Country Schools

A Kansas Portrait

For a hundred years, white frame or native stone one-room schoolhouses dotted the section corners across Kansas. They were called names like Prairie Flower, Buzzard Roost, and Good Intent. The children who attended ranged in age from five to 21 and endured dust storms, prairie fires, and cattle drives eddying past the school house in order to get an eighth grade education. They got the school on foot, on horseback, or in a wagon. When they arrived on their first day of school they may have only known how to speak a foreign language but they soon learned how to speak, read, spell, and write English.

The school teacher, sometimes scarcely older than her pupils, was a renaissance individual. She had to be a nurse, janitor, musician, philosopher, peacemaker, wrangler, fire stoker, baseball player, professor, and poet for less than $50 dollars a month. Equipped with little more than a blackboard and a few textbooks, teachers passed on to their pupils cultural values along with a sound knowledge of the three Rs.

By the turn of the century, the population began to shift to the cities and country schools began to lose students and tax support. School districts consolidated, pooling their resources to provide better teachers, broader curriculums, and opportunity for extracurricular activities. By 1966, the one-room country school had become a thing of the past.