In Praise of Really Small Schools

Research shows that, for education, there’s no such thing as a school that’s too small. Sit next to Socrates on a stump in the woods near Athens, and you’ll get an education. Ross Perot was a political kook, but the little red schoolhouse to which he kept referring educated many persons well. My grandfather grew up in an unorganized territory in North Dakota, went to a one-room schoolhouse, and then on to Brown when he was fifteen.

I’m not exactly sure of these numbers, but it sticks in my mind that the U.S. once had as many as 140,000 schools, mostly so-called one room schoolhouses, and now has around 14,000 centralized school districts. Anyway, the order of magnitude is correct.

Michael Katz makes clear (in “Alternative Models for American Education”) that large urban and, eventually, suburban schools arose because of movements toward bureaucracy and the professionalization of education. The decisions by which incipient bureaucracy became the triumphant model for public education had much to do with processing hordes of immigrants and those moving from farms to cities and little to do with the actual quality of education.

It’s similarly clear that the “corporate volunteer” model—the model for contemporary independent schools and private colleges and universities—and the model of “democratic localism,” which fostered community control of schools—educated students more thoroughly and more humanely.

Who benefits from large schools, if not the students? Today, somewhat tongue in cheek, I’d say there are two primary beneficiaries: Textbook publishers and football coaches. Alexander Stille, writing in the “New York Review of Books” in 1998, discloses the degree to which high school history textbooks are manipulated by Texas and California public school districts and school boards—the largest districts, on average, in the country, therefore the largest purchasers of books, and the most ideologically driven in that school boards represent groups that inspect prospective texts and submit lists of demands (including the elimination of the word “imagination;” some Christian fundamentalists locate its root near that of “magic,” a practice they associate with the devil…).

Similarly, if you want to field a good football team, the larger the pool of potential players, the better.

But, for actual quality of teaching, why not think of Deep Springs College in Nevada, quirkily devoted to teaching two dozen—and only two dozen—first and second year college students? Why? Because a “teacher proof” curriculum, and the leveling dross-making of textbook publishing, work against the conversations at the actual heart of teaching and learning.

(For how NCLB hurts small public schools, see http://www.matr.net/article-30517.html)