One-Room Schoolhouse

Backed against a wall, the visiting Pittsburgh teacher barely escaped a thundering mob of moppets carrying chairs. A second herd crashed by, lugging lightweight desks; then came a teacher, pushing a bookcase on wheels. Instead of vanishing into classrooms, the kids camped in noisy huddles all over one huge room. With teachers hopping from huddle to huddle, the scene sometimes took on the look of a Red Cross disaster station, but it was routine teaching at the free-form grade school in Carson City, Mich.

In its unique, $200,000 school, rural Carson City has gone far beyond the new notion of movable walls to banish "egg crate" classrooms. In Carson City, there are no walls. The school consists of five grades in two cavernous "clusters," each measuring the size of four conventional classrooms.

Result of the freedom is to group the 247 pupils according to their needs rather than by grades; a fourth-grade student may, for example, join mostly third-grade children for arithmetic if arithmetic gives him trouble, but study English with fifth-grade pupils if English is easy for him. Yet, on balance, no child is likely to be embarrassed as conspicuously backward or made self-conscious as conspicuously superior. The system has turned out so well that Carson City now insists on reservations weeks in advance from the scores of educators who want to come and observe.

In Isosceles Triangles. Gone is the familiar desk to stash books and apple cores; each pupil every morning picks a plastic "tote tray" from a central rack. The kids hustle about all day in a bewildering variety of changes. Even the furniture arrangement is unpredictable. "They might be seated in rows, circles, squares or even isosceles triangles," says one teacher. "Or that day they might just want to clump around my desk."

Carson City's conservative citizens bought this radical design from former School Superintendent Martin Atkins. who in 1955 set out to build a new school for team teaching (using teachers according to skill in each subject), decided it needed wide open spaces. The townspeople went along; "I just told them the new school would be something like the one-room schoolhouse they once attended," says Atkins.

No Squirming, No Recess. The problems were noise and rootlessness. But some months later, when Atkins tested his teachers' reactions by announcing that he was going to put in walls, they cried, "Give us back our contracts." The pleasure of moving each child at his own pace far outweighed the problems, and the kids were visibly broadened by mixing with all ages.

Even the constant movement "satisfies a definite need," says Principal Elizabeth Martin. "We see little squirming in class, and we don't have to schedule recesses.' The kids are so active that they don't need them." The complex planning required also brings teachers together. "I couldn't stand going back to a traditional classroom," says one. "It's so dull and lonesome being shut up in a little room all day with only the kids to talk to."

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