Quotation of the Day
13th May 2018
‘The institutional form of the one-room school was radically difterent from the institutional form of the school where children md subject matter are sorted into grades. Each form imposes its oro behaviors on teachers and students. The one-room school H. the teacher to cater to the differences among children and 6e difierences within each chiid. But the graded school requires rhet the teacher stand before his class of same-year-olds and teach thatever sameness has been prescribed for children in his grade.’
— John Henry Martin & Charles H. Harrison, Free to Learn: Unlocking and Upgrading American Education
This was published in 1972. Things haven’t changed much from that day to this, and education is still broken.
May 14th, 2018 at 07:40
As one of the now-rare Americans who actually went to a one-room school, I can attest to the truth of this. Technically, it was a 3 room school; 1-3, 4-6, and 7-8 grades in each room. We were consolidated into another school when I was in 2nd grade and painfully learned what it was like to be boxed into a single grade. A teacher in the consolidated school beat my knuckles with a ruler because I had worked on the future lessons in a workbook. In the one-room, if I finished my 1st grade stuff I could work on whatever I liked, even reading 3rd grade books.