One-room schools, in 1910

Dillsboro, Jan. 1910

ONE-ROOM SCHOOL

PROBLEM IS UP

Indianapolis -- John R. Carr, superintendent of the Marion County schools and president of the Indiana County Superintendents Association, in his opening address at the meeting at the statehouse, advocated the appointment of a commission of citizens and parents of the common schools by the governor to inspect the conditions of the one-room school buildings in the township and report the nature of their findings.

He declared that patrons would not tolerate the conditions of these school if they knew about them, and that an indignant public would demand reform were the conditions laid before them as they actually existed.

As a second means of bettering the conditions, Carr said that the state Board of Health should have more power and more help so that it could make a sanitary inspection of every such school building in the state, with absolute power to condemn and close where the conditions were found detrimental to the physical welfare of the child.

Now the board investigates only in such districts as send in complaints because of lack of sufficient force.

"But," he said, "that community needs most aid were the people show their stolidity and contentment with the wretched influence under which their children are attending schools, their utter unfitness to rear, unaided, citizens for this commonwealth." 

"The rural school," he said, is in charge of officials, from township trustee to county superintendent, all of whom are compelled to ask for inspection at the hands of a political party. No set of schools ever did rise above mediocrity that was not first purged of politics. With the elimination of politics, it would be possible to place the schools in the hands of experts."

As it is, he said patrons are "complacently entrusting the management of their schools to men whose whole thought and training have in no way fitted them for their duties."

Carr advocated getting rid of the one-room school by consolidating all such schools in graded school buildings.

Robert Aley, late superintendent of public instruction, said that the one-room school would exist in Indiana for many years to come, and that the energies of the school officials should be directed first of all toward bettering the conditions in these schools where they are certain to remain.

Note: Almost all one-room schools were closed by 1922. Some were forced to close much earlier than that, including Farm Hill and Saltwell.