Schoolhouse

“ The schoolhouse is an unoccupied room in a private house, an ancestral, or other temple, or any other available place borrowed for the purpose. Renting a place for a school seems to be almost or quite unknown. The teacher does his own cooking, or if he is unequal to this task, he is assisted by one of his pupils, perhaps his own son, whom he often brings with him, albeit, as already mentioned, there is classical authority against having a son taught by a father. ”

“ An American schoolhouse of today owes its improvement in appearance over the schoolhouse of fifty years ago largely to the popular diffusion, through the illustrated magazines, of better standards of artistic taste. But whether the judgment of school-teachers and school-children upon a piece of literature is any better than it was in the red schoolhouse of fifty years ago is a disputable question. ”

“ With few exceptions, I found the teachers in these country schools to be miserably poor in preparation for their work, and poor in moral character. The schools were in session from three to five months. There was practically no apparatus in the schoolhouses, except that occasionally there was a rough blackboard. I recall that one day I went into a schoolhouse—or rather into an abandoned log cabin that was being used as a schoolhouse—and found five pupils who were studying a lesson from one book. ”

“ In such a schoolhouse one could get along very well, if he could keep his pupils close enough to him, but the chances are, as I have found, that they will put bugs down one another's collars, and while you are hearing one class the other children will chase one another about. Their buoyant spirits will not permit them to keep quiet while they are in the open. ”

“ In the first place there should never be any waste paper on the basement floor; and in the second place boys should never carry parlor matches, or any other kind of matches, to school. There are more precious lives in a schoolhouse than in any other building in the whole world. ”

“ Happy is he when he enters definitely into community life by taking his place in the district school. The schoolhouse may be at the village centre or it may stand aloof among the trees or stark on a barren hillside along the country road; physical environment is of small consequence as compared with the new social environment of the schoolroom itself. ”

“ The school building should be in a dry, sunny, sightly spot. Ordinarily it should face the southern compass. This would move seven tenths of our rural schoolhouses, and turn more than half of them end for end. It is not at all necessary that a school building should face the road, or be very near it. Light, warmth, horizon, room to play, these are the important considerations in locating a schoolhouse. ”

“ The schoolhouse was much like any country school—but smaller and more cheaply built. It had long wooden benches and a rusty stove and in fine weather a dozen or more pupils, who ranged in age from very young children to great farm boys, who towered over Ida Mary, but whom, somehow, she learned to manage effortlessly in that serene fashion of hers. In bad weather, when it was difficult to travel across the prairie, her class dwindled until, at times, she had no pupils at all. ”

“ The schoolhouse should be used by the community as the place for many of its social acts and performances. Almost every night, and throughout the summer as well as in the winter, the people, young and old, should meet at the school for some sort of social work or play. ”

“ Let each township, or perhaps somewhat smaller area, select a central, well-adapted site and thereon erect a modern, well-equipped school building. But this building must not be just the traditional schoolhouse with its classrooms and rows of desks. For it is to be more than a place where the children will study and recite lessons from books; it is to be the place where all the people of the neighborhood, old and young, will [Pg 33] assemble for entertainment, amusement, and instruction. ”

“ The picture of several dozen boys and girls in a schoolroom engaged in study made a deep impression upon me, and I had the feeling that to get into a schoolhouse and study in this way would be about the same as getting into paradise. ”

“ The old district system has not lost all of its value, for the first six grades, or perhaps seven, can be taught in the old schoolhouse, providing that schoolhouse be rightly orientated and equipped with playgrounds, and other necessities, quite as well as in the center, and the children are within their mothers' reach. ”

“ The rural schools possess inadequate buildings and equipment. The average rural schoolhouse consists of one room, with perhaps a small hallway. The building is constructed without reference to architectural effect, resembling nothing so much as a large box with a roof on it. ”

“ The schoolhouse is a log hut sometimes without doors and windows, or even a floor. For religious services, dependence is placed upon the chance visits of an exhorter who sometimes cannot read, and is even proud of getting his inspiration at first hand. ”

“ This movement proposes that the schoolhouse, especially in rural districts, be used as a social centre, becoming the club house, the library, the forum of the community, thus assembling together many of those otherwise isolated, or with no recreative horizon. ”

“ There are no public schoolhouses. The school is [Pg 24] sometimes held in the temple, sometimes in the home of the schoolmaster, and sometimes in the home of a wealthy patron. The furniture of the schoolroom consists of an altar consecrated to Confucius and the god of knowledge, a desk and a chair for the teacher, and the pupils' desks and stools, provided by the children themselves. No effort is made to render the room attractive. ”

“ In the middle is an iron stove, around which on a winter’s day are parked four benches in a hollow square, upon which, or studying in the corner, huddle and wriggle twenty-three pupils, ranging from seven up to twenty-one years of age. They are reading physiology aloud, in the midst of the gaunt room, with very little in the way of blackboards or materials. An example of the better district schoolhouse is in a populous region near the mill town of Talassee ”

“ The new schoolhouses erected during this period were said to be very substantial and well adapted for their purpose:
Several of them have been built with an eye to beauty of design and finish, as well as to comfort, and are supplied with the latest improved furniture and apparatus. ”

“ And if the school premises are now too small in extent to admit of such a use, let the pupils make an earnest plea for additional ground. As a general fact our school-grounds have been shamefully limited in extent and neglected as to their use and keeping. The school-house, in itself and in its surroundings, ought to be one of the most beautiful and attractive objects to be seen in any community. The approach from the street should be like that to any dwelling house, over well kept walks bordered by green turf, with trees and shrubs and flowers offering their adornment. ”

