by Mary Lou Healy
Recent television news coverage revealed Chelsea Clinton and her mother checking out New England colleges. Such a scene is but one straw in the wind, indicating the imminence of an event deplored by children and welcomed by mothers...the first day of school.
The golden days of summer dwindle down, the last of them becoming whirlwinds of activity. Soon-to-be scholars choose their back-to-school outfits. They stock up on notebooks and supplies. Some can hardly wait for opening day. Others approach it with all the enthusiasm of 18th-century French nobles going to the guillotine.
The majority of children will attend traditional schools, public or private. A minority will opt for alternatives. Home schooling, once a necessity for pioneers and those in isolated locations, is enjoying a resurgence of popularity. Parents may choose it because they are dissatisfied with the quality of available schooling, because they are unhappy with the curriculum, or because they wish their offspring to be taught in accordance with their own beliefs and religious convictions.
Whatever the setting for September's students, very few will be returning to one-room schoolhouses. True, some of these still exist but for the most part, this old-time school has vanished. I feel lucky to have attended one. Two, actually.
My first schoolhouse sits at the end of our rural road but is now a private residence. It's the same school my father attended. In his day, there was a two-door outhouse in the rear. According to my grandmother, he'd ask to use it and, gaining permission, would exit and just keep on going until he got home. Where upon she'd take him by the ear and march him right back again. He always was a free spirit.
I, on the other hand, loved the little school. There were only five or six students in each grade. One class sat up front in a semicircle of tiny chairs, to receive their lesson while others remained at their desks, presumably doing their assignments...but probably not.
Inside the entrance, were twin cloakrooms...the girls' side and the boys'. Segregation continued downstairs, with boys' and girls' bathrooms. In addition, there was Mr. Brox's domain, the boiler room. Everyone loved to run in there after recess on a cold winter day and leave wet mittens to dry. Mr. Brox, the janitor (we hadn¹t heard of custodians or sanitary engineers) was a neighboring farmer.
So was Mr. Perry, the bus driver. He it was who took stern charge when we left this first experience in education to attend the next level, grades four through six, at another one-room school about a mile away. Mr. Perry was an army veteran whose upright military bearing, size and general unsmiling demeanor were enough to keep order in the ranks of pint-sized passengers. We rode his bone-shaking vehicle in which anything that could possibly rattle did and we filled it with a decibel level of babble which probably made John Perry long for the quiet mooing of his herd of dairy cows. He deposited us each morning into the care of Mrs. Judge, and elderly lady whom I remember with deep affection. She was elderly, unlike the teacher described by my 7-year-old, years later, as old. When I met her at the first P.T.A. meeting, she was all of 22!
Mrs. Judge was short and round and sweet-faced. She wore her hair in a bun through which she skewered her pencils. She read us a Bible passage every morning, after we saluted the flag and sang a patriotic song. I suppose today¹s liberals would shudder at such activities but I don't believe any of her students were ever contaminated by such overt signs of faith and patriotism.
In our small world, we learned English, history, geography and arithmetic. We read Longfellow¹s Hiawatha and Evangeline. A traveling music teacher came twice weekly; also an art teacher. In our 4-H group, we learned the rudiments of sewing and crafts. We turned cigar boxes into sewing boxes; we painted stones for doorstops. I still have mine, a triangular-shaped rock showing a seashore setting, complete with lopsided sail boat.
The older girls took turns helping Mrs. Judge make the morning cocoa in a large enamel pot. We carried bag lunches and often our teacher brought dessert. At Christmas, we "entertained" parents and neighbors with carols and nativity plays. Periodically, our artwork and best papers were displayed for their admiration.
For Memorial Day, each child brought flowers to school. We then wound our way in a two-by-two line down the country road to an ancient cemetery and placed bouquets on the graves. Returning, we stopped at a brook that ran beneath the road to throw flowers into the water, in memory of sailors lost at sea, on the theory, I guess, that all brooks eventually reach ocean.
Many years later, while serving on a jury panel, I met a former schoolmate, who was a fellow panelist.
"Do you remember," he asked, "the time I turned the clock back?"
George, who incidentally was the despair of Mrs. Judge, had one day slipped back into school toward the end of recess and turned the clock back an hour. We had the longest recess in the history of one-room schoolhouses. It seemed no time after the hand-held bell (a privilege to ring) had called us inside, until the bus arrived to take us home. Poor Mrs. Judge never quite figured out what happened that day.
The one-room schoolhouse was a warm and nurturing environment, a safe, secure place in which children took their first steps toward the future. Our burgeoning population has rendered it impractical and obsolete and that's a pity.
I could wish for every child the conviction of his or her importance and value, and the joy of learning and discovery which are the lasting legacy for those of us who filled inkwells and washed blackboards and left initials scratched into battered desks, who grew up and grew older but never forgot their one-room country schoolhouse.
Mary Lou Healy, an "umpteenth generation" New Englander, writes regularly for our journal.