Learnin' in One Room

Learnin' in One Room Far-Flung and Sparsely Settled Arizona Retains the Tiny School House for Read-ing, Writing and 'Rithmetic

IT IS A CRISP, early winter morning in a mountain valley of Southern Arizona. Jack Frost has silently stolen down from the high peaks during the quiet hours before dawn, and has painted all the landscape with a silvery coat of white. The last summer's grass lies under foot, brittle and frozen, and the evergreen leaves of the oak trees glisten with frozen moisture as the first rays of a bright sun peep over the far distant ranges and chase the night shadows away toward the west. Down the yet dark, and chilly valley, a whisp of grey smoke curls lazily out of the chimney of a small, white-plastered building, as a very determinedlooking, young woman walks out of the front door to the slender pole near the country road and hauls away on a light rope. A ray of sunshine glances suddenly between the oaks, as Old Glory unfolds and waves in the bright light. The young woman walks back and disappears inside of the neat, little building. Clang-clangclangclang. Four times the clear tones of a bell ring out over the quiet valley, just as they must have done more than two hundred years before, when the hands of the padres pulled on the bells of San Xavier or of Tumacacori in the valley of the Santa Cruz, and began the day for the Papagoes.

Soon, small figures trudge up the road or down the trail from the hills. The greatest institution in the country has started to operate, its members have gathered together at the little one-room school house to do just what the founders of this country once did two centuries ago. From ranches hidden in the yellow and green hills of the high country of Southern Arizona, on foot, or sometimes on the old plug, who can no longer keep up with fast cow ponies, come the pupils, often miles away from their homes, anxious to learn and serious of mind. No forcing them to get to school in time or making excuses for being late. In far outlying, small, mining Seventeen miles from the Mexican border and almost a mile high is this beautiful scene. Note the tiny school house, center, and the Huachuca mountains in the background. This is the Canille school whose pupils, right, are pledging allegiance to the flag.

camps or road construction crews, the ever-present American boy or girl needs and wants to learn the same as the ones more fortunately situated and the little old one-room school house looks to them as fine as the four-storied ones in the larger places, so up the road they come in the family model T, accumulating more passengers as they near the shrine of learning and discharging all in a shrieking and laughing gang on arrival. Way out in the sandy flats of the Colorado River Valley, the adobe school house holds a promise as surely as the old log house turned into a school in the high plains between the Painted Desert and the pine-covered foot hills of the White Mountains atop the Mogollon (Continued on Page 19)