Seems quaint now, but my family lived in a part of rural America in the early 1950s where one-room school houses weren’t still common but they still existed.
Seems quaint now, but my family lived in a part of rural America in the early 1950s where one-room school houses weren’t still common but they still existed.
Bell Victory, situated on the outskirts of Springfield, Missouri, was one of the remaining ones. It stood on a stone foundation and looked more like a country church than a school. Inside, there was a large room that occupied most of the interior space; and at the rear of the room were two cloak closets, one was for first through fourth graders and one for fifth through eighth graders where hats, scarfs, coats, boots and lunches were kept.
There was also a raised platform at the front of the big room for the teacher’s desk, and rows of school desks filled the large room for the students. Along both sides of the school were large windows that brought in an abundance of light and made the room seem big and airy.
And, on top of the roof was a belfry that would typically be a place for a bell; but, ironically, there was no bell at Bell Victory. Electricity powered the lights, but water came from a well with a hand pump that provided clean, clear, cool water on demand.
And this place, this one-room school, was where I began my first two years of formal education.
I also remember that there was a big yard that surrounded Bell Victory where baseball and other games could be played, and lots of grassy areas for other types of activities, and an amazing camaraderie — given the age differences among the 22 students.
But the really amazing part was what happened in the course of the day with one teacher attending to lessons for eight different grades. In many ways, it is an ideal environment for learning and a lot like home-schooling today. Each grade received lessons that were age appropriate. But younger students who wanted more had the opportunity to absorb whatever they could from lessons for the older students.
What I will never forget is an occasion when I became interested in the lesson for one of the older groups, thought I knew the answer to the question the teacher was asking, and responded. I thought I had said it only to myself, but discovered that everyone was turning to look at me, and realized I had said it out loud. I was enormously embarrassed, but more then a little proud when the teacher acknowledged that my blurted answer was correct.
The most important thing I learned from the two years in that one-room school house but didn’t fully comprehend until years later is that the mind is capable of stretching far beyond what our more highly structured educational systems today sometimes fail to encourage.
At the beginning of my third-grade year, Bell Victory consolidated with a handful of other one-room schools to create a one-through-eigth-grade school. The new school was named Kickapoo (in honor of the Kickapoo tribe of Native Americans indigenous to that part of Missouri, after they had been run out of the Great Lakes area — don’t get me started). It was quite a different experience from the one-room school that began my formal education.
Kickapoo was far more organized with each grade having its own room or rooms. The playgrounds were spacious with areas for swings and other devices, ball fields, courts, etc. Kickapoo provided a sound education in preparation for high school.
Still on country roads in Greene County, Missouri, at the time, we students rode a bus to school and back each day, and that took about an hour. This, of course, with a dozen or so boys in close proximity to one another was where I learned about the world. We had all the answers and were willing to share what we knew with one another.
Turns out, we didn’t know much. And certainly, we didn’t know much that had any accuracy to it. We were full of a lot of myth and mystery. Cars and girls were our major topics of discussion, and we knew a lot more about cars than girls.
Cars were the myth; girls were the mystery.
It’s interesting that decades later and with considerably more educational experiences, it’s Bell Victory that I remember the most. It was among the things that were vanishing rapidly from the landscape as America entered the second half of the twenty century…even in the more remote parts of the country. The one-room school is an artifact of rural America before the automobile closed distances and allowed for larger school districts and larger per-school enrollment.
I was born in a place and time where I could experience the last interesting dregs of an older rural America and the emerging integration of that culture into a rapid modernization of “country folk” like those of us on the Old Hyde Place. I remember having a “party line” telephone in our house, using an “outhouse” bathroom, having to pump water for household needs, using wood burning stoves for cooking and heating, listening to the radio in the evening as our entertainment and connection to the world beyond our farm, and lying in bed at night in the hot summer before air conditioning with my head in the window to catch whatever tender breeze I might to try and get to sleep.
By the time I was 22 years old, I was off the farm, had a college degree, was working in higher education, and watched on television as an American stepped onto the moon for the first time.
And today, writing from my retirement comfort zone and asking ChatGPT to get me data on the number of one-room schools that were still in operation in 1951 when I started first grade — and which it did in seconds — I’m more than whelmed at what has taken place in the last 74 years.
Bell Victory to ChatGPT. I guess I’m really not country folk anymore.
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