The One-Room School in Canada

Luke Lawson is a teacher and administrator in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

This book pays tribute to a slowly disappearing feature of the Canadian
landscape. The one-room school, from the last half of the 19th century
to the first half of the 20th century, is evoked through numerous
photographs (many of them remarkably clear), memoirs, and excerpts and
samples from catalogues and old texts. Individual chapters are devoted
to such topics as the building of the school, the role and status of the
teacher, the Christmas concert, the schoolyard, visitors, and the forces
of social change. The brief outlines the author provides at the start of
each chapter seem wooden and bland when compared with the colorful and
often brutally honest excerpts from the original sources; the latter
treat readers to a very realistic depiction of rural life. The lack of
documentation will frustrate amateur and professional historians, but
the causal reader will find this book a treasure.