Women Progressive Leaders in the Twentieth Century: From Caroline Pratt and Helen Parkhurst

to Lillian Weber and Deborah Meier

Susan F. Semel

City College of New York and CUNY Graduate Center

Keynote Address at ISCHE 26, July 15, 2004, Geneva, Switzerland

Abstract:

This paper examines the historical progression of progressive women leaders from the early 20th century to the present, using a number of women to demonstrate the historical legacy of progressive education through the century and how the influences of Dewey and the women who implemented his ideas in schools continued to be an important part of educational reform, albeit differently. It concentrates on

New York City, which along with Chicago was a primary home for early progressivism and examinethe lives and works of Caroline Pratt, founder of the City and Country School, founded in New York City also in 1914 and Helen Parkhurst, founder of the Dalton School, founded in New York City in 1919. It then moves across the Atlantic and briefly looks at the life and work of Susan Isaacs, Director of the

Maltby House School in Cambridge, England from 1924-1927 and Head of the Department of Child

Development at the Institute of Education, University of London from 1933-1943. Isaacs had a profound influence on the development of British progressive education and through Lillian Weber at City College of New York and Deborah Meier at Central Park East in New York City on U.S. progressive education from the 1960s to the present. The last part of the paper will examine the historical connection between

Weber and Meier and the progressive women of earlier parts of the century.

The founding mothers of the early twentieth century, exemplified by Caroline Pratt and Helen Parkhurst were heavily influenced by John Dewey. Although committed in theory to the child-centered,

community and egalitarian aspects of Dewey's writings, their schools, City and Country and Dalton,

became far more emblematic of the individual, child-centered and community features of progressive

education, with the egalitarian, social reconstructionist thread visibly absent. Although both City and

Country and Dalton were committed to the vision of a democratic community, these own communities

were primarily upper and upper middle class. Most importantly, as private schools they illustrate one of

the significant problems of American progressive education, where the more child-centered and

community based types were found in private schools and with progressive education in public schools

more often than versions of administrative progressivism, with its emphasis on vocationalism, life-

adjustment and testing.

Although both Weber and Meier were influenced by the individualistic, psychological and child-

centered work of Susan Isaacs, their versions of progressive education were also far more concerned

with issues of social justice and the egalitarian aspects of social reconstructionism. Both Weber and

Meier worked exclusively in public education with low-income students and students of color. Both

were committed to applying the child-centered features of progressive education to create more equal

educational opportunities for disadvantaged children. And in doing so, they reconnected American progressive education with its early Deweyan democratic principles. Interest in progressive education and feminist pedagogy has gained a significant following in current educational reform circles. Given this interest, the purpose of this paper is to examine the historical development of women educational leaders from the Progressive Era to the present.

These include both female founders of progressive schools in the twentieth century and the schools that they founded, as well as a number of women leaders of educational organizations, movements, and teacher education centers.

In the early part of the twentieth century, progressive reformers tended to concentrate their efforts in public education, applying scientific management techniques to the administration of schools, reforming curriculum and creating secondary, vocational schools.' But as historian

Lawrence A. Cremin indicated, a second trend developed during this period, as many progressive educators began to focus on a select group of pedagogical innovative independent schools catering principally to middle class children. 2 A number of independent, progressive schools, developed during this period.3 A majority of them were founded by women during a time that a great divide in the history of progressive education4 was occurring-one in which the thrust toward Asocial reformism was virtually eclipsed by the rhetoric of child-centered pedagogy.

Educators commonly referred to these schools as child-centered. They were often founded by female practitioners Spurred by the revolt against the harsh pedagogy of the existing schools and by the ferment of change and new thought of the first two decades of the twentieth century.

While historians tend to group these child-centered schools together, each has a distinct philosophy and practice according to the particular vision of its founder. For example, City and

Country founded by Caroline Pratt emphasized the idea of self-expression and growth through

3

4y play-in particular, through play with wooden blocks.7 Another school, The Walden School, founded by Margaret Naumburg who was heavily influenced by Freudian psychology, emphasized the notion of individual transformation. Under the leadership of Naumburg's sister, Florence

Cane, the school encouraged children to paint exactly what they felt impelled to paint.8 Other examples include The Bank Street School, founded by Lucy Sprague Mitchell,9 and The Lincoln

School, founded by Abraham Flexner, which became a laboratory school for Teachers College,

Columbia University.10 Outside of New York City, where the aforementioned four schools were located, other examples of progressive education sprang up. Among these were The Organic

School in Fairhope, Alabama, founded by Marietta Johnson; Francis W. Parker School in

Chicago, founded by one of the early pioneers of progressive pedagogy, Colonel Francis W.

