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One-Room Schoolhouse Provided Education

By Capper's Staff
Published on December 14, 2011

One thing I’d like to emphasize is that you received the same kind of education in one of those one-room schoolhouses as you did in a graded schoo1. If the school was in New York State, you had to pass Regents in order to enter high school as the children in the graded schools did.

In the school I attended our textbooks were supplied by the district, but in some schools the children had to buy their own.

We had more fun in a one-room school because as soon as noontime was announced we took our lunches and ran outside if it was fair. We went wherever we wanted to go. We very often played in a woods across from the schoo1.

We always had school even if there was a bad storm.

My last fifteen years of teaching were in a graded schoo1.

However, I thought I did my best teaching in the one-room schoo1. There, if a child didn’t know something such as the six times tables, he was immediately sent into the hall with an older child to learn it. There always was some older child who wasn’t busy because the classes lasted such a short time that he was able to get his work done quickly. I didn’t send two children into the hall in a graded school because, since they were the same age, they’d probably fool or just visit.

Another example of teaching in a one-room school was that the children did their work in school and not at home. I’d make up questions in social studies. In a graded school most of the children would answer the questions at home. If they couldn’t find the answer they’d write “Don’t know” or “Can’t find.” In a one-room school, the child would come to me and say, “1 can’t find the answer to this question.” I’d tell the child where to look, such as, “Look on the top of such and such a page,” wherever it was. This helped the child in silent reading as well as in social studies

Evelina Fuller
Saugerties, New York


Back in 1955 a call went out from the editors of the then Capper’s Weekly asking for readers to send in articles on true pioneers. Hundreds of letters came pouring in from early settlers and their children, many now in their 80s and 90s, and from grandchildren of settlers, all with tales to tell. So many articles were received that a decision was made to create a book, and in 1956, the first My Folks title – My Folks Came in a Covered Wagon – hit the shelves. Nine other books have since been published in the My Folks series, all filled to the brim with true tales from Capper’s readers, and we are proud to make those stories available to our growing online community.