Hazelwood Tutors Come To You

Hazelwood is a suburb of St. Louis in Missouri. It is a quaint little town, with parks and historical landmarks that illustrate its longstanding charm as an outgrowth of a major Midwestern city. With founding in the mid-nineteenth century, no better representation of its early days is found than in its iconic one-room schoolhouse, affectionately referred to as “The Little Red Schoolhouse.”

The Little Red Schoolhouse, or The Old Elm Grove School, was founded in 1852 and is likely the oldest schoolhouse in the whole county. It is small—only 12 feet high—with cheerful red bricks that compose its façade and walls. The schoolhouse is small, with a chimney that surely would have been lit winter after winter to warm the different classes that were held there. Located in Brookes Park, and surrounded by a white picket fence, this idyllic setting conjures up images of the old days, before industrialization and urban expansion.

One room schoolhouses in the United States were common in rural areas. As a result, they were often constructed as the country grew in size and scope. As settlers moved west, they brought with them their children, and with enough members of a community committed to education, a schoolhouse would usually result. Some were simple structures, with adobe or wood construction, others were more sturdy brick, like the one in Hazelwood. Inside of each schoolhouse, one could expect to find split benches or rows of desks to accommodate small bodies of students living in small, rural communities. Chalkboards, primers, and writing implements were common, though paper was still something of a commodity, especially for children.

Early one-room schoolhouses often served a wide range of students, all gathered in the same room. Children as young as five or six and as old as seventeen or eighteen would learn side by side to read, write, calculate numbers, and how to be upstanding citizens that followed social norms. Schoolhouses ran from late fall to early spring, leaving crucial months open to planting and harvesting. Students were valuable workers in their families—many ended up dropping out of school well before they reached adolescence in order to devote themselves to laboring alongside their parents and siblings to bring forth lucrative crops year after year. These were common practices in the Midwest, and the educational practices of this region differed greatly from the formal schooling found on the East Coast—especially for the affluent.

Devoting oneself to education in places like Hazelwood certainly must have been a difficult leap of faith to take for many youngsters. If challenges were encountered, it would have been easy to drop out, since work needed to be done anyway. However, with the help of tutors, students in Hazelwood now do not have to take this kind of action. With additional help, they can stay the course and continue on. The Little Red Schoolhouse closed for business in the 1950s, but it stands as a small reminder of the potential that education has for the life of the hard-working and dedicated student, especially with the guiding hand of tutor to help their clients weather the ups and downs of academic performance.