As late as 1938 there were 200,000 one-room schools scattered throughout the United States. By 1978 there were little more than 1,000 in operation. Primary-source research on rural education has now been conducted by 23 researchers in Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming, sponsored by the Mountain…

The time period and the pioneer conditions that existed when north central and northwestern North Dakota were settled determined the type of rural schools that were established there. Those areas were settled between 1885 and 1910. Most of the settlers in that area of the state were of Scandinavian (particularly Norwegian) extraction. The vast…

Country schools were important in the growth and development of North Dakota. While most of the early schools were constructed of wood, some were constructed of stone, sod, or logs. Standardization was established by 1915, and the white framed one-room school was duplicated in every township of the state until the end of World War II. A former…

Teacher duties and curriculum developed by North Dakota, in deciding what role teachers would play in the community and what standards of conformity and propriety would be applied to teachers, mirrored certain aspects of the local culture and reflected a wider national culture. The inclusion of health studies reflected the local majority concern…

This book relates the history of four Catholic Indian boarding schools in the Dakota Territory between 1870 and 1928. Chapter 1 covers 1870 to 1887, when federal Indian relations were driven by the Peace Policy, which assigned reservations to specific religious bodies and established a formal system of schools to assimilate American Indians into…

The state superintendent, the county superintendent, and the one-room school teacher each contributed to classroom instruction in North Dakota. In 1895, the "School Text Book Law" provided for free text books and school supplies for all pupils; however, the law was not mandatory. Specific courses of study and elaborate handbooks on all…

In an attempt to ascertain the validity of the assumption that Norwegians supported education much more than did German-Russians in North Dakota in the early part of the twentieth century, select counties made up predominantly of the ethnic groups in question were examined, using data taken from the years 1910-12, 1922-23, and 1930. The two groups…

In North Dakota, the schools played the major role in imparting American culture to the immigrants who by 1920 numbered 67% of North Dakota's population, but rural schools were not ideally suited to the task. The immigrants tended to cluster in nationality groups in geographic areas of the state, giving communities distinct ethnic identities. The…