Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory Book

A pleasant read, along the lines of an extended popular magazine article. Often someone would be quoted but not cited, so that "one prominent educator stated that, blah blah" would be completely unattributable. This is frustrating for an academic interested in rural issues in education--I want to know WHO said this--it's part of the story for me. That said, I had a fun time learning that the first mosque in the US was in a small rural town in North Dakota and other trivia. The underlying point of the book, made over and over and over was that the "little red schoolhouse" has become iconic, and almost transcendentally so, like Grandma and Apple Pie, in Americans minds. Conservatives, Liberals, Reformers, and Back-to-Basics advocates all use it as a reference to some imagined better time.