B O O K R E V I E W
Less Is More
Island Schoolhouse One Room For All, By Eva Murray
304 pages, $20
Tilbury House, Publishers
Gardiner, Maine, 800-582-1899
Public education in the US has for years faced criticism, controversy and protest. Some high schools have grown to the size of college campuses. The transition from elementary to the industrial scale middle school is almost universally recognized as something psychologically traumatic for many students.
One well-funded high school in nationally known college town is often referred to as a“good school” by some, but it gets lower grades from many parents. The continuous barrage of state testing, mountains of nightly homework, the hit the ground running at 6 am schedule, expectations of honors classes, advanced placement courses, multiple extra curricular activities, multiple sports, end of the day exhaustion and the inevitable isolation of cliques soon begins to look less like an education than preparation for a dull, sleep deprived life as a middle manager.
When one of these high schools showed a film critical of these features the modern public high school. The Race To Nowhere, it drew 450 parents in a college town “good high school” with 1,200 students. Ironically, the education department at one of the colleges in that town was nationally known for being at the leading edge of educational reform 50 years earlier.
Some of those reforms might have produced schools like those Eva Murray describes in Island Schoolhouse. Small class size, individual interaction with the teacher, hands on activities, real life relationship with the academic subjects and community, field trips – a life/community/family scale educational reality.
Eva Murray, author of Island Schoolhouse One Room For All. Addison DeLisle Photo
Murray has taught in a one room Maine island schoolhouse. She is the teacher that most parents whose children are being processed down at the local enormous Ed. Factory wish their kids could instead spend the day with. Murray gets it. She understands kids, she understands education and she understands the importance of the teacher’s role in the lives of students and in the community.
Murray is also a good writer whose books and columns for newspapers and magazines stand out for their clarity, wisdom and wit. She is also the author of Well Out To Sea-Year Round on Matinicus Island.In Island Schoolhouse Murray writes about the history of the one room schoolhouse in America, those schoolhouses in Maine, and on the Maine islands. Part of that story is of the disappearance of most of these schoolhouses in Maine and in the rest of the country.
The focus of the book is on the island schools of Maine. It is the story of how these schools began, how they are changing, how most have disappeared and how some are becoming strengthened through the use of technology that enables them to access the educational resources of the rest of the world.
From the school whose entire student body is two brothers to a larger school that has two rooms to accommodate grades K though 4 and grades 5 through 8 the one room school house atmosphere in no way resembles its mainland suburban counter part. Absent is the crowded alienation, timed bells, loud and noisy chaos between classes, the echo on concrete and metal, ever present discipline, rigid fashion dress codes, purple hair, angry Johnnies and mean Marys.
Graduates of the island schools talk about having felt a security and contentment at their school. The complaints so many high school kids have about high school life are not a part of what island school kids experienced.
Murray’s insight into early education, human nature, the details of the evolution and current state of one room island schools belies the fact that Murray taught just one year in her Metinicus Island one room school. But Murray has remained active in the island school, other island schools and the community that is so much a part of the school and visa versa.
Island students go off island the high school. Some commute daily to near shore islands while others go to boarding schools. Murray says she is often asked about the stories of island kids going on to some of the country’s most prestigious colleges. She said she doesn’t know that the percentage is any high for island kids. She doesn’t think the island school experience makes kids any more prepared for that result. However, she does think that being at a boarding or prep school where school work is taken seriously could be influential.
Of the island one room schoolhouse teacher she writes, ”In the smallest schools, the island teacher may have to be the secretary, the drama director, the soccer coach, the nurse, the librarian, and the janitor at once, in addition to teaching multiple grades and, now, staying on top of ever changing technology.”
Murray taught on Matinicus, an island 20 miles out to sea. There is lots of weather, but no police, fire department, all night diner, traffic light, traffic, or roads. She went there to teach, married, had kids and is in her 25th year there. Transportation to the island is on the mail boat that is also the ferry boat. Weather, particularly in the winter, makes service spotty and at times hair-raising. More hair-raising is the small plane air service to the hillside gravel airstrip on the island. This service is weather and courage permitting.
Island Schoolhouse is about the 13 remaining Maine island schools, but is more about the students in these schools and the people in the communities the schools and teachers are so much a part of. Murray’s writing is loaded with anecdotes, humor and sharp-eyed observation.
“Moving to an island is not just a change of address. Everything about one’s life changes. What you do for a living changes, how you deal with emergencies, and holidays, and all sorts of things you never used to think about have to change. You won’t need a good haircut, your high heels, your roller skates or a cell phone. You may well need a pickup truck. If your wise, you will have a fat tired bicycle, a large freezer, reliable rubber boots, spare milk, a big set of wrenches. And a thick skin.”
Murry’s husband runs the island’s power plant.
The most unusual thing about this is that he is therefore not a fisherman as are most all the other men on the island. There are no Walmart greeter jobs, no sales jobs at the Buick dealership, no night shift at the convenience store, no ad agency VP spots. In fact, Murray’s husband may have the only job on an island with no year round store or any of the other businesses that crowd the visual landscape of the rest of the nation.
So how is it that a remote island has a school that the top contemporary front line educational philosophers in America have been trying unsuccessfully promote for 50 years. The one-room schools have been this way for more than 50 years. Most all the other one-room schools in the nation were dismantled over the last 100 years. Dismantled in an effort to make public education cheaper per student, to make the system more “efficient”, and to sell the cost to taxpayers.
The changes in modern public education over the last century is a complex economic, logistical and philosophical story. The story of educational qualities common to the one room school is a simple story. That of the one room island school is a story of it’s own. It too is not complicated. The unique character of island life and community, familiar and interconnected, make these schools a unique looking glass for educators and parents tearing their hair out over the spiraling down of their big public systems.