Would it have been better to maintain the one-room schoolhouse?

We have all heard stories of the one-room schoolhouse. The idea is that previous generations all learned together. Eventually, we started splitting students into age-based groups that were expected to learn the same things together.


It might sound like an improvement, but I have to admit that I'm not convinced that this change was for the best. While teachers could focus on more specific learning, that form of learning became more rigid by age groupings.

There have always been serious problems with our schools. If we would have kept all students in the same class, we would have been forced to evolve in a different manner. With different children learning different things, we would have to improve our ability to accommodate variability in learning. This could have led to better support for variable needs. If a teacher wasn't particularly strong in a subject, he or she would need to allow a degree of educational independence for students. Additionally, we might have seen the foundational issues a little easier. If we saw the foundational problems better, we might have actually been willing to address them.

I don't make it a secret that I believe in education being the responsibility of the learner. I believe that children are variable in their needs, wants, and passions. A single-room schoolhouse would not be sufficient to restore educational rights, but it's unlikely that it would be any worse than what we have today. More importantly, maintaining this approach might have evolved in a more desirable manner.

I believe that education should be open and accessible, not controlled and restricted. While I would say rooms have value, there are certainly limitations to my support for putting walls between educational opportunities. My ideas have long included larger groups of children with mixed-age opportunities. A single room is actually closer to my beliefs than what we are now doing. From what I can tell, a single room is preferable to our current approach.

I'm not saying that I want to go back to one-room schoolhouses. I believe that it would be best to create a new educational system from scratch. Given a choice limited to either a single room or rigid groupings, I think it would be better to go back to the single room. This isn't because I think it's a good idea, but because what we are doing now is worse.