How many of you attended one-room country schools? I did, too. And there aren't many of us left anymore. My family's farm was 2.5 miles from the schoolhouse if you went by road. You could trim a half-mile off if you cut through the woods, which I did most of the time.

When my daughter reached school age, I told her I had to trudge five miles through snowdrifts on linoleum soles, carrying lard sandwiches. This was an overstatement designed to make her appreciate how easy being a student was in her day.

Still, I put in four miles of hiking each day--more, if you count the side trips to explore things of interest. On chilly mornings, we would stay warm by running. (Today, we pay taxes to buy $80,000 school buses to haul kids to school, where we build $850,000 gymnasiums so the kids can get some exercise.)

The schoolhouse building resembled a boot camp barracks without the bunks. The dominant furniture in the room was a wood-burning stove. The aroma of burning firewood mingled with the smell of wet wool and leaky gastric systems. In warm weather, opening all the windows wide provided ventilation. (Nowadays, they call off school when the thermometer hits 90 degrees.)

One teacher taught 30 or 40 students in all eight elementary grades. The teacher bore down on reading, writing and arithmetic, with some history and geography. Neither she nor the students had time for any fancier courses of study. (Today, it's a national crisis because some classrooms have more than 20 pupils--all in the same grade and usually all being taught the same subject.)

Were we educationally deprived in those one-room schools? Probably. But we got the basics of learning drilled into us. If students failed to pass, they were held in the grade for another year. (No one had heard of "social promotion" back then.)

I'm not sure how well we were educated when compared with grade school students in other areas or countries. If anyone assigned an international pecking order on pupils back then, I never heard about it.

But I recently read U.S. students rank sixth from the bottom among 17 developed countries of the world. Fourth graders were tested in 1995; eighth graders were tested in 1999. U.S. kids slipped from average to 22 points less than average--just in those five years. They were way behind South Korea and Hungary.

Maybe we had some advantages in those old, one-room country schools. At least when kids completed the eighth grade, they could read. And if they couldn't read, they didn't graduate.