Susan Leist has produced an exceptional 'first hand' account of the rural one-room school experience in early twentieth-century Virginia. This accessible, indeed — graceful — volume goes a long way toward filling a scholarly void created by our cultural propensity to examine urban circumstances before all others.
Paul Theobald, Ph.D., Woods-Beals Endowed Chair and professor of educational foundations, SUNY College at Buffalo In times when schools and educators are under fire, too often the impulse is to imagine a rhapsodic past while chasing tomorrow's next idea to fix the present. Perspective is lost. But this portrayal of one-room schools in rural Virginia restores perspective through its rich account of another time in America's educational history. In that time, school was a source of exciting possibilities for both teachers and students. This is not a melancholic journey to a past that never existed; rather, the voices that Susan Leist captures here speak with poetic authority about one-room experiences. Children and their teachers bent the arc of history then with their belief in each other and the learning made possible in an intimate community. Modern-day educators can learn much by placing themselves in this American story and rediscovering their inheritance.
Margo A. Figgins, Ph.D., associate professor, The Curry School, University of Virginia