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{{B}}One-room
Schools{{/B}} One-room schools are part of the heritage of the United States, and the mention of them makes people feel a vague longing for "the way things were." One-room schools are an endangered species, however. For more than a hundred years, one-room schools have been systematically shut down and their students sent away to centralized schools. As recently as 1930 there were 149,000 one-room schools in the United States. By 1970 there were 1,800. Today, of the nearly 800 remaining one-room schools, more than 350 are in Nebraska. The rest are scattered through a few other states that have on their road maps wide-open spaces between towns. Now that there are hardly any left, educators are beginning to think that maybe there is something yet to be learned from one-room schools, something that served the pioneers that might serve as well today. Progressive educators have come up with progressive-sounding names like "peer-group teaching" and "multi-age grouping" for educational procedures that occur naturally in the one-room schools. In a one-room school the children teach each other because the teacher is busy part of the time teaching someone else. A fourth grader can work at a fifth-grade level in math and a third-grade level in English without the stigma associated with being left back or the pressures of being skipped ahead. A youngster with a learning disability can find his or her own level without being separated from the other pupils. In larger urban and suburban schools today, this is called "mainstreaming." A few hours in a small school that has only one classroom and it becomes clear why so many parents feel that one of the advantages of living in Nebraska is that their children have to go to a one-room school. |