9/14/2009:
When a child hears the word "school" today, he or she might think of brick school buildings, big yellow buses, computers, and textbooks. But the word school meant something very different to the first students of North Dakota. School meant walking two miles to a one-room structure made of wood, stone, or sod to learn about the three Rs without benefit of textbooks, workbooks, or in many cases, pencils and paper. Before the days of standardized testing, school accreditation, and bus transportation, education was an irregular and haphazard affair. Former state superintendent of schools, E.J. Taylor, once said, "It can be truthfully said that the men and women who laid the foundation of our schools had the capacity for enduring and overcoming hardships that has not yet been surpassed, if equaled, by their successors."
Early teachers in North Dakota were not paid nearly enough for their struggles to educate students in a less than ideal environment. In 1889, male teachers received approximately thirty-nine dollars a month and female teachers thirty-four-barely enough to live on. Basic school supplies were also sorely lacking. For example, in his report for the 1889-1890 school year, the superintendent of schools expressed his disappointment that 16 schools had no blackboards, 314 had no dictionaries, and only 43 schools in the entire state had libraries. Books were so rare in schoolhouses that students usually brought family books from home. The children whose families had the best books often received the best education.
Educators had to be resourceful and creative if they hoped to teach their students anything in a poorly-supplied, one-room schoolhouse. Teacher Frances Flaa recalled that she would teach writing by drawing "letters or numbers on the desktops with chalk [and] the pupils outlined them with kernels of corn."
School was no easy task for students either. The children had to walk, sled, ride horse-back, or hitch rides on buggies just to reach the school house. As farm responsibilities beckoned children home, superintendents found it difficult to keep them in school. Some schools were in session only four months, some six, others ten. And when children were old enough to begin school, they had little understanding of what "going to school" meant. For example, on the first day of public school in Bismarck, teacher Frank McCreary was surprised to find that seven of his pupils brought six-shooters to class! They had no idea that weapons were forbidden. As the Bismarck Tribune stated, "those were rough and ready days." But one way or another, North Dakotans found a way to educate their children.
Dakota Datebook written by Carol Wilson
Sources
Bismarck Capital, August 22, 1939 (Jubilee Edition).
Frances Alexander Flaa. Rural School Memories. Gwinner: J&M Printing, Inc., 1985.
The Richland County Historical Society. A History of Richland County. Dallas: Taylor Publishing Company, 1977.