Teachers at Kendall County’s one-room schools faced challenges now mostly forgotten

Drive around Kendall County and keep watch at country road intersections. If you look sharply, you are very likely to happen upon a relic of county education history.

One-room schools once dotted the county, providing rural youngsters’ an education in first through eighth grades. Dozens of these one-room buildings were constructed over the years to serve youngsters living within about 2 miles of the school.

Consolidation of the county’s one-room schools began early in the 20th century and was complete by the late 1950s. After individual one-room school districts – there were about 90 over the years – had been consolidated with one of the county’s town school districts, the buildings were sold at auction. Some were moved and turned into farm out-buildings and private residences, while others remained on their 1-acre sites at country intersections, where they were converted into family homes. Those are the ones that remind knowledgeable travelers of an era of public education that’s gone, and rapidly being forgotten.

The era of the one-room school in Kendall County started well before the era of tax-supported public schools. Pioneers, mainly those who arrived from northeastern states, considered educating their children to assure they’d become good citizens and responsible voters an absolute necessity. Since there was no public tax mechanism in place at the time, schools were established by subscription.

Sometimes residents, and sometimes itinerant teachers, approached parents and gathered subscriptions to establish a grade school. Teachers received slim pay, and generally “boarded around,” receiving a bed and meals from subscribing parents until the school term was over. Early county historians counted nearly 125 such subscription schools in the era before the Illinois General Assembly approved public financing.

By the mid-1850s, school districts supported by property taxes were authorized to be established in the state’s townships. Each rural school district was governed by a three-member board of directors. They, in turn, were overseen by elected township school trustees. Not until the late 1800s was the office of county superintendent of schools established to supervise rural schools’ curriculum and staff.

In rural schools, a single teacher was responsible for teaching up to 40 students in eight grades, along with cleaning the building, making sure there was a fire in the stove on cold mornings and maintaining discipline among students ranging in age from 6 to sometimes 20 years old.

Among the many challenges teachers in those early years often faced was a lack of formal education. Most teachers during the late 1800s and early 1900s were high school graduates. Not until after the first quarter of the 20th century did some rural schools begin requiring at least some college. In the 1950s, the Illinois Superintendent of Instruction, through a variety of programs, strongly encouraged teachers without four-year degrees to go back and earn their diplomas, and a bachelor’s degree gradually became the minimum requirement for new teachers.

Until the 1940s, the majority of rural students never attended high school, much less college. Finishing eight grades and attending the county graduation ceremony was considered a fair achievement by most rural parents of the era. With labor required on farms, going on to high school or college was not an option for most rural students.

And too much education was viewed with some suspicion until the early 20th century. The Kendall County Record’s Oswego correspondent reported in April 1873 that voters in Oswego Township had declined to establish a high school. “The proposition to establish a high school was rejected; only 7 out of 181 voted in favor if it. The free school system is a good thing, but good things carried to excess become hurtful… Under the system of communism where the earnings of both the lawyer and the hod carrier go into a common fund, the free high school principle would be entirely proper.”

In rural schools, a single teacher was responsible for teaching up to 40 students in eight grades, along with cleaning the building, making sure there was a fire in the stove on cold mornings, and maintaining discipline among a student body ranging from 6 to sometimes 20 years of age.

But as years passed, high schools were eventually established, as continuing education beyond eighth grade was increasingly valued, although graduating classes were extremely small for several decades.

That meant that the education students received in one-room schools was all the more important. In 1893, school directors in Oswego announced a new, updated curriculum designed to benefit the majority of students who did not plan to attend high school, as well as the minority who did: “The new course of study was adopted by the board of directors Sept. 4, 1893. It provides for 12 years of instruction, three of which is high school work,” the Record’s Oswego correspondent reported. “A large percentage of scholars attending never go further than the intermediate [junior high] grade. The imperative need then, is seen for a thorough elementary course. If a scholar never enters the grammar grade he may still be able to figure rapidly and accurately, read and write easily, and know something about his language and his country.”

But times changed. By the late 1940s, most students were at least going to high school even if they didn’t graduate. And parents began to notice that the larger town schools offered more opportunities, both socially and educationally, for their children. And that, along with encouragement from state educational officials, led to the acceleration of consolidation of rural one-room schools into larger schools in town.

The process began by moving students in seventh and eighth grades into town schools from the one-room buildings, and continued with consolidating entire school buildings. As the schools closed, the buildings, school sites and equipment were sold at auction until gradually all the former one-room districts had been consolidated.

For instance, on Nov. 23, 1949, the Record’s NaAuSay Township correspondent commented that: “Four rural NaAuSay Township school houses were sold at public auction in November. Prices ranged from $135 to $2,710 for the Brown School with lot. The bell in one school brought 25 cents. This sale marks the passing of one of the greatest institutions of our country.”

In Oswego SD308, the last one-room building, Church School at Heggs Road and 119th Street in Wheatland Township, was closed at the end of the 1957-58 school year. It was the end of an educational era that stretched back 123 years to the county’s first one-room school that started when interested parents collected subscriptions in 1834 to hire C.B. Alford in the then prospering, now vanished, community of Pavillion southwest of Yorkville.

Today, the last concrete reminders of the county’s once-thriving system of one-room public schools are three restored schools, Fern Dell School in Newark, the Union School at the Kendall County Historical Society’s Lyon Farm and Village, and Oswego’s Little White School Museum. Each tells a part of the story of how our pioneer ancestors’ appreciation of the importance of public education helped the United States grow and thrive.

* Editor’s note: Roger Matile is the director of the Little White School Museum in downtown Oswego and local history columnist for the Record Newspapers and Shaw Local News Network. This article was originally published in the Record Newspapers Sept. 9, 2016.