Reading Places: Literacy, Democracy, and the Public Library in Cold War America

Chapter 5: Children, Teacher, and the Rural School

153 5 Children, Teachers, and the Rural School E Teaching in the one room rural school is a strenuous and difficult task. The multitude of classes, the janitorial work expected of the teacher and the difficulty in securing desirable living conditions had made rural teaching unappealing to many prospective students of teaching . . . Institutions of higher learning recruit far more of their students from the immediate territory about them than from more remote territory. Fifty-Three Years of Progress in Teacher Education: Wisconsin’s County Normal Schools On a cold winter’s day in the early years of the twentieth century, a hired hand at four-year-old Hazel P.’s southern Door County farm taught the little girl to read. The two sat on the kitchen floor while the young man wrote out the letters of the alphabet, and Hazel repeated them after him. Lacking paper and a pencil, he improvised with a bar of Bon Ami soap and the black surface of the kitchen range. To those raised in a culture where paper is a disposable commodity and pens and pencils are readily to hand, it is hard to imagine a situation in which even a scrap of paper and a pencil stub were hard to come by. At that time, though, such scarcity was commonplace. Hazel’s family was far from wealthy, but neither did they live in poverty. Since the income from eight cows was not enough to feed a growing family, her father took a job hauling milk with a horse-drawn cart to make ends meet. Hazel remembered that during the winter the roads were often blocked with snow, making her father’s job all the more difficult. When she started to attend her local one-room school, the winter snow drifts created more problems. “I can remember more than once my father came to meet me with a blanket and carried me home,” she recalled. Despite her struggles to get there and back, Hazel loved school and developed a burning desire to be a schoolteacher. Her parents understood her ambition, but saw obstacles. “They knew it required educa- 154฀ Children, Teachers, and the Rural School tion, but money was hard to get in those days,” she recalled some seventy years later. Hazel eventually realized her ambition by attending the DoorKewaunee County Normal School in Algoma and going on to teach in the very area where she grew up. Women like Hazel were the backbone of the rural school system. Familiar with the complicated organization of one-room classrooms that might contain children from as many as eight grades, and with an intimate knowledge of the students and their families, they represented the stability and reassurance of continuing traditions. In particular, they helped maintain children’s access to a pool of reading materials that hardly changed from one generation to the next, and that reflected literary standards about which there was little disagreement. When changes came in the 1950s and 1960s, though, the teachers were eager to take advantage of them, both for their own sake and for that of their students. The Rural School System For rural people, the common school has long constituted a site of extra-familial, secular sociability with the potential for cutting across lines of class, ethnicity, and gender, just as early reformers intended. At the end of the nineteenth century the public school system in many parts of the country consisted of small, independent schoolhouses scattered over vast rural tracts. Wisconsin made a constitutional provision for free public education when it achieved statehood in 1848, and immediately followed this up with a law to implement the provision.1 Neighborhood education followed a general pattern in midwestern states that divided each township into approximately nine school districts , each two miles square, resulting in a schoolhouse at alternate crossroads, and in theory leaving no child further than two miles from the neighborhood school. Within each district, local farmers elected a school board, constructed and maintained the schoolhouse, hired a teacher, chose textbooks, and decided whether they would pay for them 1 Wayne E. Fuller, The Old Country School: The Story of Rural Education in the Middle West (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1982), 41. Children, Teachers, and the Rural School฀ 155 out of tax funds. “The exercise in participatory democracy that followed in this smallest self-governing political division in the nation showed how thoroughly the farmers controlled the...