Parker;" the Putney School, a boarding school in Putney, Vermont, founded by Carmelita

Hinton;12 and The Shady Hill School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, founded by Edward .

Yeomans.13 °

Whereas these child-centered progressive schools were almost all independent, private schools, public education was dominated by the social engineering strand of progressivism. From the transformation of the high school from an exclusively academic institution at the turn of the 'cthhe century to a host for life adjustment functions by the 193 0s, to the social class- and race-based tracking systems that separated academic and vocational education, public progressive education from the 1930s to the 1960s stressed life adjustment rather than intellectual functions and often helped to reproduce rather than ameliorate social class, race, and gender inequalities. Progressive

14 experiments in public schools did exist, for example, in Gary, Indiana, and Winnetka, Illinois.

Although public education during this period came to be dominated by administrative progressivism and male administrators, some women educators did have an influence in the public

sector as principals, superintendents, and union leaders.

In the 1930Os and early 1940s, a third strain of progressivism, social reconstructionism, had

a limited effect on the school practice. Based upon the work of Harold Rugg, George Counts, and

Kenneth Benne and the journal the Social Frontier, a number of schools adopted a philosophy

that espoused a radical reconstruction of the social order, especially with regard to inequalities. 15

Examples of these schools include Malumet, Hessian Hills, Arthurdale and Downtown Commu-

nity School.16 Although they represented an important attempt to use schools to change society,

they neither had a wide following, nor a lasting influence.

Progressive education transcended a narrow focus on schools alone and extended its reach

into communities and other educative institutions, such as universities and teacher centers. This

paper, therefore, expands the traditional view of progressivism by broadening its focus to include

education and educative institutions in the widest sense.

In "Schools of Tomorrow ", Schools of Today: What Happened to ProgressiveEducation,

we argued that there are significant lessons to be learned from the history of early progressive

schools for contemporary educational reform. This is no less the case for the lessons to be learned

from women progressive educational leaders in the 20 h century. Over the past two decades a

significant body of research on the importance of school leadership for educational reform has

highlighted the critical role of school leadership. 17

In FoundingMothers and Others: Women EducationalLeaders During the Progressive

Era (2002) we chronicled the life and careers of many female founders of progressive schools and

other educational leaders during the Progressive Era. In this paper, I will examine the historical progression of progressive women leaders from the early 20th century to the present, using a number of women to demonstrate the historical legacy of progressive education through the century and how the influences of Dewey and the women who implemented his ideas in schools continued to be an important part of educational reform, albeit differently. I will concentrate on

New York City, which along with Chicago was a primary home for early progressivism and examine the lives and works of Caroline Pratt, founder of the City and Country School, founded in New York City also in 1914 and Helen Parkhurst, founder of the Dalton School, founded in

New York City in 1919.

I will then move across the Atlantic and briefly look at the life and work of Susan Isaacs,

Director of the Maltby House School in Cambridge, England from 1924-1927 and Head of the

Department of Child Development at the Institute of Education, University of London from 1933-

1943. Isaacs had a profound influence on the development of British progressive education and through Lillian Weber at City College of New York and Deborah Meier at Central Park East in

New York City on U.S. progressive education from the 1960s to the present. The last part of the paper will examine the historical connection between Weber and Meier and the progressive women of earlier parts of the century.

Helen Parkhurst Educated in primary and secondary schools in Durand, Wisconsin, she received her B.S. degree in 1907 from the River Falls Normal School at Wisconsin State College, graduating with the highest professional

honors ever awarded. In 1904, prior to graduation, she began her teaching career in a rural one-room schoolhouse in Pepin County, Wisconsin. It was here that the seeds ofthe Dalton Plan were planted out of need and ingenuity in attempting to teach forty farms boys of all ages. After graduation, she taught from

1909-1910 at the Edison School in Tacoma, Washington, where she continued to develop the outlines of

the plan. Although no direct evidence exists, it is likely that Parkhurst was influenced by Frederic Burk and Carleton Washburne, the latter the founder of the "individual system" in Winnetka, Illinois, which permitted

students to progress through their studies at their own pace. By 1910, Parkhurst called her plan the Laboratory Plan, and emphasized the laboratory, or "lab," as her students and faculty later came to call it, as her creation. It was one of the focal points of the early plan, which would be developed more fully in subsequent years. Although Parkhurst wanted to found her own school to develop the plan, for nearly a decade this dream went unfulfilled. For the next few years she trained others to teach, from 1911-1913 at the Central

