The school formally known as the Cara Jean Baldwin One Room Schoolhouse near Bristol, IN, was originally on C.R. 17, but when the county did the four lane renovation on 17, they literally picked it up and moved it to the side of the road, and there it sat for many years. It was also used as a meeting place for farmers over the years, but the school was eventually closed. The local non-profit organization One Room School House Inc. decided to look into purchasing it and was eventually able to purchase the school from the Bullard family for a dollar. Following the purchase, the school was taken down board by board and reassembled on a plot of donated land at Bonneyville Mill Park. In 2003 it was again opened to the public as an authentic one room schoolhouse experience. The school has been under the management of One Room School House Inc. since the early 2000s.
Essentially what they do is have one state-certified teacher and several assistants who dress up in period costumes and teach the kids for a day in the same way kids would have learned 100 years ago. Howeverk change came to Bristol’s Bonneyville Mill Park with the announcement that management of the park’s historic one room schoolhouse will be taken over by the Elkhart County Historical Society. While the members of One Room School House Inc. have always kept the best interests of the school in mind, the organization is simply no longer able to manage the program adequately.
When the management switch became official, the Historical Society took over full control of the program immediately. It will actually be able to put more emphasis on the teaching of history. They make for a great partner with their strong knowledge of Indiana history as well as local county history in relation to the school. Society members are excited about the prospect of managing the historic schoolhouse, but are taking a cautious approach to the deal as well. The society will take it over for a year as a trial.
It is open to all parochial as well as private schools, incorporates Indiana Academic Standards of Education, and is especially directed to fourth-grade teachers and classes, which get the most benefit from the program. Schools teach Indiana history in fourth grade.
The cost to attend the one room schoolhouse program is $150 for a class of up to 35 to 40 people. Schools interested in attending provide their own transportation. In addition to the classroom experience, the Historical Society is now also toying with the idea of opening the building up to tourism as a way to generate some additional income and interest in the area. The school could be used for many different types of events, such as parties, weddings, church gatherings, etc., so if people would like to use it, all they would have to do is call the park department and make a reservation.
The Ashcraft Schoolhouse was built sometime before 1895 by Walter and Amanda Ashcraft. It was the county directive of the time that a schoolhouse be built every 5 miles so children ages 5-20 did not have to walk too far for their education. Students of all ages were seated in the same classroom and typically started their day with prayer. Reading, writing, arithmetic, and recitation were taught by the teacher, with the older students assisting younger students. All children were needed at home to manage farm responsibilities so the rural school year ran between harvest and planting time. Teachers were paid around $25 a month at that time and some teachers lived with local families during the school year. It is still hard to believe that one teacher taught multiple grades in a one room school house like this. In the 1920’s rural schoolhouses were closed and consolidated into bigger schools. Originally located near Rocky Spring Church off Brief Road, the vacant schoolhouse was purchased by neighbor William Augustus Linker to be used as a hay barn.
A ‘For Sale’ sign hammered into the front lawn of the old country doctor’s building was all the motivation needed to begin the Mint Hill Historical Society. Twenty-one citizens signed the charter in 1985 with the purpose of preserving the history of the area. The Mint Hill Country Doctor’s Museum was the first restoration project. Now, twenty five years later, everyone is invited to take a step into history at the Carl J. McEwen Historic Village. Visitors can walk through the restored Country Doctor’s Office, the Ashcraft one room schoolhouse, the Ira V. Ferguson Country Store, and the soon-to-be completed Gold Assay office where miners brought their ore to see if they had struck it rich!. Other outbuildings in the village like the blacksmith shop, hen house, and meat curing building reflect the rural nature of early Mint Hill. Children and adults alike find excitement and enchantment as they step back in time in the village.
An Education World e-Interview With John Taylor Gatto
John Taylor Gatto proudly declares himself a saboteur, out to overturn our educational system. In his book, The Underground History of American Education, published by Oxford Village Press, Gatto labels the current system “a conspiracy against ourselves” and suggests ways of “breaking out of the trap.” Always provocative and challenging, he talked with Education World about what’s wrong with compulsory education, how the Prussian approach to education influenced U.S. education for the worse, and other compelling issues.
John Taylor Gatto attended public schools and a private boarding school in Pennsylvania before doing undergraduate work at Cornell, the University of Pittsburgh, and Columbia and graduate work at Cornell, Yeshiva, Hunter College, and the University of California. He worked as a scriptwriter for films; an advertising writer; a jewelry designer; a songwriter for the American Society of Composers, Authors and Songwriters; and a cab driver before he became a teacher, a job he held for 30 years. During his classroom career, he was honored as teacher of the year for New York City and New York state.
