Beyond the One-Room Schoolhouse

Sources

Schools. Before midcentury, most communities that devoted resources to public education would have felt a sense of accomplishment if they had managed to maintain a single, one-room building whose sole function was to serve as a school. In some areas of the country, schoolrooms consisted of little more than the corner of a church or a town hall, though in many rural communities, and especially in larger towns and cities, the “one-room schoolhouse” had emerged as the standard model for common-school instruction. Inside the schoolhouse, teachers faced the daunting task of trying to conduct classes that would benefit children at all levels, from toddlers of only five or six years old to young adults of fourteen and fifteen. With educational standards still only beginning to take shape by 1850, no two classrooms were exactly alike. Many students attended school irregularly, enrolling as family or work pressures dictated. Some were illiterate or barely able to read, while others had become proficient enough to serve as teacher’s assistants, or even to become teachers themselves. This system survived long past midcentury in more sparsely settled rural areas, but increasingly, beginning in the larger urban areas in New England and New York, the “one-room schoolhouse” became unmanageable and—from the perspective of educational reformers—inefficient, and a new type of school began to emerge.

Growing Pains . On one level the emergence of a school system based on age groups was a testament to the growing success of common schooling. In the early 1830s educators in Boston were still building schools with the aim of teaching three hundred students of various ages in a single classroom. In nearby Providence, Rhode Island, school-board authorities thought it proper, when they built a new grammar school in 1840, to take the model of the one-room schoolhouse and simply expand it. Each floor of the newly designed building consisted of a large, single classroom with room for 228 students, and instruction for the entire student body was the responsibility of a single “master teacher” aided by several assistants. The problems associated with this arrangement are not hard to imagine: teachers expressed frustration at their inability to manage such a large and diverse group, and more-advanced students who had already

acquired reading and writing skills felt their own progress was being held back by having to sit through classes aimed at beginners. Educational reformers felt that the ungraded system had outlived its usefulness and needed to be adapted to complement the expansion of public education they had in mind. In their search for a solution, leading educators were attracted by the German system of graded schools, whose strength, Horace Mann wrote, “consists of the proper classification of the scholars.”

Birth of the Graded School. The most important advance in applying the German model in the United States came in the late 1840s, when Boston educator John D. Philbrick convinced the school board there to build a new “model” school embodying the latest wisdom regarding classification. With Philbrick as its first principal, the Quincy School opened to great fanfare in 1848 and revolutionized American schooling in a way few other developments have. In place of the large halls intended to seat hundreds of students, the Quincy School consisted of smaller rooms, each built to seat fifty-six students and a single teacher. Its architecture embodied all of the most innovative ideas about educational reform: later dubbed the “egg-crate school,” the building consisted of four floors and a total of twelve classrooms. The fourth floor of the school contained an assembly hall capable of seating the entire student body, and in line with the reformers’ penchant for professionalization, the structure also contained a separate principal’s office. Its most important innovation, however, as remarked upon by many contemporary observers, was the provision of separate, individual desks and chairs for each pupil.

Graded Texts. Throughout the 1850s, the graded school pioneered by Philbrick became the model in larger towns and cities across the country. “For the next fifty years,” one educational historian has noted, it became the standard for schools systems everywhere. “More than any other single influence it stimulated the introduction of the graded classroom form of schooling.” The advent of the graded school was one indication of the growing complexity of common-school education, and in its wake other important developments followed.

These schools required a graded course of study, and school textbooks during this period began to reflect the classification taking place inside the schools. The nationally renowned McGuffeys Readers, which by this time had become the most popular classroom texts in America, underwent major revisions in 1857 and again in 1879 to reflect the new trend toward grading of materials. The new system also translated into an increase in textbook sales: in the fifteen years before midcentury, seven million McGuffey’s Readers had been sold; over the next two decades sales increased to forty million.

Codification. Frequently the task of designing an appropriate curriculum fell to city superintendents such as William H. Wells. As Chicago superintendent of schools between 1856 and 1864, Wells published Graded Course of Instruction for the Public Schools of Chicago in 1862, and the book was adopted as a standard guide by many school systems across the country. In it he attempted to establish uniform guidelines to be followed at different levels:

Children began with the alphabet at the age of five, learned to count to 100 and do simple addition in the next grade, and proceeded in the next years to learn about the mysteries of Roman numerals, the hanging gardens of Babylon, the Crusades, and the Trojan War.

By the end of this period, the era of the one-room schoolhouse was coming to an end, and the graded school model had won the admiration of educators throughout the United States. In rural areas, particularly in the South and the West, practical implementation of the new ideas associated with classification would be delayed by a lack of financial resources or, in some cases, a lack of enthusiasm on the part of public officials. Nevertheless the graded school we are familiar with today was here to stay.

Sources

Frederick M. Binder, The Age of the Common School, 1830–1865 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1974);

Ellwood P. Cubberley, Public Education in the United States: A Study and Interpretation of American Educational History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934);

Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill ôc Wang, 1983);

Michael B. Katz, “From Voluntarism to Bureaucracy in American Education,” in Education in American History: Readings on the Social Issues, edited by Katz (New York: Praeger, 1973);

Joel Spring, The American School: 1642–1985 (New York: Longman, 1986).