The Freeman School: Building Prairie Communities (Teaching with Historic Places)

This lesson is part of the National Park Service’s Teaching with Historic Places (TwHP) program.

It seemed, as I recall it, a lonely little house of scholarship...But that humble little school had a dignity of a fixed and far off purpose...It was the outpost of civilization. It was the advance guard of the pioneer, driving the wilderness farther into the west. It was life preparing wistfully for the future.
-- James Rooney, in Journey from Ignorant Ridge, 1976

The Freeman School, or the Red-Brick School House as it was originally called, served the community of Blakely Township, Nebraska from 1872 to 1967. It is representative of the one-room schools that once dotted the landscape of the American West. At the time it closed it had the honor of being the oldest, continuously used one-room school in the state of Nebraska. The Freeman school served not only as an educational center, but also as the church, a meeting hall, the township polling place, and as the social and political center of the community. At present, the National Park Service maintains and preserves this historic structure that is located within the boundaries of Homestead National Monument of America in southeastern Nebraska. Although no children's voices fill the yard, the red brick school still offers visitors the lesson that one-room schools were not only places where children learned reading, writing and arithmetic, but also places where far-flung families could gather to forge a sense of community.

Essential Question

How did Americans organize to educate pioneer children on the U.S. frontier?

Objective

1. Understand the relationship between U.S. land and homestead policies and the construction of schools and development of communities on the western frontiers;
2. Describe the importance of one-room schools to people in developing communities of the American West as educational facilities and community centers;
3. Compare/contrast the educational experience of rural students in one-room schools with their own educational experiences;
4. Research the oldest school in their community.

Full Lesson Plan