Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory (review)

The photograph I have before me was taken sometime in the early years of the 20^th century. It shows a dilapidated one-room schoolhouse, clapboards askew, windows ajar, panes broken or missing, and a chimney ramshackle and close to collapse. The photographer was a young man who was teaching in this building at the time he took the picture. The condition of this Connecticut schoolhouse was typical. We know from scores—even hundreds—of memoirs of 19^th-century teachers and students who taught and studied in at least a quarter million of these one-room schoolhouses what was the reality of these schools. Four-year-olds sat on backless benches, feet dangling, clutching McGuffey's First Eclectic Reader (1836) memorizing the shape of each letter. If they were lucky, the wood stove cast some heat, but by a February mid-day the ink was frozen in the older children's jars and the littlest ones were in tears of misery and struck with a ferule if they whispered or wiggled. "From the bad construction of our schoolhouses," Henry Barnard wrote in 1841, "there is more physical suffering endured by our children in them, than by prisoners in our jails and prisons."¹

What went on inside these hovels of pedagogical ignorance was every bit as primitive and broken down as the windswept and leaky buildings themselves. Some learning came about—miraculously—we know; but very little teaching in any meaningful sense of that word. The only pedagogy known and practiced for centuries was that of rote and rod: memorize or get hit.

These schools, still 200,000 of them serving millions of students across the nation in 1900, educated Americans in, not only the three Rs, but also behavior, civics, patriotism, and Christian morality. In an era when only a tiny minority of (mostly boys) continued schooling after the age of twelve or fourteen, the image of America held by the vast majority of native-born adults was that of the virtuous republic portrayed by Webster and McGuffey. This retro-vision was, of course, a myth—the myth of the little red schoolhouse. (See Charles Leslie Glenn, Jr., The Myth of the Common School [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988].)

In Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory, Jonathan Zimmerman, Professor of History and Education at New York University, describes in telling detail this virtually universal retrospective image of the one-room school house complete with a bell tower, wood stove, outside privies, and a stern schoolmarm clanging her bell to open the school day or end recess. The building, we know, sat at the summit of a hill and was painted red.

Of course, very few Americans alive today ever experienced these one-teacher schools. The great consolidation movement of the turn into the 20^th century coupled with the road-building rush of the 1920s and 1930s brought the demise of most of them. Present day visions reflect mostly Winslow Homer's picture, Snap the Whip (1872), Edward Eggleston's The Hoosier School-Master (1871), John Greenleaf Whittier's poem "In School Days," and for a more recent generation, Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie series of biographical novels and television programs.

"Whatever their political or cultural orientations," Zimmerman writes, "whatever their race or class or ethnicity, Americans use a remarkably consistent icon to symbolize their diverse educational institutions. A century ago, most American students attended a one-room school; today, almost nobody does. But images of the little red schoolhouse—its roof, its bell, its flag, and most of all its color—are ubiquitous, instantly recognizable to anyone who reads a newspaper, watches television, or shops on the Internet." (p. 3)

To explain why the image persists, and persists in sharply delineated iconographic form, we "must start with Americans' deep ambivalence toward progress itself." (p. 5) Harboring the belief that humanity, with Americans leading the way, is...