ABSTRACT
One-room rural schools, as much as rural churches, were vital to Midwestern rural society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There were more one-room schoolhouses than church buildings in the country. At the turn of the twentieth century, Iowa had over twelve thousand rural schoolhouses, and Illinois and Missouri each had close to ten thousand. All told, the Middle West had over ninety thousand schoolhouses in 1918, "almost as many as in the rest of the nation combined." Nearly every rural neighborhood had its own one-room school. 2
In the early twentieth century Midwest, teaching methods were much the same as they had been fifty years earlier. Children learned reading, writing, arithmetic, spelling, and orthography. They normally memorized their lessons and recited them for the teacher. In most one-room schools, one teacher taught these subjects to all eight grades. Pupils might be as young as six years old or as old as twenty. Generations of farmers, town leaders, and even national figures had attended such one-room schoolhouses for their common school education.3
