I'm looking at a 1 room school house situation with my base numbers. This worked well for centuries.
The one-room school house is a model of education that has always intrigued me. My father was educated, partly, in such schools in the 1930s in rural Alberta. In terms of North America, I'm not sure they can be called 'centuries' old.
See
http://pages.suddenlink.net/wvsfm/school.html which I found on Wikipedia, here
http://www2.johnstown.k12.oh.us/cornell/states.html
This US link looks interesting...
http://www2.johnstown.k12.oh.us/cornell/states.html
They appear to be a late 19th to 20th century phenomenon as far as North America is concerned, which is what I had suspected. Expectations were significantly different. I don't have the figures at hand, but in the early 1900s a very small number of high school graduates in Canada made it into university. Similarly, a smaller percentage of our populations completed high school. On my dad's side of the family, one of five siblings finished high school, my dad's youngest brother, born much later, in 1950.
My mother had six siblings: four girls finished HS and went to nursing school; three boys left school and found good paying jobs. To my knowlege, virtually all of my cousins (something like 30) finished HS, and many went onto university. I find that pre-post WWII transformation quite an amazing leap. My parents later attended university in their 30s (1960s), making them the first of their generation to go beyond HS, and even then elevating them in their peer group.
My BA (1983) and BEd (2001) didn't impress anyone I knew.
My historical sense is, that along with an expansion of industry and everything else, there came an expansion of public schooling into the larger schools and boards we now have. Early one-room school houses probably met the needs of an agrarian economy in sparsely populated communities. Those schools, in all likelihood, were very homogeneous in every sense. School teachers were probably among the few considered to be highly educated in their communities. Getting everybody into school became a priority, and that part of it worked pretty well. Generations did move forward. In the simplest of equations (though adult illiteracy exists in alarming numbers in our time) people in North America are far more literate than they were in 1900.
Now of course there are things I'm assuming are there. Desks, chairs, computers, text books.
When I went to college, I bought a text book, new or used, that was pretty current. How any schools are still using maps that show the USSR though?
That's a very valid point you raise. Since I'm a librarian, I'll use that as an example. It's prudent to weed out reference materials every five years. These are high end items. A really good single copy of a library quality reference atlas is probably about $250. You mentioned the USSR. Heaven forbid any of my collection is that dated; however, I can give you a more recent example for Canadian collections: April 1st, 1999 -- a new Canadian territory was created,
http://www.gov.nu.ca/english/ Globes, atlases, texts, and countless non-fiction titles came off the shelves. Now, the flip side of this is that some print resources have become virtually irrelevant. My kids wouldn't look at a print encyclopedia if there were fifty dollar bills stuffed in it -- they go online. I don't fault them for that because I have looked in a phone book in the last five years. Nowadays, paid subscription databases -- essentially online encyclopedia -- prove more up to date and more effective.
In a very recent instance, we updated our grade eight geography books to the tune of $60 a copy. The concession was to purchase two sets coordinated to service six classes on a rotating bases. I've bought cars for less. In my elementary years (60s) I was educated in the same system, but the books were already there when you walked into the classroom. We didn't have teachers running up and down stairs with hundreds of lbs of books. Now teachers and staff can coordinate all of this, but coordinating the traffic of books, the endless minutiae and logistics, comes at the expense of teachers having a thoughtful conversation with eachother about what they are teaching. It comes at the expense of teachers having a little more time just to be with their students.
Now of course, today the little red school house idea doesn't work in most cases. A centralized location makes more sence.
I think it evolved that way. As we're seeing right here in Toronto, bigger ain't better. In 1998 the former Provincial gov't implemented municipal and school board amalgamation here. Six municipalities and six school boards of the former Metro Toronto became one city and one megaschoolboard -- TDSB, for which I work, now has 575 schools, placing it among the five largest in North America. This does not include TDCSC (Roman Catholic), nor the many independent schools. Within the last several months, active discussion has begun about breaking the board up into manageable bits.
There still is much to be learned from that era. In my board they've managed preserve Century School House, a one room school from 1910, which stands, ironically, the shadow of a large general hospital and a school board building. A retired teacher, Mr Church I think is his name, devoted much time to researching the era and the manner of instruction. My son went on school visits there twice in elementary school. The first day he had to sit on a stool with dunce cap from throwing stones at cows. Note: There were not cows, or pastures, surrounding the school, just post war brick bungalows for returning soldiers to settle.
Still, as my dad recalls, grade one kids listened to grade two lessons, and so on. The mysterious teacher's day book was essentially open to children for years.
But I offered an alternate solution.
Desks, etc, ccould be provided by donation by corporations.
Microsoft, Apple, IBM, HP, Dell, and hundreds of other companies regularly donate billions of dollars in equipment, software and cash to education around the US. Bill Gates and his wife have donated millions to libraries and other institutions. Niagara Falls NY recently built a new state of the art high school. Every student got a laptop. It was heavily paid for by corporate donation.
I keep hearing about these. I never actually see them spread around -- a project here or there. A photo op and ribbon cutting. My readings of Jonathan Kozol's works on US education suggest an economically divided system of schooling, where quality of education seems to depend on property values. Per child expenditures vary from district to district. I'm suspicious of all this being righted by corporate largesse. The Socialist in me tells me that the private sector invest based on opportunity not need.
At the time I met Alliyah in the school year 1997-1998, New York's Board of Education spent about $8000 yearly on the education of a third grade child... If you could have scooped Alliyah up out of the neighbourhood where she was born and plunked her down within a fairly typical white suburb of New York, she would have received a public education worth about $12,000 every year. If you were to lift her up once more and set her down within one of the wealthiest white suburbs of New York, she would have recieved as much as $18,000 worth of education every year and would lkiely have had a third grade teacher paid approximately $30,000 more than her teacher in the Bronx.
Kozol, Jonathan. The Shame of the Nation. Crown: New York, 2005. pp. 44-45
Equal or equitable funding, as Kozol has pointed out throughout the years, is part of the equation. He sees the rest as an ethical issue of how much we really value all children.
Not to place Ontario above it all, I am seeing schools in a physical state of decay. I've also seen example of public schools in very affluent communities benefit from donations within the community. I once worked in an inner-city school where the income levels were so low that an attempted school fundraiser actually lost money. A Vancouver school, several years ago, sparked some controversy when it hired a fundraising consultant. You can imagine the ire that would have been raised, except that by the time the story broke, the bagman skipped town with the money!
My point is, the existing system where I'm taxed and part of that money goes for paying for crowded classrooms, outdated training materials, and 10 support for each teacher, hasn't really worked all that well.
Maybe something else is what we need to really meet our 2st century needs?
I don't know what your mean by "10 support." I absolutely 100% agree with you. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I see something quite diabolical in the failure of large public institutions -- the opt out. Keep the system expensive but just out of range of hitting its goals, and people will opt out. On both sides of the border, we've heard seniors and those without children say, "I don't have kids. Why should I pay for this?" Or in some cases, "Give me a voucher -- I'll spend it on a private school." If it doesn't work, cut it and gut it.
The less return perceived, the greater the opt out.
BTW, thanks for pointing out the holes Gordon. Much appreciated.
It did come across as though I were trying to punch holes. I was sitting at a computer table over lunch hour staring at a carpet that should have torn out and replaced five years ago. Believe, I get where you're at. Thank your for replying the way you did -- I spent two hours on this post. What we're talking about here is very important to me.
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