Vital to each growing community was a school. Taught by single women teachers with little more than an eighth grade education, the one room school house brought the skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic to the children frontier.

"They looked at their slate's smooth, soft-grey surface, and its clean, flat wooden frame, cunningly fitted together at the corners. It was a handsome slate. But they must have a slate pencil.

Pa had already spent so much for the slate that they hated to tell him they must have another penny. They walked along soberly, till suddenly Laura remembered their Christmas pennies. They still had those pennies that they had found in their stockings on Christmas morning in Indian Territory.

Mary had a penny, and Laura had a penny, but they needed only one slate pencil. So they decided that Mary would spend her penny for the pencil, and after that she would own half of Laura's penny."

-from On the Banks of Plum Creek

 

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