Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory

By Jonathan Zimmerman
(Yale University Press, 2009)

      The little red schoolhouse has all but disappeared in the United States, but its importance in national memory remains unshakable. This engaging book examines the history of the one-room school and how successive generations of Americans have remembered—and just as often misremembered—this powerful national icon.
       Drawing on a rich range of sources, from firsthand accounts to poems, songs, and films, Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of educational history in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, traces the evolution of attitudes toward the little red schoolhouse since the late 19th century. Celebrated as a symbol of lost rural virtues or America’s democratic heritage, denounced as the epitome of inefficiency and substandard academics, the one-room school has been a useful emblem for liberal, conservative, and other agendas. The truth of its history has sometimes been stretched. Yet the idyllic image of the schoolhouse still unites Americans. For more than a century, it has embodied the nation’s best aspirations and, especially, its continuing faith in education itself.