The Country Curmudgeon: An American schoolhouse
By Roy Hicks
Thursday, October 8, 2009 11:14 AM PDT
The graying man shaded his eyes with his hands and peered through the dusty window of his old schoolhouse. The little white-painted building had once been located about two miles away but now had been moved into the center of his old hometown and preserved as an historical monument.
Rightly so, he thought fondly, because it was a memento of the best part of traditional American education.
Too bad he hadn’t been here on one of the two days it was actually open to the public because he would have loved to get inside again.
From 1949 to 1953 he had been a pupil here from the fourth to the seventh grades under the stern tutelage of Eva Donovan, their tough old Irish schoolmarm.
Mrs. Donovan ran a very tight ship: ruling her 28 somewhat unruly country kids in eight grades with a strong hand and a rattan cane on the wall behind her desk, and she brooked no nonsense: insisting all her young charges learn how to read, write and do figures. They all did and eventually graduated to the high school in town.
Everything looked exactly as he remembered from 47 years earlier: the antique desks and benches in orderly rows; the wide slate blackboards across the front of the room; and even the old oil-fired furnace that used to heat the schoolhouse in the dead of the Michigan winters.
He could almost hear old Mrs. Donovan calling “fourth-grade arithmetic” or “seventh-grade English — pass!”
Summoning pupils from their desks to the front of the little classroom to recite their homework lessons.
Here he had received the finest basic education America had to offer.
“Public education” in America had been born in countless little one-room schoolhouses exactly like this one, run by stern country schoolmasters and schoolmarms thoroughly dedicated to their calling. They taught the “three R’s,” and pupils in this quaint environment succeeded because failure was not an option.
The original purpose of public education in rural America was to teach children how to read the Bible and instill its no-nonsense values into their developing lives. It’s appalling how we’ve departed from those simple principles now: teaching grade-school pupils how to put condoms on bananas and mindlessly chanting praises to Barack Obama.
The graying man reluctantly stepped away from the old schoolhouse window.
So much had changed, he thought sadly.
Where such sound basics and a similar high school education had served him so well through all of his lifetime, American education had suffered a tragic fall from its original illustrious purpose.
Roy Hicks, a Payette resident, writes a weekly column for the Argus Observer. Comments or questions for Mr. Hicks can be directed to: Roy Hicks, Argus Observer Newsroom; 1160 S.W. Fourth St., Ontario, OR 97914 . The views and opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily represent those of the Argus Observer.
