Few Americans now alive attended a one-room schoolhouse. Yet, for most Americans, the image of a red-painted, white-trimmed wooden building with a small cupola perched atop its peaked roof instantly and unambiguously says "school." More broadly, it says "education" and "learning," to the point that department store back-to-school displays, educational websites, and the Department of Education all press it into service. It symbolizes a lost golden age of education in "the basics" to one set of onlookers, the tyranny of rote memorization and corporal punishment to another, and the systematic racial discrimination of the Jim Crow era ("separate" but never "equal" schools for black and white children) to a third.

Jonathan Zimmerman's brief, brisk book is a tour de force history of the one-room rural schoolhouse in America (not all of them were "little" and most were not red) and an incisive analysis of the layers of meaning that have been attached to it. Zimmerman is a historian and this is a scholarly book: firmly grounded in primary sources, and rich with the voices of the students, teachers, and townspeople whose lives bumped up against such schools. He gives shape and meaning to the complex story they tell without smoothing away its complexity in the interest of a more streamlined narrative. His central theme is that the little red schoolhouse has become a potent, protean symbol because its complex history – haven and hellhole, bastion of mindless tradition and hotbed of innovation – can support (almost) pundit willing to mine it selectively.

Zimmerman himself mines that history comprehensively and thoughtfully, and writes about it in smooth, graceful prose that makes Small Wonder an engaging read. Anyone interested in the history and politics of American education, or in the stories that Americans (collectively) tell about themselves, will find it fascinating. ( )