Along the way, Gatto became known as one of education’s most original and controversial critics. His books include Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992), The Exhausted School (1993), and A Different Kind of Teacher (2000). Education World talked with Gatto about his book The Underground History of American Education.
The Caroline Wheels of Time Museum and Historical Village provides a charming trip back in time to when pioneers were first settling the Caroline, Alberta, area. There are a number of historic buildings to tour including the Trunnel House, a two story log home built in the early 1900’s and furnished with era related antiques. Next door, the Anderson Cabin is set up like a trapper’s cabin with a number of mounted animals indigenous to the area along with the “tools” display. The last building in the front row is a combination Village Office, Lock-up and Fire Hall complete with an actual rotary phone, a jail, and fire engines.
In the back row is the Big Bend School, a large one room country school house which includes photos of past classes, desks and a piano, and a teacherage, which is the tiny house provided for the school teacher. The Big Bend School was donated by the community of Big Bend. The school was moved to the Museum grounds in 2005. Besides being paragons of the school and community, which was apparently symbolized by the wearing of two petticoats, female teachers were expected to sweep their classroom at least once a day, scrub it with hot water and soap at least once a week, clean the blackboards at least once a day and start the fire by 7:00 a.m. so the room would be warm by 8:00 a.m. for the students arrival.
In the Main Building with its display area, there are exhibits, such as the 100 Year Family Pioneer Genealogy Collection. The east wing has the feature exhibit which changes each year. Also, there are a Nature Trail, a grassy area, and picnic tables. We welcome picture taking, so bring your camera and spend some time with us. The Museum and the Village are open Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from noon to 5 p.m. beginning the May long weekend through the September long weekend. There are plenty of events throughout the summer to enjoy.
Siloam School is a historic Rosenwald School building located at Charlotte, Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. It was built about 1920 as a school for African-American students and replaced an earlier schoolhouse on the site. It is a one-story, gable-front, one-room school building. It measures approximately 22 feet by 43 feet. During the Jim Crow era, Mecklenburg County had more Rosenwald schools for African-American children than any other county in America. The Siloam Schoolhouse, a rural primary school for African Americans in northeast Mecklenburg County, is a rare surviving example of the institutions built by newly-freed blacks after the Civil War. The school stands as a testament to the perseverance of Mecklenburg’s black residents, who were willing to undergo severe hardships in order to obtain a basic education. It is a physical legacy to a rural lifestyle that is fast disappearing as development expands to that portion of the County where Siloam is located, Mallard Creek and is a rare surviving example of the institutions built during the Jim Crow era.
The building ceased to operate as a school about 1947. Though it is not clear which year Siloam ceased to operate, beginning in 1947 the County School Board sought an owner for the Siloam School property. In 1951 The Young family purchased the one-acre lot and schoolhouse. When the Young family purchased the property they made internal structural changes. Initially used by the family as a residence, Nelson Young and his wife Cora added the wall at the rear of the building in order to accommodate a kitchen, and walls for bedrooms. By 1973 Nelson and Cora had moved into the city of Charlotte. It was then that they conveyed the property to James Young and his wife Vera. Young converted the property to an auto shop. He demolished most of the internal walls and built the large garage door that now exists on the east side of the property. Young closed his shop in the 1980’s, and the property began to serve primarily as a dumping ground. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2007. The Charlotte Museum of History is partnering with Silver Star Community, Inc, The Tribute Companies, Pixelatoms, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission, and many others to preserve this important artifact of Charlotte’s African-American community and give it renewed life as a community center.
Siloam Schoolhouse, discovered in February, 2006 and located in the northern University area of Charlotte, which is under development threat, is currently one of only two known existing rural one room schoolhouses for black children still standing in Mecklenburg County. The other school is Bethesda Schoolhouse built circa 1898. They stand as a memorial to the African American educational system in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. The Siloam Schoolhouse is located near the intersection of John Adams Road and West Mallard Creek Church Road. It stands on a one-acre lot approximately 150 feet from John Adams Road, at the top of a steep hill. The schoolhouse is a one-story front gabled wood shingled structure. The building rests on rectangular brick piers, which run in five rows, each containing five piers for a total of twenty-five. The moderately sloped roof is covered with 3-v metal sheets, with exposed rafter ends. The front façade of the building, which faces north, is three bays wide. The front entrance, currently without a door, is reached by three-riser high set of stairs, which is currently in very poor condition. A small wood awning covered with green roof shingles shelters the doorway. A small louvered vent is located above the doorway. On either side of the door are six-over-six double-hung windows. Most of the glazing is missing.
