For many years, among the hills of Southwest Virginia, most children attended one-room schoolhouses or the schools erected by mining companies, usually with three or four rooms serving all grades and ages of children. These schools were usually staffed by young women, as young as 17 or 18, with sometimes only two years of training as schoolteachers. This respectable work often gave way to marriage and family, which in most cases necessitated giving up the teaching position to another unmarried woman. Many women began teaching, left for several years to rear families, and then returned to the classroom, gathering, as one of our narrators did, a teaching career that spanned a lifetime.
What was it like to come from field and farm as a student into the one-room schoolhouse? Was there really a bell, and did it ring, and did you hear it and know that you were late? What did the child expect and see there, and what did a student learn? What did you do at lunch and recess? Who were the adults, and why did they choose to be part of the school? Where did the money come from for supplies and books? Were there books to take home and read? Was there a library shelf? What was it like for a 14-year-old student to be present in the class with younger children? How did bright children find enough to fill their days? How did slower children find help with their studies? Were there children with handicaps or disabilities? What did the teacher do with boys who misbehaved? What did the teacher do with girls who misbehaved? Were the discipline problems, the curriculum problems, and the worries of teachers and students anything like our own problems and worries in school today? Were these schools good for children? What was it like to stand responsible as a teacher before many children with wide ranges of age, developmental stages, ability, and knowledge levels? Why did the parents send their children, and why did the children continue to come?
We do not ask these questions out of curiosity alone, but rather in a search for our own roots as educators and inheritors of this small corner of the world's geography. We began the study with a sigh for work that must be endured, toward the goal of completing a course for credit. We grew quickly into a feeling that we wanted to know the answers to these questions at a personal level, to share, and in spirit at least, to be present with this past from which we grew.