School and schoolhouses

One-Room Schoolhouses - see page 11 side bar in A World More Bright – the Life of Mary Baker Eddy, by Isabel Ferguson and Heather Vogel Frederick.

I know about one-room schools. I attended one at Bribie Island from the age of 6 to 12. I hold the experience very dear and consider that I received a good primary education there.

Mind you, we learned nothing about music – our music consisted of singing and we were required to actually sing as a group at some functions: probably Dance and Euchre evenings. 

Our exercise activity was marching and pulling up bracken fern from the black sand.

And, there was no sewing or other domestic-type work for the girls, nor manual work for the boys. The teacher’s wife was not interested in teaching, I guess. I am sure others in the community could have been given the opportunity – my guardian, for one, with sewing. There was a teacher’s house, so families in the community were not required to board “Sir” (the teacher), as, we are told, was the case in Bow, New Hampshire.

In my youth, schools in Queensland were built on “stilts,” so there was space under the building for playing when it was raining, and shelter from the sun. This allowed for the playing of “beam”. This game had nothing to do with beams of light. Rather it was a tennis ball game of two players throwing a ball against one of the beams under the building, the point being for the ball not to miss the beam over or below it.

This was a time (the 1930s/40s) when Queensland homes were very prone to white ant infestation, so the high wooden stumps were capped with metal plates, and there was wonderful space underneath the house for laundry, for men’s workshops, for children’s play, and for storage.

Anyhow. The writers of A World More Bright have given us delightful side-information columns. One (page 11) tells us that there were seven of these one-teacher schools in Bow. Now, I had thought of Bow as being a village, so how do seven schools relate to that? In fact it is, and was, a town.

The Bow schoolhouse was likely to have been 22 feet square. I will try to figure out the measurements of our building. There was a verandah the length of the southern side, and lots of windows on the northern side which warmed us in the winter; there was no other warming or heating of course. Maybe our building was of a similar size or a little smaller than School #3 which was “a mile from” the Baker home.

The furniture in our school consisted of the teacher’s table/desk, the blackboard, long desks and backless stools. The desks were equipped with ink wells, probably five to a desk, one for each pupil. Memory doesn’t quite give me an accurate number of desks. Perhaps there were five.

Of course, all ages were catered for by the teacher.

Joyce Voysey