Learning and the one-room country school.

Abstract

During the past one hundred and fifty years, thousands of rural schoolchildren were educated in one-room country schools. Children who attended these schools learned under a system that was ungraded. and teachers used individual tutoring, followed by older students helping the younger. Group interaction was constant in the learning process. There was a spirit of democracy and cooperation in the one-room school. The isolated one-room schools also served as community centers. Although there are several hundred one-room schools still operating in remote rural areas from New York to California, today most rural schoolchildren are educated in consolidated, graded, town schools. The abandoned schoolhouses can still be seen in rural areas; and some of the buildings have been converted to museums, homes, or still serve as community halls. During the same one hundred and fifty years, American public education has attempted to provide efficient and standardized education for children. Professional educators, assisted by demographics, have pushed to close the rural schools in favor of consolidated, graded schools, in which the student could be among many others of the same age and skill level. Because part of the consolidated system revolved around testing and ranking the children, this grouping introduced competition to schoolchildren. Children were ranked not according to what they had learned, but what they knew compared to their fellow-classmates. Modern scientific research has demonstrated that children learn less, and are most stressed when subjected to the graded, competitive, and standardized system the professional educators developed. This same research has proven that the atmosphere of learning with individual attention and cooperation yields greater learning. This was how children learned in the one-room, ungraded school.