The Birth of the Prairie One-Room Schoolhouse
To The Birth of AI Technology
This picture is of the Beaver School, which received a new life as the Town of Castor resurrected and restored it for the town museum. At one time, there were thousands of these schools, dotting the vast rural plains, ensuring the children of those who settled in the West got the education they needed. Traditionally, these schools were from grade one through eight.
The call went out, and teachers of all ages came from across North America to answer it. Among them were two young women from the Dakotas, fresh from their formal education: my Grandmother and Aunt Edith. They came to Saskatchewan to live and teach my grandmother to Grandora, Saskatchewan, where she would teach Edna Tripp, who later became my other grandparent, and Aunt Edith to Asquith, Saskatchewan, about ten miles up the road.
It’s hard to imagine what it might have been like compared to modern classrooms. First, no electricity lighting was provided by coal oil lamps and the natural lighting provided from oversized windows. The second and most important was that there were no boilers. The entire school and cellar living quarters were heated by a single coal and wood-burning furnace. Finally, the last had no running water, and the old outhouse was dug out somewhere beside the school. If there was no well on the school property, it had to be brought in by one of the students to fill a cistern at the back of the class close to the stove.
The teachers’ quarters lay in the cellar accessible by a trap door behind the teachers’ desk a small space with an old coal-and-wood stove for preparing their dinner. Very few perishables were ever kept because the iceman was often much farther away.
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These were blackboard teachers, preparing the next day’s lessons after their students had gone home by horseback, horse and buggy, or, when needed, on foot. Carrying their slates in hand or hardbound journals.
For those of us accustomed to computers, calculators, spell checkers, and grammar tools, it can be difficult to picture a world like that. In those days, students relied on quill pens and inkwells, chalkboard slates, and, if they were fortunate, a hard-covered journal.
As my generation was one of the last to work from the blackboard and learn by it, I can imagine some of what my grandma and aunt faced.
Our education rested on two principles: discipline and repeated practice in spelling, writing, and mathematics. We printed or wrote in cursive page after page until our hands ached, only to do it again the next day. Assignments had to be handed in on time, without exception, or we received a goose egg for a mark. We grew up believing in achievement and merit, confident that those principles could carry us along whatever path we chose.
Consumer technology still seemed distant. The first Texas Instruments calculator appeared in late 1972 with only four functions and a price of more than $300. By 1974, the company had released its first scientific calculator, beginning to replace the old slide rules, but, like its predecessor, it carried a hefty price tag. So, like most of my classmates, I used the slide rule.
When I think of the friends and colleagues who grew up at those same blackboards, two traits stand out: a near-photographic memory and a more adaptable, disciplined way of life. Even now, we tend to meet change with thoughtful questions and a strong moral compass.
With the rise of AI, the disciplines learned from those blackboard teachers seem more important than ever. We cannot stop the advance of AI, just as we could not stop the early, largely unregulated growth of the internet. But in the rush to ask what we can do, we must not forget the question that once disciplined every hypothesis: should we do it, and how far should we go?
A century is not as distant as many believe. At 65, I can still remember standing at the blackboard, solving my first long-division problem as if it were yesterday. I am fairly certain my grandmother and her sister Edith, looking back with the wisdom of experience, would say we have forgotten something important.
