Campbell F. Scribner. The Fight for Local Control

Few icons in U.S. history have greater symbolic power than the “little red schoolhouse.” Standing in as rhetorical shorthand for rural America and its values, it inspires ambivalent associations, as Jonathan Zimmerman elaborated in a slim volume on the symbol, Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory (2009). Signifying both a simpler and bucolic yesteryear of shared values and community participation in educational affairs, the one-room structure is also an object of disdain, representing the unsophisticated days before teaching was professionalized and curriculum standardized. Whether it evokes nostalgia or disparagement, the little red schoolhouse, and by extension the surrounding rural educational landscape, is often considered—even by contemporary historians—to be a relic of a bygone era. Regrettably, if somewhat understandably, much exciting scholarship on the history of education in the twentieth century has mostly reinscribed this assumption about the irrelevance of rural education. Given the trends of urbanization, immigration, and industrialization that defined the Progressive Era, those who study schools during this rich period have focused on the cities where the professional and infrastructural systems that defined a newly scientific, and soon widely adopted, approach to education were created. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) is appropriately the fulcrum of scholarship on mid-century schools, and its centrality has focused attention on urban educational environments both for their multiracial composition and for the presence of intense resistance to racial mixing, residential and otherwise, in densely populated zones. In the late twentieth century, the demographic movement to the suburbs inspired tremendous attention from historians on the peculiar politics that germinated there, from the Southern California conservatives of Lisa McGirr’s landmark Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (2001), to the Greater Boston liberals of Lily Geismer’s Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (2014), to the Long Island homemakers who became the champions of a “family values” worldview in Stacie Taranto’s Kitchen Table Politics: Conservative Women and Family Values in New York (2017). Often, suburban sensibilities are contrasted to urban ones, but their relationship to rural experiences in schools and beyond have been understudied.

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