“ A school-house should be made a place of the most pleasurable resort and agreeable associations to children, but certain it is that in no wise can this be the case where the great hickory, thong, leather strap, or bridle-rein meets, as it enters the school-house, the child’s eye as it does the eye of the visitor, reminding one, as it must the other, of entering the presence of the old plantation overseer in waiting for his victim. ”

“ The building, well-designed for its occupancy, is large, airy, open to the light on every side, amply provided with all appliances requisite for instruction in the arts and sciences, and finished interiorly and exteriorly in the highest style of useful and beautiful architectural effects. The distinguishing characteristic of the Ideal School building is its chimney, which rises far above the roof, from whose tall stack a column of smoke issues, and the hum and whir of machinery is heard, and the heavy thud of the sledge-hammer resounding on the anvil, smites the ear. ”

“ Do you remember, when you went to school, the long closet, or dressing room, where you used to hang your coat and hat? The boys and girls of the Soldan School have steel lockers in a sunlit locker room. Do you remember the old wooden floors? These boys and girls have wooden floors to walk on, but the wood is quarter-sawed oak, and it is laid in asphalt over concrete, which makes the finest kind of floor. Do you remember the ugly old school building? The front of this one looks like Hampden Court Palace, brought up to date. Do you remember the big classroom that served almost every purpose? ”

“ The schoolroom is so primitive that you would hardly recognize it as such. Light and air and space are all too little. There are no desks or even benches. A small, wooden blackboard and the teacher's table and rickety chair are all that it can boast in the way of equipment. The only interesting thing in sight is the children themselves, rows of them on the floor, writing letters in the sand. Unwashed they are, uncombed and almost unclothed, but with all the witchery of childhood in their eyes. In that bare room lies the possibility of transforming the life of the Village of the Seven Palms. ”

“ By the side of the models of the school-rooms, where children find school-furniture studied with painstaking care and proportioned to their stature, have been placed the works executed by the school-children themselves of every kind, primary, maternal and professional. These works, in a general way, prove an average aptitude for the industrial arts, and indicate a real taste for beautiful forms. A hall is wholly set apart for the pupils of the special schools. ”

“ I cannot see how it is possible to come nearer perfection in the building of a public school. There is not a dark corner in the whole structure, from the splendid gymnasium under the red-tiled roof to the indoor playground on the street floor, which, when thrown into one with the two yards that lie enclosed in the arms of the H, give the children nearly an (p. 354) acre of asphalted floor to romp on from street to street; for the building sets right through the block, with just such a front on the other street as it shows on this one. ”

“ The School Building, imposing upon our credulity and pretending to be too sacred for these purposes, needs to be taken down from its pedestal. It may be permitted to have a share in the education of our youth if it will but remember that it is no more important in that process than a garden, a swimming tank, a playground, the library around the corner, the woods where the botany class goes, or the sky overhead that exhibits its constellations gladly at the request of the science teacher. ”

“ Once in the school building they feel at home and take the same interest and responsibility in the work that they take in their own homes. Each child knows186 what all the other children and classes are doing, for all the children are constantly meeting in the locker rooms or as they pass through the halls for their change of classroom at the end of every hour. The auditorium and the system of visiting classes, and the repairing and manufacturing of school equipment by the students, are strong factors in creating the spirit that prevails among the scholars. ”

“ The interior of the school-building resembled the outside in being precisely like that of ten thousand other graded schools in this country. The halls were long and dark and dusty, and because the building had been put up under contract at a period when public contract-work was not so scrupulously honest as it notably is in our present cleanly muck-raked era, the steps of the badly built staircase creaked and groaned and sagged and gave forth clouds of dust under the weight of the myriads of little feet which climbed up and clown those steep ascents every day. ”

“ For us the bell upon the Old Red School-house calls in vain. We heed it not, we that hearkened for it years ago. The living tide of youth flows toward the school-house, and we are not of it. Never again shall we sit at those old desks, whittled and carved with rude initials, and snap our fingers, eager to tell the answer. ”

“ The Interior.—Within the building there is frequently no adequate equipment in the way of apparatus, supplementary reading, or reference books of any kind. There are no decorations on the walls except such as are put there by mischievous children. The whole situation both inside and out brings upon one a feeling of desolation. Men and women who live in reasonably comfortable homes near by allow the school home of their precious children to remain for years unattractive and uninspiring in every particular. ”

“ The old pine benches and desks have disappeared before the march of improvement—my recollection of them is anything but agreeable—and the school-rooms are furnished with comfortable seats and desks combined. The children are no longer crowded together in small, unventilated rooms. Blackboards, maps and apparatus are furnished to all schools. Trained teachers only are employed, and a uniform course of study is pursued, so that each Public School is a stepping-stone to the High School, and upward to the College or University. ”

“ This is the youngest child among the chartered institutions of the Association, but even this child is crying out for enlarged accommodations. The enrollment of the school [318] shows a considerable increase over that of last year, and the promise for the year now opening is still larger. One building only answers all the purposes of this institution. Here are the school rooms, the teachers rooms, the President’s residence and office, dormitories, rooms for industrial training of girls, library, chapel, dining room, kitchen and laundry, and it is not a large building either. ”

“ The kindergarten system is largely used in the school-room when, as is sometimes necessary, children are sent at an earlier age than five, to learn obedience and habits of discipline, which cannot be observed so strictly in the nursery. In the well-to-do English home the school-room is a delightful spot. It is generally one of the best rooms in the house, chosen for its brightness, its pleasant aspect, and general convenience, and in the lives of most children it is a place of real happiness, and to the girls of the family full of delightful memories. ”