In defense of small, neighborhood schools of no more than 100 per grade

As an educator, I have decried the loss of small town and village schools as well as small neighborhood schools in larger town and urban settings.

As an anthropologist and cultural ecologist, I have decried the loss of the quality of life caused by hundreds of thousands of children being forced to spend hours per day, sometimes from before sunrise to after sunset, being hauled long distances in school buses to huge warehouses, oftentimes without windows or any visible signs of our natural world, that are fraudulently called “schools.”

Huge consolidated schools, that I call “pre-prisons,” are d...