Would you prefer a one-room school to what is offered in your community?

I certainly would. Bill Kauffman reviews a book by NYU professor Jonathan Zimmerman, Small Wonder. My understanding of one-room schoolhouses comes largely from the writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder, and they were a mixed blessing, though amazingly successful considering their scant resources. As we vote with our feet and send our kids anywhere but the local public school, let's remember how we got where we are: consolidation in the name of progress. Kauffman writes:

'The attempt to abolish one-room schoolhouses, whether by the carrot of state aid or the stick of government fiat, set off one of the great unknown political wars of U.S. history, pitting farm people who "invoked classic themes of liberty and self-rule" against the "mostly urban elites" who "would wage zealous battle against the rural one-room school." Typically, two Delaware schoolconsolidators informed the hicks that "modern education . . . is less romantic and more businesslike, more formal, more exact, more specialized, done according to tested methods and a standard schedule." Such grim exactitude sounded like prison to parents used to the comparatively anarchic and localized governance of rural schools.

'Progressives worshipped "efficiency," Mr. Zimmerman observes, a word that to country people "conjured up a bloodless, impersonal system that buried small-town traditions and idiosyncrasies in a maze of regulations and policies." Big was better than small, asserted the consolidators. Riding the bus to a new school over "good roads" -- the highway and automobile industries lobbied for consolidation -- was superior to walking (how old-fashioned!) to a nearby school. A system in which parents and neighbors had a say in the education of a community's children was judged incapable of keeping up with the ever-accelerating improvement of the human species.'

Because public schools as we know them were born of a belief in human progress, even meliorism, it appears that the calamities of 20th century, from the sinking of the Titanic to the Great War to the Depression to the Second World War to postmodern philosophy, nullified the premises of progressive schooling. All that is left is the progressive impulse to consolidate power.

Public schools can be reformed, but it is going to be extremely difficult because it
is virtually impossible to pry central power from any entrenched bureaucracy. What is needed is decentralization.

Most of the brilliant experts who don't teach daily but tell teachers all over each state how to do so would do well to get back into the classroom themselves. The central authorities which micromanage all but a small percentage of public school funds should be told that the local authorities are free to be brilliant or stupid. If public education cannot be reformed and made effective by local people at the local level, it cannot be reformed.

A school, if it is to nurture a culture of freedom, needs to be free. Where the schools fail, the school boards will be replaced or the citizens will vote with their feet. American public schools in structure and hierarchy resemble Soviet agriculture more than they resemble the culture and methods of a free people.

[Photos above of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane.]