I was never a happy student in my days of public school. Every morning until the time I reached the 12th grade, I spit up before leaving my house. My stomach, I recall, was always in knots. Suffice it to say that I was not school spirited nor do I really look back on my school days as times of bliss like so many of my old classmates are now wont to do. Yet I loved to learn and was a good student. School to me was a place of often cruel children and even today it disturbs me that a girl in my 5th grade class who had leg surgery and used crutches for months, was the butt of jokes and snide remarks from loud mouth , freckle faced girls and boys who shared her space. I remember she leaned over to me one day and whispered in my ear that I was the only one in the class room who did not make fun of her.
It is my opinion that modern public education is designed to be divisive. It was arranged to place children in different compartments according to their ability to conform to the public school ideal. That ideal is to be attractive, popular, athletic, good in Math, and not at all intellectual or religious. The ideal student is not a book reader unless it is some trendy story about fornication or runaways. The ideal student is formed by the bureaucracy of the public school administrators who view education as scores on standardized tests designed to make children study to them and forget the material the moment the test pencil is put down/. A woman I know was honored in high school as the Best Student in Spanish Language. She got all As , all the years of studying that language and scored very high on the Spanish Language ACT exams. Yet she told me recently that she purposely forgot that language when it was no longer necessary to study for tests in order to excel in test scores. The only Spanish she remembers is Hola and Adios It did not matter to her once she no longer needed to be tested on her knowledge of it.
Part of the trouble in public school is due to the fact that many children feel they belong nowhere in the school and have received no acceptance by their peers These are the students who are perennially in trouble, wear all kinds of inappropriate clothes, and usually spend a lot of time in detention. Somehow the educators in state offices forget that human beings need to feel they belong someplace and the alienating feeling that so many people experience looms large in the public school arena.
The One Room School house of the 19th century was none of these things. Humble, sometimes primitive, it nevertheless provided a place for equals to learn what parents felt was necessary to educate their children. Brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles all crowded into the one room school . Some were bright , some were not. Some were attractive, some were not. Some showed athletic prowess , some did not . Yet despite these disparities there was no overt separation based on these distinctions. After all, they lived in community with one another . Their families farmed together, went to church together , socialized at rare times, together. So they all belonged to their little, rough village and they all belonged -together. I am certain there were squabbles. Diaries of teachers and students recount some very wicked behaviors, but those were isolated episodes that required the censure of the community and their values. It is because of this solidarity, that the memories of a majority of people once long removed from the little school of their childhood do so with a wistful longing for something that no longer seems to exist.
