The late 1930s and early 1940s were the peak of progressive education in the United States, and Elisabeth Irwin's Little Red School House in New York City was iconic in that movement. For the first time, stories and recollections from students who attended Little Red during this era have been collected by author Jane Roland Martin. Now in their late eighties, these classmates can still sing the songs they learned in elementary school and credit the progressive education they loved with shaping their outlooks and life trajectories. Martin frames these stories from the former students "tell it like it was" point of view with philosophical commentary, bringing to light the underpinnings of the kind of progressive education employed at Little Red and commenting critically on the endeavor. In a time when the role of the arts in education and public schooling itself are under attack in the United States, Martin makes a case for a different style of education designed for the defense of democracy and expresses hope that an education like hers can become an opportunity for all.
The late 1930s and early 1940s were the peak of progressive education in the United States, and Elisabeth Irwin's Little Red School House in New York City was iconic in that movement. For the first time, stories and recollections from students who attended Little Red during this era have been collected by author Jane Roland Martin. Now in their late eighties, these classmates can still sing the songs they learned in elementary school and credit the progressive education they loved with shaping their outlooks and life trajectories. Martin frames these stories from the former students "tell it like it was" point of view with philosophical commentary, bringing to light the underpinnings of the kind of progressive education employed at Little Red and commenting critically on the endeavor. In a time when the role of the arts in education and public schooling itself are under attack in the United States, Martin makes a case for a different style of education designed for the defense of democracy and expresses hope that an education like hers can become an opportunity for all.
School Was Our Life: Remembering Progressive Education
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School Was Our Life: Remembering Progressive Education
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Overview
The late 1930s and early 1940s were the peak of progressive education in the United States, and Elisabeth Irwin's Little Red School House in New York City was iconic in that movement. For the first time, stories and recollections from students who attended Little Red during this era have been collected by author Jane Roland Martin. Now in their late eighties, these classmates can still sing the songs they learned in elementary school and credit the progressive education they loved with shaping their outlooks and life trajectories. Martin frames these stories from the former students "tell it like it was" point of view with philosophical commentary, bringing to light the underpinnings of the kind of progressive education employed at Little Red and commenting critically on the endeavor. In a time when the role of the arts in education and public schooling itself are under attack in the United States, Martin makes a case for a different style of education designed for the defense of democracy and expresses hope that an education like hers can become an opportunity for all.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253033055 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/06/2018 |
| Series: | Counterpoints: Music and Education |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Jane Roland Martin is Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and a recipient of a MacDowell Colony Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the author of Reclaiming a Conversation, The Schoolhome, and Education Reconfigured.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Remembering Little Red
Together Again
It is August 1989 and ten of us plus spouses are at Henry's house in Worcester, Massachusetts. This is the first time we have been together since May 27, 1943, the day we graduated from the eighth grade, and it is as if we have never been apart. In her memoir Lost in Translation, Eva Hoffman describes what it is like to meet her childhood friend from Poland after a seventeen-year interruption: "We look at each other with some disbelief. This vigorous, handsome man is somebody I don't know at all, but he carries within himself a person I once knew completely" (1989, 224). Her friend says, "Who are you? Sometimes you seem a woman, sometimes a little girl" (228). This is the way it is for us after a forty-six-year interruption.
We remember everything about Little Red: our teachers; Miss Irwin, our principal; June Camp. "Do you know about June Camp?" one of my classmates asks when she is interviewed three years later. "I adored it." "I think everybody, practically everybody, loved June Camp," comments another. "We were gone for the month, and we did have some instruction, you know, lessons and stuff, but we also had a lot of outdoor play. And when we first went it was too cold to swim but as it got warmer and warmer we had swimming and things," says a third.
At Henry's we sing "Casey Jones," "A Mighty Ship Was the Gundremar," and "Stenka Razin." "Stinking Raisin" is what we used to call the protagonist of the Russian folk song, and we laugh at how embarrassed we once were by the lyric "Proudly sailed the arrow BREASTED, Ships of Cossack yeomanry." "I remember the music as being special," one classmate tells her interviewer. "My memory is that we had it every day, that we learned a new song either every day or every week 'til we had this vast knowledge." Another says, "To know that many songs. I mean, I know people, today they said, 'How come you know all these songs?' and I said, 'We sang them in school.' So yea, that was a brilliant thing."
Mrs. Landeck was our music teacher, and Emily writes me a letter in which she says: "What a marvelous woman. I remember the lessons in conducting. I remember the grace with which she did everything." According to the liner notes for a CD of the songs we sang at Little Red, "For 75 years music has been the part of Little Red and Elisabeth Irwin's curriculum that bound everything together."
