Study these primers on your ancestors' classroom experiences.
1. One-Room Country Schools: History and Recollections by Jerry Apps (University of Wisconsin Press). This is an intriguing and heartwarming memoir of the author's experience attending class in a Wisconsin one-room country schoolhouse in the 1940s. A former education professor, Apps talks about not only the formal education inside the classroom, but also games, sporting activities, childhood mischief and lunchtime experiences that occurred on school grounds. His well-written and -illustrated book highlights several other rural Wisconsin schools, too, and includes an appendix of school museums in the Badger State. If you or your parents attended a one-room schoolhouse, you'll especially enjoy this recollection and probably can relate to many of the anecdotes.
2. School Days in Van Zandt County, Texas, volume 3, compiled by Sibyl Creasey (Van Zandt County Genealogical Society). Because they're so hard to track down, school records are an underutilized family history source. But genealogical societies could take a lesson from Van Zandt County society members, who hunted for and compiled school census records into a series of spiral-bound volumes. Since many schools took annual counts, these records can fill the gaps in between federal population schedules. School enumerations frequently list students' names, ages, birth dates and their parents' names. The compilers of School Days in Van Zandt County, Texas, went the extra mile with this volume spanning 1921 to 1924: They've included brief histories and photos of the schools, class pictures and an index. Although you may not have Van Zandt County ancestry, you'll want to take a look at this book — then encourage your society to adopt a similar project.
3. Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom by Heather Andrea Williams (University of North Carolina Press). Although laws in most Southern states prohibited slaves from learning to read and write, some slaves became literate enough to read the Bible and learn about abolitionist activities. In Self-Taught, Williams examines black education from the Civil War era to the present. Though most history books discuss the roles of white missionaries and teachers in black education, the author's research reveals it was primarily free blacks who built schools, paid teachers and sought help from white society to educate blacks. Williams draws from a vast range of sources, including Congregational and Quaker missionary archives, Freedmen's Bureau archives, Civil War military records, and slave narratives and autobiographies. It's an interesting look at this aspect of black history.