Features April 1997
The eighth in a series on The future of the European past,
A year or two back, my small town in New Hampshire completed the decades-long process of educational consolidation and closed our last one-room schoolhousea fine 1839 clapboard academy atop a hill overlooking a small settlement. For the last thirty years, it had been used as the town kindergarten, but now the little ones have gone downhill to join their siblings in the first-to-eighth grade school. The town isnt sure yet what to do with the building, so the classrooms been tidied up and decorated with some surviving artifacts of its illustrious past. On the blackboard is a typical math exercise of the mid-nineteenth century: If 46 yards of cloth cost £53 10s 6d, what is that per yard? The tattered volume from which its taken sits on a pupils desk three rows back, with the names of several of the towns oldest families inscribed inside. Its an American book published in...