State Teachers College, in Ellensburg, Washington; and from 1913-1915 at Central State Teachers College, in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. In 1914, while on leave as Director ofPrimary Training Department there, Parkhurst was appointed by the Wisconsin Department of Education to report on the Montessori Method. She studied in Rome with Montessori and later Montessori asked her to direct her exhibition classroom at the San Francisco World Exhibition. It is probably around 1915-1916 that her relationship with Mrs. W. Murray Crane began, the woman who eventually would provide Parkhurst with the financial support she needed to found her school. Mrs. Crane, a mid-Westerner by birth, transplanted by marriage to a pastoral factory town in Dalton, Massachusetts, was the second wife of one of the wealthiest men in the United States, the owner of Crane

Paper. Parkhurst moved to New York in 1916, and during this time, was invited to Dalton, Massachusetts to supervise the education of the Crane's youngest child, Louise, born in 1913. Although there is little evidence regarding how and when Parkhurst began a school for Louise and three or four of her friends in the Crane family house in Dalton, what is significant is the relationship that began between two women: one rich, powerful and an important patron of the arts; the other, a practitioner of modest means, and a messiah of progressive education. Parkhurst's school in the Crane house lasted one year. In 1918, she implemented the Laboratory Plan in the public high school in Dalton, Massachusetts, which lasted for one year. Apparently, the experiment was met with resistance from parents in Dalton. In 1919, with the encouragement and financial support of Mrs. Crane, Parkhurst opened her own school in New York City. Originally called the Children's University School, it was renamed the Dalton School in 1920; a compromise as Parkhurst wanted to name the school after her benefactor who declined the honor in favor of the name of the town where the Crane family originated. Her plan was also renamed the Dalton Plan in keeping with the new name of the school. The original site of the school was a brownstone on West 74th Street. As the size of the student body increased the Lower School was moved to West 72nd Street and the High School was opened on West 73rd Street. In 1929, both divisions were moved to the present site of the middle school and high school at 108 East 89th Street. Today, the lower school is on East 91st Street. Based on a synthesis of the works ofDewey, Montessori, and Washburne, the guiding principles of the Dalton Plan were freedom and cooperation. There were three objectives of the plan: to connect the students' studies to their needs and interests, to help students develop a sense of responsibility toward others, and to promote both independence and community. In order to accomplish these goals, there were three parts of the plan: House, where students were organized into small communities; Laboratory, where students met individually with teachers on their studies; and Assignment, which provided each student with an individually planned and paced set of studies. Parkhurst's early educational efforts attracted considerable attention. John Dewey frequently visited the school. Evelyn Dewey published The Dalton Laboratory Plan in 1922. Parkhurst's book, Education on the Dalton Plan, published in 1922, was translated into fourteen languages within six months ofpublication, and eventually into fifty-eight languages. In the 1920s and 1930s, she traveled to England, Japan, Russia,

China, Chile, Denmark, and Germany to lecture on the plan. Dalton schools were founded in England, the Netherlands, and Japan. Helen Parkhurst was the headmistress of the Dalton School from its founding in 1919, until she was forced to resign in 1942. Her personal style set the tone of the school from the beginning. A creative and forceful leader, she inspired devotion and loyalty. She was also authoritarian and paternalistic and was viewed by some as a despot. Although she built her school into an international model of progressive education, by the late 1930Os, her autocratic leadership and often-sloppy financial management, left the school on the verge of bankruptcy. In 1942, after years of faculty upheaval and financial difficulties at Dalton, Parkhurst was forced to resign. In the words of a trustee during her administration, "when she was on the ship she was captain. What she failed to comprehend was that the ship she commanded was only temporarily entrusted to her." She was succeeded by Charlotte Durham, then head of the High School, who Parkhurst brought to Dalton in 1922 as an English teacher. Durham, who said that she was herself educated by Parkhurst, helped to restore financial stability to the school and to retain the Dalton Plan as a central component of the school. Building upon the philosophical legacy of Parkhurst, she positioned the school to survive in a fiercely competitive, New York independent school world. Although the school today has been transformed from its early progressive roots to a more traditional, elite college preparatory school, the vestiges of the Dalton Plan still remain there as a monument to the life and work of Helen Parkhurst.

