Studying the One-Room School

As a prospective teacher, you may be personally interested in learning more about the conditions for teachers and students in the one-room schools that were popular in the frontier days of American history. Then, as a teacher, you may also find that studying one-room schools can help your own students make a personal connection to the lives of American pioneers and settlers. In either case, here are some ways you can learn more about what teaching and learning were like in one-room schools.

• Begin by reviewing the section of this chapter on the one-room school. Note how it is defined and how it related to American history and society.
• There are several very useful Web sites on one-room schools. For example, visit The One Room School House Project, of Southwestern College, Winfield, Kansas, at http://www.sckans.edu/~orsh/; One Room Schools: Michigan's Educational Legacy, of the Clarke Historical Library, Central Michigan University, at http://www.lib.cmich.edu/clarke/schoolsintro.htm; and Rural Education in the Late 1800s at http://www.cobleskill.edu/schools/mcs/CSBest/school.htm. These Web sites examine specific one-room schools and provide information about their teachers, students, architecture, textbooks, and curriculum.
• You and your students can continue your research with a visit to your local or school library, where you can identify articles and books on this subject. Research these materials and create a bibliography about one-room schools.
• You may also wish to consult the local museums and history societies in your area. See if they have materials or collections on one-room schools and nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century education. You could arrange a class visit to the collections.
• There may be people in your community or in students' families who attended one-room schools. Based on your research, you and your students could develop some questions about one-room schools and conduct interviews with some of these people.

A few additional web resources about one-room schools include:

Angle Inlet School
This is the Web site of a one-room school on the Canadian border of Minnesota that is still operating.

Blackwell History of Education Museum
The one-room school section of this museum's Web site tells the story of the one-room school that actually resides at the museum. In addition, the links portion of the site has a section devoted to one-room schools.

Fred Hultstrand Photo Collection
Click on "schooling" to see what frontier education looked like, courtesy of this set of online photo exhibits from the Library of Congress' American Memories collection.

Schoolhouse History
This site offers more ideas for studying the history of schools with your own students.