One Room Country School

ONE-ROOM COUNTRY SCHOOL: SOUTH DAKOTA STORIES delivers precisely what its title promises, that is, a collection of short narratives by former teachers and students who taught and studied in one-room, multi-grade schools in mostly eastern and mid South Dakota, generally in the 1930s and 1940s. A few of the stories pre- and postdate these two decades, a very few being as recent as the 1990s. The recollections range widely, including, for example, care of the schoolhouse, episodes involving the outhouse, the crude heating systems (and sometimes fires), teaching methodologies, political indoctrination (through the Young Citizens Leagues, or YCL), varmints infiltrating the classroom, dangerous winter storms, Christmas programs, and other memories from the contributors to this collection. In addition to the first-person recollections recounted here, an introduction provides a brief history of early South Dakota schools, and a photography section furnishes visual reenforcement of the stories. The book is certainly not over-long, consisting of only 139 pages, of which twelve are devoted to photographs. There is, in addition, a brief bibliography of apparently similar books, but with no annotations to suggest the nature of each book. The vignettes comprising ONE-ROOM COUNTRY SCHOOL paint vivid mental pictures for the reader of at least one facet of the lives of school-age children living in sparsely populated areas of the northern Great Plains in the early and mid twentieth century. I was particularly struck by the multilingualism of South Dakota around 70 years ago. Both Native Lakota children and children of recent European immigrant families had to face linguistic hurdles in schools where teachers could not understand their languages. I was also struck by the fact that, while few in number, tiny, one- and two-teacher schools are only now truly dying out on the vast and lightly populated plains of South Dakota. I highly recommend ONE-ROOM COUNTRY SCHOOL to every reader who is at all interested in the nineteenth-century history of education in the granger states of the nation, to every reader who ever wonders about the lives of children a half-century or more ago, and to every reader who enjoys chuckling over personal recollections that, more often than not, lean toward the humorous, at least in hindsight. If I "grade this book down" at all, it is because it is all too brief and could have held my interest for many, many more pages than it actually contains. I also found the bibliography of very limited usefulness in that it lacks any annotations describing the relatively few books listed. Otherwise, the book is a very enjoyable and fast read, and should be of interest not only to adults but also to contemporary public school students by showing them some of the things they have missed by having to attend school in the 21st century! [...]