After her resignation in 1942, Parkhurst went to Yale as the first Yale fellow in education and received her M.A. in 1943. From 1947-1950, she became an award winning radio and television broadcaster, with "Child's World," where children discussed their problems. She had a number of other shows and recorded over 300 recordings with children on psychological issues. From 1952 to 1954 she taught at the City College ofNew York, and wrote three books from 1950 to 1963. In 1973, while working on a book on Montessori and another on her childhood, she died in New

Milford, Connecticut, of a pulmonary embolism at the age of eighty-six.

Helen Parkhurst was one of the early twentieth century pioneers of progressive education. Her

Dalton Plan became internationally known and, although it had little lasting effect on public education, it influenced independent, progressive education in the United States and abroad. The school she founded, the Dalton School in New York City, remains one of the most important schools in the New York independent school world. By the 1980s, many of the progressive reforms initiated in public education, had their philosophical origins in the Dalton Plan, sometimes consciously, other times, not. The University of

Wisconsin, Stevens Point has dedicated a lecture hall in Helen Parkhurst's memory. Parkhurst's contribution to progressive education is undisputable. However, Parkhurst's

autocratic leadership style and her recruitment of elites for the student body remain problematic for progressive educators today. In fact, her style and her school mirror the progressive paradoxes that I

have written about elsewhere, particularly democratic education autocratically delivered and

democratic education for the elite.' 8 Parkhurst's leadership style was not unlike that of many of her

contemporaries and in many ways, not unlike that of heads of start-up schools in the public sector, today. Her recruitment of elites for her school, in part due to funding issues, however, speaks to the

complexity of social class issues embedded within progressive education and explored in the work of

the late British sociologist, Basil Bernstein.19 Paradoxes notwithstanding, Helen Parkhurst represents

an important founding mother who made a lasting contribution to progressive education.

Caroline Pratt

Caroline Pratt, a former practitioner from Fayetteville, New York, began her school, which would

eventually become City and Country, in a three-room apartment in Greenwich Village in the fall of 1914.

Influenced by current pedagogical thinking, she attempted "to try to fit the school to the child, rather than as we were doing with indifferent success - fitting the child to the school" (Pratt, 1948: 8). However, as it will become apparent, Pratt also created alongside of her child-centered pedagogy, an embryonic community within the school, which attempted to mirror a democratic society.

Interestingly, Pratt began her school as a "play school" - a pre-kindergarten school- based on the notion that children learn by play and that for children, play was really hard work (Pratt, 1948: 9). In par- ticular, Pratt emphasized the use of wooden blocks to help children "sort out and make sense ofthe world around them" (Murray, 1950: n.p.). Pratt explicitly stated that the program for the younger children and the one for the older children as well, was formulated through,

.work with blocks and kindred materials. Play with these materials is an organizing

experience. At three or four, children come to block-building, for example, after a good

deal of experiencing with their bodies. They themselves have been everything.., cows,

animals of all kinds, engines., everything that moves .... Now they become interested inthe

details. What part of the engine makes the whistle? What makes the movement? Who

pulls the throttle? Children are interested in these not as mere facts, but as facts to be used

in play; or it would be more correct to say that what the information does to the play is to

keep it going and help it to organize as a whole, to raise new inquiries and above all to

offer new opportunities relationships... this is what block-building means to us (Pratt,

1927: 105).

Play, however, for Pratt, as stated above, was not static; rather she believed that the play experience leads to new opportunities for further experiences and therefore, growth.

Although Pratt began her school with six children from working class families whose tuitions were funded by outside benefactors, she had difficulty attracting and retaining working class families from the neighborhood. As she expanded both her preschool and elementary school programs, in a new building that she rented on West 13th Street, she observed,

We did not get as many children as we had hoped. It was one thing for parents to send their children to play school before they were six, but quite another to keep them out of

public school and send them to us. They were afraid the children would not be ready for

public school later, and they were not far wrong. We had no intention of pushing three R's

on the children until we felt they were ready (Pratt, 1948: 48-49).

However, if working class families were unwilling to participate in Caroline Pratt's pedagogical experiment,

artists and writers in the neighborhood were not. Rather, this group was for more willing to embrace

unconventional methods and thus, the composition of the student body changed dramatically during the

school's initial years to include mostly Greenwich Village bohemians, along with some upper class WASPS,

and German Jews (Pratt, 1948: Chapter 4).

