am 27. John M. Schwab:I had the good fortune to attend Bankers, Michigan School (grades K – 8 in one room) from kindergarden through fourth grade, when it was closed. I managed to complete both Kindergarden and first grade in one year. One could take classes they were good in with the advanced grades, and work with the lower grades in areas where they were having problems without being “held back”. Of course, the teacher could not worry if your self esteme was hurt because you failed a test. Actually, that is not true. She worried enough to stop by the house on here way home, on her own time, and work with you and your parents on your problems, both academic and social. But she did not have enough time in the classroom for those things. We were there to learn, and this she made sure we did. Unlike today, the school board, which consisted of some of the parents, could fire a teacher for poor performance. These facts along with having a step-father who had served in the US Marine Corps gave me a diciplined grounding that served me well in school and my 21 year stint in the Navy.
Jun 1, 2008 - 11:15 am 28. ElizabethB:I have often thought that one-room schools were a good way of doing things. I met a 94 year old one room school teacher and she said she never had any problems teaching mixed ages and managing all the different lessons. It really sounded like a good way to go. (She also used phonics and said ALL her children learned to read well.)
There is an article by Andrew Pudewa which he calls “Mixed-Age Classrooms” that I recently read, I think you all will find interesting–he has seen several examples of one-room schools today that work: https://www.excellenceinwriting.com/?q=article-list
We have a very small mixed age classroom (we homeschool), but if we didn’t move so often (5 times in the last 6 six years) or need the flexibility of homeschooling and had an opportunity to send our children to a local one-room school, I would be very interested! I also wouldn’t mind teaching in one, it sounds much more interesting than teaching in today’s type of classrooms.
Jun 1, 2008 - 7:40 pm 29. Back to the one-room schoolhouse at Joanne Jacobs:[...] we returned to the one-room schoolhouse, paying teachers would be no problem, writes Charlie Martin on Pajamas Media. He costs out a [...]
Jun 2, 2008 - 4:45 am 30. Justin:Where does all the “other” money go? I read somewhere that 80 cents of every dollar spent on education funded special ed programs and facilities (and, no doubt, all the pseudo-administrative chair-moistener positions commensurate to that area). So unless we can shake off the Brobdingnagian burden of special ed funding, the modern one-room school cannot but succumb to the same bureaucratic dead weight.
Oh, and for what it’s worth, it’s Salina, KS. Not Salinas. The town is still there. Might be fun to compare modern student scores in Salina to those from the 19th century.
Jun 2, 2008 - 8:22 am 31. Smarty:Look also at how much it costs to build a school. I taught in a village in AK where they built a $35M school for less than 100 students.
Also, rather than kick out the criminals and the disruptive students, they hire “resource officers”.
But the above poster got it right, special-ed programs and district office type people are the lions share of the budget waste.
As far as the difficulty of teaching multi-level, with the mainstreaming of special-ed and social promotion of screw-ups, we have that anyway. Try teaching Physical science to 10th graders when whe skills vary from 1.75 grade level readers to 11.0
With the one room schoolhouse and direct parent payments, the rotten kids and their parents would be pressured by the other parents to shape up or ship out. That alone would raise the bar.
Jun 2, 2008 - 12:29 pm 32. The Cradle of Differentiated Instruction at The Core Knowledge Blog:[...] it was called the one-room school house. Is it an idea whose time has come around again? At Pajamas Media (hat tip: Joanne Jacobs), Charlie Martin costs out what it would take to bring back the one-room [...]
Jun 3, 2008 - 5:10 am 33. Believer:ElizabethB mentioned phonics. I highly recommend parents use this to teach their own children to read. I taught all 3 of mine before school.
I fell into it by accident. I had the 5 letters of my daughter’s name in large, wooden cutouts in her toy box. At 15-16mos. she asked me, “What’s dis?” I told her and the next day she remembered it, and learned the others.
I then put magnetic letters of the alphabet on the fridge. She soon learned each one. Then learned their sounds. By age 2 1/2 she was reading almost anything. My boys were not as fast. Usually boys are slower. And being slower does NOT mean they are any less bright. What one child learns in one area, another child is learning at a faster rate in another. (One friend’s child didn’t walk until 17mos. – he graduated from Stanford. His mind was too busy to take the time to move his legs..)
Use what works for each child. Discover how each one learns. A friend I was visiting took me to school with her – she taught 3rd graders. It was time to take the spelling test. She told me the boy who had earlier entertained the class with a lively story, would sit out the test. He’d never passed one. Shocked, I asked if I could work with him.
Having an imagination, I told him to close his eyes and to get a good picture of that word in his mind. Together we thought of images that each letter of each word might look like. I remember the simplest one, the word “eye” – the “e’s” were eyes and the “y” was a nose. He got all words right on the test.
Now you know my two successes in life! It was a joy to work with each one.
Jun 3, 2008 - 8:26 pm 34. Paul B:I’m a middle school math teacher and I’m absolutely convinced that the way we arbitrarily group kids is at the core of the decay in public schools. One of the societal changes that has snuck up on us is the huge mobility and diversity of today vs. that of the one room school in ‘Kansas’.
My school has 38% student turnover each year and my district has no retention or placement policy other than age and/or the grade of the school you came from. We have 4-5 year grade span of abilities in a classroom, forced to sit through a highly scripted (meaning no individulization at all) delivery system.
