Common Knowledge™
The Newsletter of the Core Knowledge Foundation
School Days
E. D. Hirsch recently sent the following email message and attached letter to Core Knowledge staffers. The Foundation invites everyone to send in their own “schoolhouse” stories, including stories from elder family members (photographs welcome, too.) Please send stories to , subject line “schoolhouse.”
Dear CK staff,
Some of you may be as fascinated as I was by the letter transcribed here, which was found today when my wife Polly was cleaning out some old files from her late father, John C. Pope, a distinguished professor of English at Yale University. The February, 1926 letter was sent when John was an undergraduate at Yale. The writer is his grandmother, born in 1840.
She began school at age 4, when she attended a one-room school house in Maine. Her priceless description of American schooling in the 1840s was occasioned by her reading the New York Times in February 1926 and seeing a lithograph of a one-room school house exactly like the one she had attended. I attach a scan of this picture along with the parts of the letter that comment on it.
The easy excellence of the style suggests that the schooling was a success.
You will note the Times caption says that the "old question of what to teach" is still very much up in the air.
Don Hirsch
Dear John,
The illustration enclosed is from the Times account of the National Teachers Association, which has been meeting in Washington as represented by School Superintendents. It is an exact reproduction of the institution in which I learned the three R’s up to the age of nine and a half.
The door was in the same place, opening into a vestibule or entry, as it was then called, the width of the building. The inner door opened opposite the outer. At the right a platform, a few inches high, enthroned the teacher’s desk; in the left corner was the stove. I think there were four rows of desks with seats for two pupils at each, with aisles between and along the sides. We used to choose our seatmates at the beginning of the term. For the summer term we had a woman called the “Mistress.” In the winter term, which lasted through three or four months, with no cessation for holidays save Saturday afternoons, we had a “Master” because big boys attended who worked on farms in the summer. It was primitive, of course, but many an American statesman can trace his development to the “little red schoolhouse.” My father was on the school committee and took pains to secure good teachers and we had some very good [ones]. Our great thing was, if children showed any aptitude and ambition for learning, they were not hampered by restrictions [or] rules but could go as fast and as far as they liked, there being no grades. It was “old freedom.”
P.S. There were many trees around the red school house I went to — oaks and birches. From the latter the master cut the rods with which to thrash the unruly boys. In those days boys were not spoiled by “sparing the rod.” When I was ten we moved to another town and I was put in a Select School for Girls whose teacher was much the worse type that Charlotte Bronte encountered. Most of the girls were older than I but I carried off the prize in scholarship and deportment against all competitors.
G.
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