Perkins One Room School house - July 1960

[camomule]

I spent my 1st and 2nd grades in a one room schoolhouse in Iowa, then it was consolidated with a district in a neighboring community and my brothers and I began riding a bus. It sucked. When my wife and I married, we decided we would home school our children. We still live in the country and our children, now grown with children of their own, also home school and live on acreages nearby. It's the little bit we, as one family could do, to hold on to simpler times and better values.

[OmegaWolf747]

An America that no longer exists.

[Commentarian1]

Think of it like this. When your children grow up do you force them to wear the same shoes they did when they were young? America has grown..

[OmegaWolf747]

But has America grown in the right way? Really? We are now a nation where parents don't let their children outdoors to play for fear they will be kidnapped. We now have schools banning children from even running at recess due to fear of lawsuits. If this is the grown America, I'll take the child America any day.

[Commentarian1]

No, I hear ya loud and clear :) One can hope this is just the zit-faced, awkward America.. When the one roomed school house came along most rural Americans wouldn't send their kids to it because they taught things like science and literature and they offered this knowledge to girls. As far as kidnapping goes, this country was peopled with children stolen from England and sold at a price to work American and Australian farms. It's where the phrase was coined.

[Commentarian1]

Hopefully what we are experiencing is America's "troubled youth" phase.. If this country's development can be compared to that of a child, at all. It has been a long time coming, though. These issues were around when I was a child. We had several teachers who told us how bad we were for eating butterscotch pudding with a straw (it was fun) or coloring outside of the lines, but I recall very few who actually brought us a spoon or showed us the right way to hold a crayon....