The school teacher, sometimes slightly older than her pupils, was a renaissance individual.
When they arrived on their first day of school they may have only known how to speak a foreign language but they soon learned how to speak, read, spell, and write English. They got to school on foot, on horseback, or in a wagon. The children who attended ranged in age from five to 21 and endured dust storms, prairie fires, and cattle drives swirling past the school house in order to get an eighth grade education. They were called names like Prairie Flower, Buzzard Roost, and Good Intent. For a hundred years, white frame or native stone one-room schoolhouses dotted the section corners across Kansas.
