My review of Jonathan Zimmerman’s Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory appears in today’s Wall Street Journal (“In One Room, Many Advantages”). The book is well worth reading. Among other things, I learned that Gus Edwards, composer of the grating “School Days,” that cloying hymn to old-fashioned education which I have always hated, was a German immigrant “who spent most of his life in New York City and probably never set foot in a country school.”
