Lessons from a One-Room School

Musings of a Simple County Man

By Hobie Morris

If you serve a child a rotten hamburger…Federal, state and local agencies will investigate you, summon you, close you down…but if you provide a child with a rotten education, nothing happens except you are liable to be given more money to do it with. –Former Education Secretary William Bennett

(Jan. 2015) In a recent education evaluation the United States received a D+.

California’s public school system was once the envy of the world.  Today it ranks 41st in the US in math, just behind Arkansas.  Students in 36 countries significantly outperform California’s, including Portugal, Slovenia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Schools in 20 states employ more non-teachers than teachers.  In the last 60 years the number of K-12 students increased 96percent, full time equivalent school employees increased 386 percent.  The number of teachers increased 252percent, but the number of bureaucrats—including consciousness sensitivity enforcers and other teachers increased 702percent.  If the non-teaching staff had only grown as fast as student enrollment, 24 billion dollars would be saved annually.

Featherbedding for administrators of political correctness create a critical mass of parental and taxpayer disgust. –George F. Wll, Washington Post, 2013

This simple cave dweller, off the grid country man can clearly see her.  She is a 6 year old with Norwegian blonde pigtails.  She is tall and lithesome for her age as she treads up the dirt road, metal lunch box in one hand, several books tied together with a discarded belt in the other.  She is wearing hand-me-down clothes from a rich aunt who lives in Chicago.  Each day she walks four miles to and from a one-room school house.  The weather beaten building sits by itself on a knoll visible from every direction.  The young girl begins first grade in this no-frill school, with the teachers she’ll have for several years—Miss Messner and Mavis Jibbon.

These long forgotten teachers would ignite a lifelong interest in learning from this primitive setting.  The emphasis was on the three-R basics.  Today such basics have been called racism, reproduction and recycling.   The earlier basics have seemingly been largely discarded  in the present educational world.  This farmer’s daughter went on to win numerous academic awards, with her near genius IQ, including a Fulbright Scholarship and prestigious national collegiate teaching awards, among others.   And to think that all this began in a no frill, bare bones one room South Dakota schoolhouse, with a his and her outhouse and a hand pumped well for drinking water.  And yes she walked to school throughout these years in Artic, -50 degree wind chill winter weather.

I often think of my beautiful wife’s educational background as we stroll down our dirt road and see at the juncture of Knight and Quaker Hill Roads the long forgotten spot where the one-room Larkin School House once stood.  At one time Brookfield had 32 such schools in its township.  They of course were consolidated to a central school and were abandoned forever.  Even in consolidation, the school for many generations was run by two people, a principal who would drive the school bus when needed, and the secretary.  In New Hartford, where I went to school, there were 6 or 7 people, including the guidance counselor and school nurse, who basically ran the school system.  The superintendent, Ralph Perry, was not too proud to walk to school from his home in Washington Mills.  Education was their goal, and the success of their charges was legendary.  Schools were not in the entertainment business, but in the education business.

But even cave dwellers, like myself, understand the world has changed and is changing dramatically.  Schools are under tremendous pressure from the politicians, educators and a society that has heaped on more and more duties once performed by families, communities, churches, etc.

I think nostalgically, and with great reverence, of those no frill educational days and tens of thousands of one-room school houses all across America that produced the ingredients in their students that made America a great and good nation envied by all.  A beacon of hope for those who long for a better life and are willing to work hard to achieve it.  Education will be the key as it’s always been and always will be.

Hobie Morris is a Brookfield resident and simple country man.

.