One Room School House Model



Most of us are familiar with the old one room school house.

We probably never attended a one room school; however,

we have probably all viewed “Little House on the Prairie."

There is a special magic in the ideal of teaching in a one room

school, I will attempt to explain it.

Today’s public school does things that the “Old One Room

School House" could not do. Today’s school separates our

children by age and accomplishment. Generally, all the five,

six, twelve, fifteen year olds are taught with others their same

age. If school has society's goal of educating and socializing us

to take our role in the community. Where in a healthy community,

other than our public school system, are we able to find our

community divided by age? I question whether it is a healthy

situation for our youth to be segregated in this fashion.

Let’s take a close look at the “Old One Room School House" model.

This form of schooling initially came about because the community

was limited in funds and could not build multiple structures or rooms

to segregate the students. A five year old might sit next to a ten

year old who in turn may be sitting next to a fifteen year old. The

one room school house school’s produced children that had a full

understanding of reading, writing, and arithmetic. In many

communities the school may have had as many as forty children in

the class. This number of students we are told by today’s teachers

as being too large to adequately teach or assist each student in

mastering skills. Yet, the teachers a hundred plus years ago did just

that. They taught, they supervised the individual student in

mastering the skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Our history as

a country, state, city, and communities is evidence of the fact that

they were taught. Why were teachers one hundred years ago able to

teach where today’s teachers say they cannot.

In the old school house model, the teacher taught subjects as needed.

If you had one student who needed to grasp an advanced math

concept, say trigonometry, the entire class was exposed to the

instruction. The majority of the class may have been active doing their

particular level of math, while listening to the lesson the teacher was

presenting to the trigonometry student. What does this mean? A student

will have heard a subject taught multiple times before he may master the

learning skills needed. This one room school model had another asset that

is not being adequately utilized today. This asset is the tutor, or fellow

student. When you have students of varying accomplishment, you have

others who can help and assist their fellow students acquire new skills.

This helps both the struggling student and the tutor. How often have you

heard a teacher of a Sunday school class say they have learnt more by

teaching than we, the class, will learn by being taught the lesson. Working

to teach and clarify a subject to a student causes the teacher to gain a full

understanding that may not have been required to just master the skill. Our

one room school house teacher becomes a supervisor of student teachers.

Our community is a mixed age population. Have you seen today’s kids

ostracize other children due to age differences of only a year or two? I

am not discounting the fact that a teenager would not want to

congregate with a ten year old. Our community needs us to learn to

socialize ourselves with groupings of people from all ages. The skill of

social involvement with others from different spheres is required by a

healthy active growing community. A young child, a toddler in today’s

society is often put with other toddler’s to play. Watch these toddlers

play. Most of the time the toddlers are NOT interacting with one

another, they are playing with a toy while removed emotionally from

their surroundings. Take the same toddler and have them play with

their parents and siblings, you will see active interaction between the

toddler and siblings, parents.

Homeschooling returns us back to a system that has worked

successfully for centuries. The historical past of the United States and

the world as a whole document our growth and accomplishments of

mixed age socialization. It has been a recent social experiment to

segregate our youth by age. What is and has happened since its

adoption into our society shows its failure.

Home schooling our children is a correct choice for them individually

and society as a whole. A home schooled child learns to take on

responsibility for their lives. As in the one room school model, they

too become involved with helping others.