Old school education

BY DANIELLE MEDINA
Correspondent

PHOTOS BY SCOTT PILLING staff Ocean County Historical Society member Carolyn M. Campbell displays her book, “Chickaree in the Wall,” which documents one-room schoolhouses in Ocean County. BRICK — Today, the Brick Township public school system consists of 14 schools, 1,200 teachers, 46 administrators and 450 support staff personnel.

But at the turn of the 20th century, a formal education in Brick consisted of 12 one-room schoolhouses and 16 teachers to educate 800 students.

A slide show on one-room school houses in Brick and throughout Ocean County was presented by Carolyn M. Campbell, a member of the Ocean County Historical Society, at the Herbertsville Firehouse on Jan. 10.

“What was important wasn’t that it was one room, but that there was a teacher in the room,” Campbell said. “They were more like one-teacher schools.”

Residents funded, built and elected three trustees to run the schools, Campbell said.

Each school was a separate district that hired its own teacher, bought supplies and heated the schools.

A member of the Brick Township Historical Society points to the location of one of the county’s former one-room schoolhouses at a presentation at the Herbertsville Firehouse Jan. 10. “Some schools in an area represented only eight families,” Campbell said. “With five kids per family, that was the entire school.”

There were even districts that existed only on paper but didn’t have any students to attend school.

In 1890, Brick boasted five one-room schoolhouses: in Burrsville, Cedar Bridge, Herbertsville, Metedeconk and Osborn. Schools in Bay Head, three schools in Lakewood and three schools in Point Pleasant were also part of Brick.

The Herbertsville School, which was built in 1858, had the distinction of being the only one-room schoolhouse made of brick in the county. Most schools were made of wood and resembled houses, with a bench and a bucket and dipper — a predecessor to the water fountain — on the front porch.

“Each community did its own thing,” Campbell said. “There were no standards.”

Inside, furnishings were scant, with double desks for students, a teacher’s desk, a chalkboard and a globe. Sometimes a picture of George Washington or Abraham Lincoln adorned the walls.

Despite the schools’ sparse settings, Campbell said it was the quality of the teacher that mattered.

“If you had a good teacher, you got an excellent education,” she said. “But most teachers lacked formal education themselves, and for the male teachers it was a way to learn a little bit of extra money.”

Today, a teacher must hold at least a bachelor’s degree and obtain certification from the state. During the days of one-room schoolhouses, the only teaching requirement was a person’s age — teachers had to be at least 16 years old.

Teachers were expected to continue their education, which wasn’t always easy to do because of limited transportation options.

To get to one-room schoolhouses, students either walked or rode in horse-drawn carriages.

Some students lived so far from school, Campbell said, that it was not uncommon for the teacher to prepare hot lunches on the potbelly stove for them. For some, it might be the only hot meal of the day.

“It was a very intimate setting,” Campbell said.

As the area’s population grew and as improvements in transportation allowed students to enroll in more centralized schools, one-room schoolhouses became obsolete in the 1920s and 1930s, she said.

Most one-room schoolhouses were razed, but some are still in use as museums or historical societies. The Herbertsville School’s brick facade was stuccoed and converted into a home.

“I was utterly surprised to see how many are still standing,” Campbell said.

Most of Campbell’s research on one-room schoolhouses comes from documents and photos kept by one of Ocean County’s first superintendents of schools, Charles A. Morris, and are in her book “A Chickaree in the Wall: A History of One-Room Schools in Ocean County.”