Why the One-Room Schoolhouse Spirit Still Matters This Thanksgiving

As Thanksgiving approaches, many of us naturally look back — at family traditions and at the stories that shaped our nation.

One of America’s most enduring images is the humble one-room schoolhouse. These tiny schools began cropping up in the colonial era just a few decades after the first Thanksgiving.

For generations, the one-room schoolhouse stood at the center of rural American life. It was a place where students of different ages learned side by side, where community members contributed time and resources, even things like firewood, and where education was deeply personal.

It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t standardized or bureaucratic. But it was deeply human — rooted in community and individual relationships.

Today, as families across the country gather for Thanksgiving, the spirit of that one-room schoolhouse is returning. Schooling is being reimagined, and some of the most innovative educational trends are actually reconnecting us with our roots.

Across the country, parents are forming homeschool co-ops, microschools, learning pods, and hybrid homeschool programs that blend the best of at-home learning with the structure of small-group instruction. These are smaller, often mission-driven private school settings where students are known and challenged, not lost in the crowd.

“It’s not your grandfather’s school. It’s your great, great, great, great grandfather’s schoolhouse!” EdChoice President and CEO Robert Enlow likes to say.

Microschools surged after the COVID pandemic. Today, the country has roughly 95,000 microschools serving somewhere around 1.5 million students.

Homeschooling also exploded during COVID. Homeschooling students now make up about 5-6% of the total student population, and homeschooling continued to grow this school year by 5.4%, nearly triple its 2% growth before the pandemic.

These approaches may look different from the brick-and-mortar districts many of us grew up with, but they share something essential with the one-room schoolhouse: they put children — not systems — at the center.

That shift is at the heart of school choice.

School choice has always been about this simple idea: families know their children best.

It’s not a rejection of public schools. It’s a recognition that not every child thrives in the same environment. When families are free to choose, we see education shaped again by the people closest to the child — parents, educators, and communities.

Increasingly, these new “one-room” models are possible because of state school choice programs, especially Education Savings Accounts, which allow parents to use their child’s public education dollars for expenses like tuition, tutoring, online education programs, therapies for students with special needs, textbooks, and sometimes even college savings.

That flexibility allows families, especially those without financial means, to participate in the educational experimentation that wealthier families have always been able to access.

Just like those early American towns that built a schoolhouse because they needed one — not because a central authority told them exactly how it had to look — today’s families are constructing solutions that fit their children’s individual personalities and learning styles.

It is easy to think of education innovation as something sleek and futuristic. But the truth is that while the tools have changed — laptops instead of slates, online lessons instead of primers — the core idea remains familiar: small, flexible, relationship-centered learning can transform a child’s life.

The one-room schoolhouse may be a symbol of our past, but its spirit is alive — in the microschool in a church basement, in the hybrid homeschool group meeting in a library, in one small private school opening its doors to a handful of students, in one family deciding that this year, they’ll try something different.

We’ve always been a country that adapts, experiments, and builds something better for the next generation.

This Thanksgiving, we can be grateful that in dozens of states, families now have the freedom to choose the environments where their children learn best.