Sitting in a circle on Henry's lawn, we recite the opening lines of Alfred Noyes's "The Highwayman," William Blake's "Tiger, Tiger," Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo," and Edna St. Vincent Millay's "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver." "I can still see us sitting around in a circle," one classmate informs her interviewer, "and Marvin asking 'Now, who likes poetry?' Nobody raised their hand: Who likes poetry. That's silly. Okay. So he said, 'Okay, I am going to read you some poetry,' and he read it, and it was just like opening a door. It was so beautiful." "Very early on in the year," says another classmate, "he [Mr. Marvin] announced that by the end of the year everyone in the class would have written at least one poem and there was a snort ... And he didn't react to that. But then he started reading poetry, and he read poetry and he read poetry, and people kept gathering around him. We didn't have to."
Over our potluck lunch, Sue tells us how much she still regrets missing the trip to the sugar refinery when we were eight years old, and I silently bemoan not yet being at Little Red when our class built the pueblo:
We built a two-story pueblo in the classroom out of beams and cardboard and so on, but you could actually climb up the ladder to the second floor. That was a lot of fun.
We learned more about Indians by building those pueblos and teepees and learning some of the songs and the dances than if we just sat down and studied where the Iroquois were and where the Chippewas were.
The pueblo that we built in the third grade, my god I'll never forget that. Memorable, absolutely wonderful. Pretending I was a Pueblo Indian and climbing up and down those ladders, my lord, it was wonderful.
The year after that first reunion, we convene at the school. Some more classmates are there, but for me the highlight is our walk through the 196 Bleecker Street building. When my father died, I found the February 1940 issue of the mimeographed Little Red Bulletin in his top dresser drawer. In it was an article by him in which he wrote: "Physically the school is big, and inside it rambles. The Bleecker Street front is soft gray with bright tan at the base; the doors concede to redness. The total effect is warm and mellow, and inviting. Inside the place is livable and lived in. A homey charm pervades, and you feel you've been there before. The proportions are right; they neither dwarf nor constrict. I get this feeling about the doors: They do not so much shut off as connect."
My friends and I tour the building and in the room where we had Rhythms — a class I always dreaded — Clarence skips across the floor as to the manner born. I have always thought that everyone hated Rhythms and I am wrong. One man in my class tells his interviewer: "As an eleven I hated a class called Rhythms. It was a mixture of dancing and calisthenics, and I think I was one of the leaders of a revolt against that class. A bunch of us would not follow the teacher's instructions very well" and two are of the opinion that all the boys hated Rhythms. But a third says, "Of course the boys didn't want to do it, but she [the teacher] said, you know, run across, pretend you're shot. Oh, we loved that. So that big, physical stuff was good."
On our tour I spy the closet where Kathy and I used to hide during art periods and the office where Miss Irwin listened patiently to complaints. A classmate recounts one such incident:
In the bathroom there was a big hole in the floor where a pipe had been once and as you walked down the stairs the paint was peeling and falling down and a couple of chunks once fell on our head. Two other students and I complained about it to Miss Beeman and she said "Why don't you go and speak to the principal?" ... So we said Okay, and we made an appointment and she [Miss Irwin] listened to us. We told her all our different things, and she thanked us very much. And the next day there was a repairman scraping, painting the ceiling and fixing the hole in the pipe ... It meant to me that I was somebody that could affect my life, could affect the surrounding in which I had to live. That there were adults in the world, and I had never experienced this, neither in any of my schooling nor at home, unfortunately, from adults in my life at home, where a child's word was important and would get results.
The third time around I decide to skip the reunion. As Mr. Marvin who came from Duluth, Minnesota, and was our teacher in what most schools call fifth grade but Little Red, grouping us according to age, called the 10s used to say: "Enough is too much." Then I learn that our classmate Natalie has died and I know I must go to New York. I am, by trade, a philosophy professor and education is my specialty. I have published several books on the subject and have just begun work on what will eventually become Cultural Miseducation. My new research has made me see that my schoolmates and I — or, rather, our memories — are a rich cultural resource.
