Cherishing the survivors of that very American building type, the one-room schoolhouse

BY ADAM GOODHEART

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The One-Room Schoolhouse:
A Tribute to a Beloved National Icon
By Paul Rocheleau
Universe Publishing, $35

In a one-room schoolhouse in Worcester, Mass., in 1756, a daydreaming young teacher, fresh out of Harvard College, got his first education in applied political science. As he confided to his diary,

I sometimes, in my sprightly moments, consider my self, in my great Chair at School, as some Dictator at the head of a commonwealth. In this little State I can discover all the great Genius's, all the surprising actions and revolutions of the great World in miniature. I have severall renowned Generalls but 3 feet high, and several deep projecting Politicians in petticoats. … In short my little school like the great World, is made up of Kings, Politicians, Divines, L.D., Fops, Buffoons, Fidlers, Sycophants, Fools, Coxcombs, chimney sweepers, and every other Character drawn in History.

It was an experience he took to heart. For the teacher was John Adams, 20 years old and still undecided on a career—half a lifetime away from when he would again sit at the head of a commonwealth, presiding over its generals and politicians, its geniuses and sycophants.

Adams was hardly the only observer who has, within a cramped rural schoolroom, envisioned a nation in miniature, or at least a kind of laboratory in which raw material could be molded into sturdy citizens of the Republic. This is clear from Paul Rocheleau's photographic tribute to one-room schoolhouses, for which he crisscrossed the country to capture remaining structures, from a colonial brick survivor in Connecticut to a streamlined WPA-built example in North Dakota.

As Rocheleau observes, the one-room schoolhouse owed its proliferation to distinctively American conditions: the sparseness of rural population, the separation of church and state (which encouraged secular schools), and above all, the belief that widespread education was an essential nutrient of democracy. "A people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives," wrote James Madison in 1822.

This typically American marriage of ideals and necessities is reflected in schoolhouse architecture, which—as Rocheleau's handsome photographs show—often manages to combine the seriousness of a church or statehouse with the rustic simplicity of a barn or privy. Usually the work of anonymous builders, schoolhouses at their best are small masterpieces of the vernacular tradition. The white gable end of an 1889 structure in Lebanon, Mo., seems folded, origami-like, from stiff paper. The oddly named Sodom Schoolhouse, built in Milton, Pa., in 1814, is a clean-cut stone octagon suggesting a utopian folly in the heart of farm country.

As its subtitle unabash-edly admits, this volume is a celebration rather than a serious study. Rocheleau, who in prior books has photographed architecture ranging from tree houses to synagogues, here takes on the writer's job for the first time. He sketches the history of American education and describes interviews with former teachers and students at schools he visited. Through the haze of sentimental memories, sharp details stand out: the baked potatoes and squirrel that children brought as lunch in Louisiana; the two clumps of bushes that served as boys' and girls' bathrooms in Iowa.

Despite their often primitive conditions, Rocheleau isn't ready to consign the old schools to the past. In the final chapter, he visits half a dozen still open today in places such as rural North Dakota and off-shore Maine. He finds that, just as in the past, older students help younger ones; instead of having one teacher, a child has 10 or 20. It's a lesson, Rocheleau suggests, that could be applied in America's foundering public schools.

As for the hundreds of schools that have fallen into disuse, many stand boarded up and vine-shrouded. Others are lovingly tended as historic sites—often by ex-students. At a Kentucky school, Rocheleau shot a miraculously preserved calendar, drawn in colored chalk on the blackboard, for May 1941, the month the school closed. The image captures perfectly that long-ago last day of class, the start of a summer vacation that would last forever.

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