One-Room School

I went from first through eighth grades in a one-room school in Malaysia (I'm the girl with the very blond hair, above; click on the picture to see more detail). We never had more than eleven students in this school; that must have been a really busy year for the teacher, preparing lessons for students in most of the eight grades!

I had four teachers in all--one for first grade, the one pictured above throughout grades 2-7, and then two teachers during my 8th grade year (one the first half, and another the second half), which is the last year the school was open. After Barbara and I graduated from the 8th grade, our one-room school closed and the three remaining students on our mission hospital compound transferred to the local Christian & Missionary Alliance School, several miles away.

I've thought many times about the benefits and drawbacks of a one-room school. Overall, I'm struck by the intuitive sense that a one- or two-room school provides a better academic experience than larger schools do. But I'm not sure there's any good research that supports that, nor shows my perception to be wrong.

Many times it has struck me that the majority of my schoolmates who went to this tiny school with me over the years finished college and are contributing citizens in today's world. Julia, Barbara, and Bruce became nurses. Tim is a scientist at a research institute. Jamie is a lawyer who works on religious liberty issues and has visited the White House in that capacity. My brother is a radiation oncologist. Stephen is a PR director. I'm a university administrator. I would venture that much of our success was due to our family environments as the children of professionals: medical doctors and hospital administrators. But the other part of our success was due to our teacher who gave us individual attention, kept the standards high, held our feet to the fire in correcting our work, made us memorize tons of Bible verses, and always had something new and interesting for us to learn, or read, or see.

Therein lies the scary part of living in a community that is small enough to need only a one-room school. If you have a poor teacher, the students may languish with that teacher for several years and suffer the consequences. If there's a personality conflict between teacher and student, there's nowhere else to turn, no other options. If, as sometimes happens, the children pick on one particular student in the classroom, there may be no other classrooms or schools to which the parents can move that child. You're boxed in.

Assuming that you have an effective and personable teacher, however, there are many benefits in the one-room school. Children get more individual attention focused on their academic progress. The classroom can provide a family atmosphere with cross-age tutoring, the ability to move into a higher level of learning in certain subjects, and the opportunity for children to learn how to interact across age levels. I do think this separation of children into same-age "gangs" in single-grade classrooms can create unhealthy dynamics in a world where they need to be interacting across generations.

And then there are other benefits: you can go on cool field trips with only a few cars or a van needed for transportation. You can consider a garden plot with a space for each child to cultivate and observe and learn. Each child can get many more chances for leadership as they lead out in worships (in the case of Christian schools) or learning activities. Children develop skills of clarity in verbal expression as they have opportunity to teach concepts to the younger ones. And research does show that when an older child serves as "listener" to the young one who is reading, the reading skills of the older child also improve.

My husband and I, both educators, have shared a dream that we'll end our careers by teaching together in a one- or two-room Christian school in some interesting place. On a day when the problems seem big and complex, and you recognize your potential for interacting with hundreds or even thousands of people, it's nice to think of that little dream cocoon of the future, when we might be teaching ten or twenty kids, all with faces and stories and relationships and dreams for the future. Sometimes it's a nice thought, going back to Square One.