For reasons that I have only come to understand in the course of writing this book, Little Red is scarcely mentioned in the standard histories of American education. The oversight is surprising, to say the least, for when I was there it was one of the best-known progressive schools in the country. In the years before World War I people trooped to Rome to see Maria Montessori's schools in action. During my childhood, they flocked to Greenwich Village to observe and study Miss Irwin's. According to one of my classmates, "I remember then all these people who used to come and sit when we were in elementary school and sort of sit around the edge and take notes and stuff." In my memory, large groups of grownups filed into our classrooms and stood shoulder to shoulder along three of the four walls. Why are they watching us, I would wonder. What do they find so interesting?
What with the history books ignoring the experiment in education that Little Red conducted in Greenwich Village and few if any studies of progressive education examining their subject from the point of view of the people most affected — the children — our combined memories constitute an important portion of this nation's educational wisdom. Natalie's death is much more than a stark reminder that my classmates and I will not live forever. It sounds the alarm that unless something is done soon to preserve our remembrance of our schooldays past, a significant quantity of our culture's wealth will disappear.
At this third reunion, twelve of us spend a glorious June afternoon at Café Vivaldi, a dimly lit Greenwich Village coffee house, our present lives, families, and careers all but forgotten as we recite poems, sing our songs, reminisce about trips by subway to the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and share stories about learning to read. Henry's is the most dramatic.
He tells us that every year his anxious mother would say to Miss Irwin, "Henry still can't read" and Miss Irwin would reply, "Don't worry, Dorothy. Henry will read when he's ready." Every Christmas time Henry would visit his uncle in Boston. His uncle would ask, "Henry, can you read yet?" and Henry would sheepishly say "No." Then we are in the 9s — fourth grade. Christmas comes and Henry's uncle again puts the question. This time Henry says, "Yes." "Well," gasps the astonished uncle, "Can you read this?" Henry picks up the newspaper his uncle hands him and starts to read.
When it is time for us to leave Café Vivaldi and walk over to the school for the reunion dinner, Sue balks. "Allan will be there and he always used to tell me that my nose was running," she says. "It probably was, but I can't face that again." "Don't be silly," we reply. "That was fifty years ago." "Allan won't remember," I chime in. "Anyway, he's a doctor, so even if he does, he won't bring it up." Sue reluctantly joins our march down Bleecker Street, across 6th Avenue, and through those reddish doors into the school. There in the hallway where Miss Kearney — she of the gleaming blue-white hair — used to sit and greet us each morning is Allan. I have trouble reconciling this rather portly gentleman in an expensive blue suede jacket with the skinny boy I used to know. He has no difficulty remembering Sue. "Does your nose still run?" he asks.
One month later, I phone historian Patricia Graham for a second opinion. I need assurance that my classmates' memories of Little Red ought to be preserved. I tell her what a heady experience our reunions have been and wonder aloud if some sort of oral history should be done before we all die off. Graham, then president of the Spencer Foundation, encourages me to enlist the help of an experienced interviewer and apply to her foundation for one of their grants. I do so, and anthropologist Helena Ragoné and I receive a Spencer Foundation award that enables us to conduct and transcribe fifteen interviews with members of the Little Red School House class of '43. When the grant ends, my high school classmate Mary Woods — a social worker and the author of a widely used textbook on casework — offers to continue the interviewing where Ragoné left off. As a result, I have at my disposal the recorded school memories of thirty of us.
Memory, Oh Memory
The first time I read the transcripts of the interviews Ragoné conducted, I was transported back to Dinty Moore land. After college, I worked in the market research department of a New York City advertising agency where I had the dubious privilege of typing up reports of customer opinions of Electrolux vacuum cleaners, Johnny Mops, and Dinty Moore beef stew. The Dinty Moore questionnaire results are the ones I remember best: roughly one-half of the respondents to our questionnaire thought the canned beef stew had too many carrots and not enough beef and the other half thought it had enough beef and too few carrots.
Representing the affirmative in the Little Red School House class of '43's Grammar Controversy, one of my classmates recalls: "We had Miss Kneeland who taught us grammar and I really learned grammar so that when I went to high school and they were teaching grammar I knew it. And when I went to college in Freshman English and they were teaching grammar I knew it." Another tells Ragoné: "I remember studying grammar and I have contemporary friends now who went to public school who have no memory of learning any grammar and I loved that and it was very helpful later on when I studied languages in high school." The three of us representing the negative — I am one of them — simply say: "I never was taught grammar," "We had never studied grammar and punctuation," and "I mean grammar, forget it. Forget it."
