America’s One-Room Schools: Sites of Regional Authority and Symbols of Local Autonomy, after 1850

Before the nineteenth - century’s mandatory education laws, churches and towns created schools according to local needs. The one-room school was a product of local community and autonomy. Educational reformers sought to standardize schooling through guidelines for schoolhouse and playground design and standards for curriculum and attendance. These external reform movements provided the impetus for communities to reform or resist such impositions. America’s social memory of the “little red schoolhouse” paints the picture of one-room schools as sites of conformity and innocence, but historical archaeology of specific schools reveals tensions encoded in these buildings, their documentary records, and associated artifact assemblages.