One-room schoolhouse still offers lessons

CISCO, Ill. — School’s out forever at Bethel.

The one-room Bethel School, tucked away amid the splendid isolation of Friends Creek Conservation Area near Cisco, hasn’t heard the patter of tiny reluctant feet since 1946, when it welcomed its last class.

But the circa 1890 clapboard building still has much to teach us about the way America used to learn how to read, write and do `rithmetic in the era before yellow buses, teacher in-service days and homework assignments posted on the Internet.

Lesson one is the pervading sense of how one-on-one it all was: Carefully restored and maintained by the Macon County Conservation District, visitors can walk among the small cluster of desks and see how they were easily watched and patrolled by the lone teacher.

Under her watchful eye (low-paid teaching was typically a job for single women) she might have charge of anywhere from more than 20 students to less than 10. Discipline was administered through the swift application of blunt force trauma to hands and buttocks via hickory sticks and similar instruments and was not subject to judicial review.

And while it’s hard to know exactly what went on at Bethel, accounts from similar one-room schoolhouses say humiliation was a favorite retribution mechanism. Kids might have to stand up against the wall with their nose not allowed to move from a circle chalked on the blackboard. There were also dunce caps and the opportunity for erring boys to be made to sit on the girls’ side of the room with a bonnet on their heads — a punishment unlikely to pass the constitutional test of cruel and unusual as seen from a 21st-century perspective.

But schools such as Bethel worked, and students learned. Now with American public education consistently dragging along the bottom percentiles of many international comparisons, there is a strong sense of nostalgia for the back-to-basics approach enshrined in the mythic memory of the one-room schoolhouse. It may be about as relevant to modern lesson plans as a hitching post in a parking lot, but the feeling that places like Bethel were on to something persists.

Mike Bricker, a site technician at Friends Creek who has been heavily involved with the preservation of Bethel, believes the fond recollection of yesteryear values is not misplaced.

“No, I think there is something to that,” he said. “People like to get in touch with the past, and the value of having a place like this is that they are able to actually see what it was like. This is a hands-on experience.”

Visitors with luck on their side might be fortunate enough to time their arrival to when costumed kids and adults are re-creating life at the old school. In a singular twist of fate, a bunch of home-schooled students regularly put on an interactive show in which they play the part of Bethel children and are watched by visiting kids from public schools.

Ten-year-old Karis Bolin of Decatur, resplendent in long flowing blue flower print dress with matching bonnet, is a home-schooler of today who wouldn’t mind riding a time warp back to the Bethel of 1890.

“Want to go back then? Of course I would. I love history, and it would be a great experience,” she said.

Asked if it was easier being a kid 120 years ago, Karis prefaces her answer by saying that having to do without running water would be a trial but, having established that, she thought the Bethel classes probably had a cushier ride academically.

“They only had like four or five subjects, and now I have 10 or 12,” she adds. “Yes, it would be a lot of fun to go back to Bethel.”