According to the old nursery rhyme: "Some like it hot, some like it cold, Some like it in the pot nine days old." Well, some liked the Dinty Moore carrots and some liked the beef, and that was that. When, however, three of us remember that Little Red taught our class grammar and three remember that it did not teach our class grammar, our preferences are not the issue. At issue is what actually happened. Now that I recall a hugely embarrassing event, I know which of us have truth on their side. It took place in the 13s — eighth grade — and everyone but me thought it extremely funny.
It is not my habit to seek help, but when Miss Kneeland asks every kid in the class to write a sentence with a preposition in it and I sit there for what seems an eternity and come up with nothing, I take the plunge. I go up to her and in all innocence say, "Miss Kneeland, I can't think of any sentence that has a preposition in it." This is not an easy thing to do, for Miss Kneeland is the one teacher in our school with a reputation as a disciplinarian. True, a man who entered our class in the 13s says, "I loved our eighth-grade teacher ... She was an extraordinary woman, very loving, very involved, she worked with you as an individual ... I found her warm. I found her stimulating." But someone else reports being "a little bit scared of her" and a third comments, "Unlike many progressive school teachers she was no nonsense. She wasn't there to win popularity contests, but she was very dignified and she expected a great deal of us."
First Miss Kneeland doubles over with laughter, next she puts her arm around me, and then she turns to the class and says, "Children, would you believe it! Jane just said to me, 'Miss Kneeland, I can't think of any sentence that has a preposition in it.' Who can tell me how many prepositions are in what she just said?" Hands shoot up.
Is this a false memory? A few years ago, I regaled a man who was two years behind me with my sad tale and he roared: "Miss Kneeland told us that story. Do you mean to say that you were that girl?" With his aid and the help of an essay by Bob Lilien who was three years ahead of us, my belated recollection sets the grammar record straight.
The Little Red School House — written by Agnes De Lima in collaboration with Miss Irwin, the staff, and a school parent and published by MacMillan in 1942 — gives a detailed account of the school's philosophy and practices. John Dewey, generally agreed to be one of the most important philosophers of education in the history of the Western world, says in his introduction: "When one contrasts what is actually done in a school of the kind here reported upon with the criticisms passed upon progressive schools by those who urge return to ancient and outworn patterns, one can only feel that the former is the one which has its feet on the ground, which is realistic, while the latter is the one which is theoretical in the bad sense of the word, since it is far away from the earth on which we now live" (De Lima 1942, ix).
My yellow-paged copy of the De Lima book bears an inscription to my father "for appreciation of his loyal friendship to the school" signed by Elisabeth Irwin on January 26, 1942. The chapter entitled "Our Graduates" contains an essay that Bob Lilien wrote for his English teacher at Stuyvesant High School and addressed to his schoolmates. It tells so much about Little Red and is so perceptive that De Lima says, "With Bob Lilien's permission we reprint this essay. Some of us felt that if we had had it earlier we need not have written this book" (1942, 217). He wrote, "Of course, there were our regular academic subjects. Arithmetic, grammar, spelling, and so on" (219, emphasis added).
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "School was Our Life"
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Copyright © 2018 Jane Roland Martin.
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Table of Contents
Foreword / Estelle R. Jorgensen
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Remembering Little Red
2. Child-Friendly Schools
3. The We've Been There and Done It Fantasy
4. Close Encounters of an Educational Kind
5. Buried Treasure
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
"This sparkling, intimate, and delightfully written memoir demonstrates conclusively how and why elementary education should be designed to fit the natural growth of the human mind."
Drawing on her own experiences 75 year ago and those of her classmates, researchers and many others, [Jane Roland Martin] has made it clear why we, even though she and the rest of us privileged to have gone through Little Red can't write cursive and never had to memorize facts and figures, are "The Lucky Ones." She draws on memories of everything from class trips, to writing poetry, to group singing to explain why much of the conventional literature about progressive education has missed the story. If it's too late for you to apply (or send your children and/or grandchildren) to Little Red, read School Was Our Life: Remembering Progressive Education. It's the next best thing.
This sparkling, intimate, and delightfully written memoir demonstrates conclusively how and why elementary education should be designed to fit the natural growth of the human mind.
Drawing on her own experiences 75 year ago and those of her classmates, researchers and many others, [Jane Roland Martin] has made it clear why we, even though she and the rest of us privileged to have gone through Little Red can't write cursive and never had to memorize facts and figures, are "The Lucky Ones." She draws on memories of everything from class trips, to writing poetry, to group singing to explain why much of the conventional literature about progressive education has missed the story. If it's too late for you to apply (or send your children and/or grandchildren) to Little Red, read School Was Our Life: Remembering Progressive Education. It's the next best thing.