Originally the east elevation of the building contained five large fixed-pane windows, approximately eight feet in height. These windows are typical of schoolhouses of the era and would have provided light to the un-electrified school. Of the original six windows only three are extant. The center of the wall currently has a large opening. The opening at one time accommodated a large wooden garage-type door, which was installed by James Young in the 1970’s to accommodate his automotive business. Currently the door is all but gone, with the exception of a few panels that hang from the top of the doorframe. A brick chimney flanks the north side of the doorway. The east façade of the building has more random fenestration, with two levels of irregularly placed windows. A window, now boarded, is located in the middle of the lower level. Near the rear/south end of the facade is a doorway. The doorway is sheltered by a shed roof. Closer to the roofline are three small fixed-pane windows. The south façade of the building is the simplest and contains one window and a door that is also sheltered by a corrugated metal awning.
The interior of the building measures approximately 22 feet across and 40 feet in length. Originally a single room, the interior of the building has undergone a number of renovations. Currently the front of the building has a small vestibule that is formed by the walls of two small rooms, which flank either side of the front entrance. It is not clear when these rooms were added, or what their purpose was. Their dimensions preclude their use as sleeping quarters, and were probably used by either the Young family or James Young’s automotive business as storage space. Both rooms originally opened into the large main room, and had doors, which are currently missing. The exterior door and that between the vestibule and the main room are no longer present. The large main room measures 22 feet wide by 29 feet in length. In the 1950’s the room was divided into living and sleeping quarters. When James Young turned the dwelling into an automotive garage in the 1970’s he removed those dividing walls. In the southwest corner of this room is a chimney that vented a coal-burning stove. At the rear of the building is a 22 foot wide by 8 foot deep room. The partitioning wall that forms this room was not part of the original schoolhouse structure. Nelson Young partitioned the room from the rest of the building’s space when he bought the house in 1951 to accommodate a kitchen.
The McKay Avenue School is a former school and historic site in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The site is a Provincial and Municipal Historic Resource, and home to the Edmonton Public School Board’s archives and museum. The original one-room school house was constructed in 1881 on land donated by the Hudson’s Bay Company, using funds raised by Matthew McCauley, Malcolm Groat and William Rowland. The smooth-finished wooden building featured a porch, double doors, eight large windows, and ten-foot ceilings. The growing population of Edmonton required the construction of a larger school house. Architect Henry Denny Johnson was contracted to design the three-storey, eight-room school on the site of the original 1881 school house. Johnson utilized the Richardsonian Romanesque architectural style. In 1904 R. J. Mason received the contract to build the school, and construction began later in the year with Governor General, Lord Minto laying the cornerstone, and construction completed and opened on September 1, 1905, the same day the province of Alberta would enter Confederation. Construction would not start on the Alberta Legislature Building until 1907, and be completed until 1913, so the Legislative Assembly of Alberta would use the McKay Avenue School for the first two sessions of the First Legislative Assembly of Alberta in 1906 and 1907. The school was named after Dr. William MacKay, a physician for the Hudson’s Bay Company, although the building retains the misspelled McKay name.
With dwindling enrollment in the downtown Edmonton area, totaling 59 in its final year, the McKay Avenue School was closed on June 30, 1983. The Edmonton Public Schools Archives and Museum is located in the McKay Avenue School. The organization is a public research facility housing records and artifacts related to Edmonton Public Schools. It also offers curriculum-based, hands-on education programs for students and a museum highlighting the history of Edmonton Public Schools and Alberta’s early political history. The museum features a 1950s-period schoolroom and the restored 1906 legislative assembly room. Following flooding in February, 2013, the McKay School was found have significant structural damage requiring $2.4-million in restoration. A fund raising campaign began which saw the Edmonton Public School Board, City of Edmonton, Government of Alberta, Government of Canada, and private donors raise the necessary funds to repair the building by 2016. The renovated building reopened to the public in October 2018. Between 2019 and 2020, the museum was the site of a traveling exhibition from the Anne Frank House. The museum also includes the original 1880s schoolhouse adjacent to the McKay Avenue School, which the McKay Avenue School replaced in 1905. The schoolhouse is used for museum education programs.
