A Village School Reopened for One Seven-Year-Old

In February 2024 the primary school in Petrovići, a village in the hills near Olovo in Bosnia and Herzegovina, reopened after a year of being shut. It reopened for one pupil. He was seven.

His teacher had thirty years in classrooms. Thirty children hide a bad lesson; one child looks straight at it.

Here is the arithmetic of a school with one pupil.

One register, which takes no time at all.

One exercise book to check, which takes the time it takes to check one exercise book. The part of a lesson that normally goes on walking round the room is simply gone. A forty-five-minute lesson plan can be finished well before the forty-five minutes.

One attention span, which becomes the timetable. When it runs out, the subject changes. The teacher follows where the child’s interest goes.

Two adults at break on the days the religion teacher drives up from town, with coffee, and one pupil with juice.

Every wall. A school with one pupil has an awful lot of wall. All of it displays the same pupil’s work.

I have taught one child at a time, and I can confirm everything about this except the calm. In Madrid, during a strike week, I home-schooled the middle one for five days. I had a plan with timed lessons. The maths lesson was over in nine minutes, because there was nobody else to wait for. The history lesson became a lesson about the Romans, then about Roman toilets, then about a documentary about sewers, which we watched, all of it, because she asked and I had no other pupil to be fair to.

By Friday her work was on every wall of the kitchen. There was a timeline of sewers on the fridge. My husband came home, looked round and asked whether we had opened a museum.

The Petrovići school did it properly, of course: a real teacher, a real school and a village that wanted its school open, even for a single child. That is a statement about a place, not just about education. A building with one pupil in it is still a building in which a village has decided to have a future.

My kitchen school closed after five days. The middle one went back to class with thirty others and was, by her account, “bored within the hour”, because the lessons did not change subject when she did.

She has asked whether she can transfer to Petrovići. I have explained that it is a long way. She has asked whether they do sewers.