The One-Room School

The other evening I met a woman who taught elementary school in the early 1950’s. After four years she got married and so had to resign her position. After all, we can’t have married women influence children. The children might get the idea that she does something unthinkable with her husband. Oh I know…we know for sure that mothers don’t do such things! June Cleaver never had her hair mussed or makeup disturbed and Rickie and Lucy certainly did not share a bed!

But, that’s not what I wanted to write about. The school where the woman I met taught was a one-room rural school house, heated with a wood stove in winter. (It was the older boys’ job to keep firewood split and light the stove in the morning, feeding it all day.) One row per grade level; she had one girl in grade eight. That immediately brought back memories. When I was eight years old my parents divorced and for the first month afterwards my brother and I boarded at a farm where there were several other children. Each morning the teacher would pick us up, loading kids into his Volkswagen on his route to school. In the evening we were expected to walk home. (I don’t recall exactly, but it was two or three miles; it probably took us about an hour to make the trip.)

The school he took us to was a one-room school house, heated with a wood stove maintained by the older boys. One row per grade. Only one or two in grade eight. He had a large bell that he rang to announce the end of recess and we all ate our sandwiches for lunch at our desks. I was in grade four. On the first day the teacher asked me if I was “smart” or “dumb” at school work. They didn’t mince words in those days. Kids classified as “dumb” usually cheerfully accepted that ruling and got on with their lives. I answered that I was “smart” and so I was given a seat at the front of the grade four row.

I don’t remember much if anything of the classes, but the long walks home I do remember. We’d start off as a group of about a dozen kids and, along the route, kids would peel off as they reached the laneways to their farms. Sometimes we’d stop off to play in someone’s barn. We’d climb up and cross a beam to its central point, someone would throw us a rope; we’d grip it and kick off, sailing through the air across the barn. The idea was to let go at just the right moment so that one would perform an arc, landing in a pile of hay.

Farm life was quite a different experience for me.  I remember watching the farmer cleaning the guts out of a freshly-killed chicken that was going to be our dinner. He pointed out the partially formed egg in the chicken’s innards. I was curious about such things. Milk was straight from the cows each morning. One of the older boys took care of that chore. All the kids slept on cots in the attic of the house. It formed one large room with one end divided from the rest by a blanket. That was the “girls’ room.”  I have no idea how many of there were, but, there were a lot of kids.

I don’t recall church, but, Sundays were set aside for rest and worship. The problem, from a kid’s point of view, is that we were not allowed to play on Sundays. We could read or rest quietly. Period. No one was allowed to talk. There were not many books in the house, but I must have read all of them during those periods of enforced silence. There were a few old Farmers’ Almanacs and some ancient copies of National Geographic . One book that I went back to time and time again had pictures of members of the shark family. What a bizarre group they were—hammer heads, especially, struck me as alien life forms. There were also some pictures of deep-sea creatures with their odd angular bodies and a glowing light dangling in front of their mouths.

After about a month my father found another family to board us and so we left the farm. The teacher, I recall, seemed very sad to see me go. He asked if he could keep one of my many drawings of ships. I liked drawing ships. They always sailed from left to right.

Such schools are long gone, replaced by large regional ones with kids shipped in by bus from a thirty- or forty-mile radius. There’s not much chance that they would visit and play with one another, or that a teacher would follow their progress from their first day of school till their last. Instead of sandwiches made with home-made bread (there was no other kind when I was young), and milk straight from the cow with all that cream still in it, they consume pop-tarts and soft-drinks. One thing for sure, there are no more “smart” kids and “dumb” kids anymore. Just one grey homogenous mass and a few troublemakers. Because if you don’t blend in and disappear into your classmates, you are a “problem” that needs to be “addressed.”