One-room school

The School Ma'am

A one-room school is a school that consists of a single classroom in which students of different grade levels (typically primary school) are taught together by a single teacher.

One-room schoolhouses began as the solution to education in small communities. They can be found the world over. However nowadays the best preserved one-room schoolhouses from the 1800s are almost universally the ones set up in pioneer communities in the USA.

There are still active one-room schools to be found across the world, especially in developing countries and remote locations, however there are also around 150 still active in Lancaster Country, PA, USA (Amish country). These are private schools and not open to the public, but you can read more about them on the Amish News (see link below).

Other one-room schools have been converted into school museums. Most one-room school museums feature some form of school corporal punishment which was the norm until very recently, and most will have one or several types of implements on display, along with descriptions and/or depictions of how that implement was put to use. Some have transcripts of anecdotes from past pupils which can be of interest — e.g. Schoolgirl Memories from Bernice A Caswell Welch.