In Davidson, NC, an effort to educate the town’s white children began in 1892, and in 1893 a substantial two-story brick school building was completed. The graded school was supported by local taxes, and by 1911 had an enrollment of nearly two hundred students, all white. No such effort was made to educate the rest of the town’s children. Black children were educated in small frame buildings located in the African- American Westside neighborhood. By the 1930s, two frame school buildings were needed in the neighborhood to hold all the children. One building was described as a “one teacher school,” and the other as a “three-teacher school.” These frame buildings were not adequate. In 1937 a new brick six-classroom school, Davidson Colored School, opened to serve the black community. Staff included three teachers from the earlier schools in Davidson. One of these was Mrs. Ada Jenkins. Designing and supervising the construction of Davidson Colored School (now the Ada Jenkins Center) and a gymnasium was assigned to Willard G. Rogers (1863-1947). In addition to the gymnasium, a classroom wing and a freestanding cafeteria were added around 1958. In 1966 the school closed when the Mecklenburg County schools became racially integrated. The present owner of the property is Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools/Board of Education which uses it as an Education Center
The Davidson Colored School, later the Ada Jenkins School, is the largest and most prominent historic element of the built environment of Davidson’s traditionally African-American Westside neighborhood. The building, which originally served as a segregated school, helps document segregation and the Jim Crow era in Davidson and in Mecklenburg County. It is a reflection of the black community’s commitment to improving the education of its young people. It is also an artifact of an unusual time, a time when Mecklenburg County was facing huge economic challenges and yet found the resources to greatly improve the infrastructure for public education. The property known as the Davidson Colored School/Ada Jenkins School possesses special significance in terms of the Town of Davidson and Mecklenburg County. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmark Commission judgment was based on the following considerations: 1) The Davidson Colored School/Ada Jenkins School is a rare and well preserved example of a substantial African-American school building that dates from the era of Jim Crow in Mecklenburg County. 2) In terms of Mecklenburg County, the Davidson Colored School/Ada Jenkins School is a rare early 20th century school building which is in good condition, and has retained a high degree of integrity. 3) The Davidson Colored School/Ada Jenkins School is the oldest public school building in Davidson. 4) The Davidson Colored School/Ada Jenkins School is an important landmark in Davidson, representing the strength and resourcefulness of the town’s African American community during the era of racial segregation. 5) Built during the Great Depression, the Davidson Colored School in an important artifact representing the work of the Public Works Administration in Mecklenburg County.
Why American Children Stopped Believing in God Cameron Hilditch (December 13, 2020)
In a report released earlier this year from the American Enterprise Institute, Lyman Stone tracked the history of religious belief, behavior, and association in the United States since the Founding. It’s a magisterial work, and I encourage readers to download the report here and peruse it for themselves.
Stone’s research helps us to understand the decline of religious faith in America over the past 60 years. Secularization is, to be sure, a hugely overdetermined development in American history, and just about everyone has a theory about how it’s happened and why. Religious conservatives would probably cite the loosening of the country’s morals that began in the ’60s and ’70s. Secular progressives might mutter something about the onward march of “Science” and “Reason” over time. But the data seem to show that the main driver of secularization in the United States has been the acceleration of government spending on education and government control over the curricular content taught in schools.
Here our secular progressive might raise his head again, perhaps feeling a bit smug about this finding. “See!”, he says. “Children used to be deprived of education and the life of the mind! They were stuck in the doldrums of ignorance and squalor before the benevolent hand of the state reached down and lifted them up into the world of literacy and critical thought. All that was needed was a little education to free them from hokey superstitions.”
The Old Noyac Schoolhouse, presumed to have been built in 1796, is an official town landmark and a hub of civic activity these days. Owned by the Town of Southampton, NY. it serves as the monthly meetinghouse of the devoted members of the Noyac Civic Council and is used for Boy Scout activities. Architecturally, it’s a “three-bay, hip-roofed building with a large brick chimney,” according to Art and Architecture Quarterly. Noyac residents cast ballots on Election Day there until 2010, when the Suffolk County Board of Elections relocated the polling site because the schoolhouse was deemed too drafty and without enough parking. It once stood a short distance north on Noyac Road.
GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS ARE KILLING THE AMERICAN CHURCH by Alex Newman (December 21, 2020)
[Israel Wayne noted: There are so many articles we see online everyday, it’s hard to take time to read most of them. This one deserves to be read. And shared.]
Over the last few generations, Christianity has declined at a massive rate in America, with millennials becoming the first generation in American history with self-proclaimed Christians in the minority. Now, the culprit is becoming clear to everyone: Government. In particular, anti-Christian, anti-God indoctrination masquerading as “public education” has been the key driver of those trends.
While it is a widely held misconception that government schools became more secular as the culture did, the reality is that the “public education” system was always intended to turn Americans against God. Indeed, it was created for that purpose. And it has been phenomenally successful in pursuing that goal, with most Christian children abandoning the faith after more than a decade in a public “school.”
According to a massive report headlined “Promise and Peril: The History of American Religiosity and Its Recent Decline” from the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, the record is clear on the issue. It is not urbanization, or more education, or the progress of “science,” or even more welfare spending, that has so thoroughly de-Christianized America and the rest of the Western world.
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