The travel route of the one-room school districts, will for the next several weeks take us through the hills and valleys of the McDonough Township. At this time a special thanks to Donna J. Robb for allowing this writer to copy the extensive historical information that had been collected by the late Elinor Troicke and predecessors, the documentation of Jennie Preston in 1976, the file of the Chenango County Historian’s office and Guersney Memorial Library History room. Without these resources this series would not have been possible.

However, before we relate the information regarding the above district, writer will include a short philosophy written by John Ruskin regarding education: “Education does not mean teaching people what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave. It is not teaching the youth the shape of letters and the tricks of numbers, and then leaving them to turn their arithmetic into roguery, and their literature to lust. It means, on the contrary, training them into the perfect exercise and kingly continence of their bodies and souls. It is a painful, continual and difficult work to be done by kindness, by watching, by warning, by precept, and by praise, but above —- by example.”