Even though most of the teachers I work with readily recognize this as a problem, they are not positioned to change it. So much of this situation is driven by archaic structural deficiencies, no significant change will come from within this dino.
I’ve written much more on the structural issues at When Galaxies Collide
Jun 4, 2008 - 3:38 am 35. Charlie (Texas):Little red schoolhouses were an AMERICAN idea in education, unlike the current concept that Mann imported from Germany (designed by the Prussian Fichte expressly to break the will of students)and that Dewey perfected into a factory-like scheme for sorting kids into their most socially useful roles.
I sent my boys to a K-8 school specifically modeled on the little red schoolhouse (http://www.peninsulaschool.org/). My mother, who did attend a little red schoolhouse in the rural south, loved the place, and my boys benefited way beyond their public-school peers.
To give you an idea, typically, 4 to 6 kids out of each class of 18-20 went on to become National Merit Scholarship finalists despite coming from a school with no academic-based selection and minimal classroom academics.
Emerson said it best about education: We often seek to make a straight-cut canal out of what should be a meandering brook.
Jun 4, 2008 - 10:33 am 36. AgingMom:IIRC, Waldorf schools assign a teacher to a group of kindergarten kids, and as the kids are promoted from grade to grade, the teacher goes with them up to the 8th grade.
A lot of Christian schools start off as one or two-room schools, and grow from there. The school my kids attended had four classrooms. They loved it there and both have gotten into very good universities, etc. Having the same teacher for several years in a row really does help to make sure that they don’t coast through the multiplication tables without learning them (as I did when I was growing up and attending a huge suburban elementary school system.) Also, it is easier for the parents to get to know the teachers (the teacher that your older child has for three years will be the same teacher that your younger child will have for three years.)
Also, because the school doesn’t accept children with serious behavioral problems or academic deficiencies, the teachers don’t burn out from frustration. (My kids were in public schools for a couple of years. Not a happy experience, even though it was a “top school district.”)
Jun 5, 2008 - 1:19 am 37. rory:I sent my boys to a K-8 school specifically modeled on the little red schoolhouse (http://www.peninsulaschool.org/). My mother, who did attend a little red schoolhouse in the rural south, loved the place, and my boys benefited way beyond their public-school peers.
To give you an idea, typically, 4 to 6 kids out of each class of 18-20 went on to become National Merit Scholarship finalists despite coming from a school with no academic-based selection and minimal classroom academics.
You make it sound like a school for poor inner city kids. With a tuition of $13,125, I am pretty sure the school is made up of upper and upper middle class kids who would of excelled in school even if they went to school in the inner city.
Sounds more like a school for the children of rich indulgent hippies.
Jun 5, 2008 - 4:20 pm 38. wgfberger:my two children attened a one room school house in Napa California. Wooden Valley school has been teaching chlidren since 1854. The school is a K thru 5th grade with 25 students. the one of a kind education they recieve is amazing. when the older kids teach the little kids they really get a breakdown on what they have learned and this makes them even learn and understand more. The little kids love the big kids and love to learn from the older kids. This is a very unique way to learn during this time. but not in the 1800’s. Learning from each other creates children working above their grade level, with out even really pushing them. it just happens. Communication skills are bulit from the beginning, kinders are just as equal as a 5th grader and this creates a community. A real life experience for their life ahead. When they hit the real world after school and college and are in the work force, these communication skills are key. One-room school house creat old school values with new school education and it works!
Jun 24, 2008 - 4:35 pm 39. kezia:Hi, do you have any openings for an elementary teacher, and a physician we are a couple looking to work with non profit organizations as we are born again and baptize we love to serve God. Looking forward to hear from you. God bless ur mission .Kezia
Jul 27, 2008 - 10:03 am 40. wgfberger:My two children attended a one-room school house in Napa, California. the school was established in 1851 and is still teaching children today. the school is a K-5th grade school with the max number of chikdren 29. We are aleays being threated closure by the Napa school district, and have some how managed to keep it open. However we just faced that threat again, it is very sad, it is a one of a kind educationa and experience i believe is wonderful. Old school values and new school education. Wooden Valley Elementry school is located in the fotthills in napa County surrounded by rolling hills and vineyards. It is picture perfect and education perfect. We love it.
Aug 14, 2008 - 6:20 pm 41. Pajamas Media » Live from DNC: Bill Keeps It Short (Day 3):[...] a fine idea, but how? Giving them more money doesn’t do it. As I pointed out with my CORS project piece, places like New York City already have enough money per student; it’s no that they [...]
Aug 28, 2008 - 12:58 am 42. one:hey
Jan 26, 2009 - 3:38 pm 43. Fran:My experience of attending a one-room schoolhouse was indeed very good. We learned to be quiet and work quietly while another class was being taught. Our teacher made sure we grasped the math in and out. Not so, when we were bussed into the city’s schools for junior high and senior high schools. I found myself sometimes bored for the lack of challenging material. There was so much repeating of english we had already learned. The math teachers did not care if you grasped the math they were teaching or not. I have to say that I had a lot of good teachers but there were those who didn’t take into account that we were bussed from rural areas and it wasn’t our fault that we were late for school. We certainly couldn’t walk the seven or more miles to school in freezing temperatures. Apparently, the city teachrs had no idea of rural life.
Jul 14, 2009 - 7:13 am