Learning in a One Room School House

Reader Contribution by The Mother Earth News Editors
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This is the fourth story from Ruth Zwald, written by her father, Robert Zwald, and submitted as part of our Wisdom From Our Elders collection of self-sufficient tales from yesteryear. She compiled her father’s stories in his own words, and they are posted in eight parts. Read the other parts: 1900s Farming in Washington County Minnesota;Growing Up on a Farm;Catching Frogs for Money;Borrowing Against Life Insurance; Changes in Agriculture; Courtship and Marriage and The Wisconsin Farm.

School Life
Now I’m going to take you to school, which I started at 6 or 7 years old. It was a one-room school house with 25-30 kids. We said the pledge of allegiance to the flag every morning after our exercises. There was one teacher, who boarded at the nearest farmhouse and was paid $3-$5 a month, plus room and board. She also did janitor work, including starting the fire in the stove in the front of the school, near her desk. She would call each grade, 1-8, to the front of the room for history, geography, arithmetic, penmanship or whatever. We learned a lot from the kids in the grades ahead of us. We had to learn the multiplication tables and learn to spell.

We walked about a mile and a half to school. Sometimes we would ski across the fields, which was a shortcut. If it was a blizzard, we usually didn’t go; unless Dad would hitch up a sleigh and we would sit in the bottom covered with a fur robe made from bear. We didn’t have running water in school, so the older boys had to take turns getting water from a nearby farm and carry it in 5 gallon milk cans – fun in the snow – and then we put the water in a pail that had a spigot on the bottom. We all drank from the same dipper – boy, were we modern.

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