Lavishly illustrated with historical photographs from private and public North Dakota collections, the 8.5x11" book printed on acid-free paper features 21 major chapters and memories of nearly 100 former teachers and students. The book provides the first major history of the 4,732 country schools of North Dakota and its students. There are chapters on what was taught, the qualifications and duties of the teachers, the tests students took, the role of the schools as community centers and as places where immigrants learned to become Americans, and first-hand accounts of the way it was during blizzards and prairie fires as well as the good times with Christmas programs and spring programs. Included in the book being sent around the world are chapters on school barns and the school lunch bucket and comparisons of the one-room schools in Norwegian and German from Russia communities. Editor and author Warren A. Henke provides the first history of the Young Citizens Leag! ue in the state, and editor and author Everett C. Albers offers an essay about his own experience in a one-room school in Oliver County, North Dakota.
From the Publisher
Once more than 4,700, a mere ten of North Dakota's one-room schools remain at the dawn of the twenty-first century. But the legacy of the tens of thousands of teachers who educated nearly 90 percent of the state's students in the early years continues to influence our values and our philosophy of what our children and grandchildren ought learn. Hundreds of thousands of North Dakotans scattered throughout the United States and the world far beyond the state's borders began their education in country schools.
In the two decades at the beginning of the twentieth century when Europeans immigrated to the state to homestead, the population more than doubled to about the same number who live in North Dakota now. The country school became the community center where students learned the language of their new country and the rights and responsibilities of American citizenship.
Mostly shamefully underpaid, far-from-adequately educated themselves, country school teachers sometimes taught without even a dictionary or blackboard in the classroom. They kept the ignite burning in the potbellied stoves and fired the imagination of the students -- who might be as young as five and as old as eighteen or nineteen -- in those single rooms out on the prairie.
Here's the history of those schools illuminated with more than 100 photographs, first-person accounts by more than 80 former teachers and students, and essays by historians and educators from then and now. Much more than nostalgia, the reader will find more of the whole story than has ever been told of what it was like in country schools from the opening Pledge of Allegiance to the closing song.
Made possible in part by a major grant from the North Dakota Centennial Commission in 1988, The Legacy of North Dakota's Country Schools required a decade of researching.
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