Although Caroline Pratt began City and Country with a focus upon the early years of the child, she

eventually began to add more classes concerned with academic content, until the school eventually

accommodated children through age thirteen. The pedagogic practice was frankly Deweyan in nature, based on the needs and interests of children at various ages and heavily slanted towards inquiry and

experimentation, book learning and experience. Pratt believed that young children should initially learn

experimentally and experientially from their immediate environments; then, as they mature and as their horizons expand, they should be introduced to move sophisticated tasks and materials:

As the children grow older, they carry their inherent experimental method into other fields with the

help of a teacher and a loosely but positively organized program. Jobs require trips to stores to

purchase things. A school store requires extended buying at wholesale and selling again at retail.

Wholesalers need warehouses for supplies and the children visit there. Finally they begin to require

books as sources of information; and through these, with the teacher's help, they extend their

inquiries beyond the confines of their own city. They make maps instead of floor schemes. They

are pushing back their own horizons (Pratt, 1933:70).

As the curriculum of the school began to evolve, so did the practice of assigning specific jobs "of actual service" to the different age groups, so that the school eventually functioned as a self-sufficient community. For example, the Eights (eight year olds) ran the school store; the Nines, the post office. The

Tens produced all of the hand printed materials for the Sevens, such as flash cards and reading charts while the Elevens ran the print shop and attended to all of the school's printed needs: attendance lists, library

cards, stationery, etc. The Twelves first made toys; then weaving, until they finally settled upon the

publication of a monthly publication called The Bookworm's Digest, which reviewed new children's books,

sent to the group by publishers as well as "Old Favorites," a particularly popular column in the journal

(Pratt, 1948: 101). As students performed jobs they also learned basic academic skills as well as more

sophisticated principles of economics, for example. What emerged from this model was a community of

independent young children who were actively engaged in their learning, while concurrently contributing to

the life of their school community.20 In sum, these students were, to return to Dewey, "saturated with the

spirit of service," while learning to be self-directed in the context of the school community - "the best

guarantee of a larger society which is worthy, lovely and harmonious" (Dworkin, 1959: 49).

While Pratt's leadership was often less than democratic, nevertheless, her creation of an educational

community in which students contribute cooperatively toward its maintenance while learning experientially

as well as through traditional means exemplifies Dewey's idea of a school as a "democratic workshop"

(Westbrook, 1992: 7). For Pratt believed that "a school's greatest value must be to turn out human beings

who could think effectively and work constructively, who could in time make a better world than this for

living in (Pratt, 1948: 15). Clearly she attempted to do just that at City and Country. Her school remains

today at West 13th Street in Greenwich Village, a small progressive school, struggling to remain true to the

vision of its founder while at the same time, meeting the needs of it students at a dramatically different

point in time.

City and Country provides an important example for contemporary educational reform. It has

remained true to the vision of its founder and today is an exemplar of the type of education advocated by

the Network of Progressive Educators and the Center for Collaborative Education. Its child centered,

democratic community with its emphasis on freedom and responsibility should serve as a model for con- temporary reformers. Throughout its history it has attempted to provide a balance between the individual and community by paying close attention to the developmental needs of individual children and at the same time explicitly connecting children to a democratic school community.,

Susan Fairhurst Brierley Isaacs 21 -\

Susan Isaacs is important to us because of her influence or\American progressive educators,

Lillian Weber and Deborah Meier. Susan Isaacs (1885-1945) was an English child psychologist,

psychoanalyst and school reformer. 22 Heavily influenced by Darwin, Isaacs, like Dewey, applied

evolutionary biology to inform her thinking about children in their early years; however Isaacs

looked to psychology, and particularly, psychoanalysis, rather than philosophy to inform her

thinking. First a psychologist and then a psychoanalyst, she became interested in education and

accepted the position of Director of Malting House School in Cambridge, an experimental

progressive school for children ages 2-10. Although Isaacs remained at Malting House for only

three years (1924-1927) she was able to gather research on the way young children learn,

'reaching out' to materials, events, plants, and animals and to peers and adults, much in the way

that the Amoeba's pseudopodium, on touching a surface, changed its behavior - an act, Isaacs

wrote, of "positive activity towards its environment.'"23 The school, controversial from its beginnings, closed shortly after she left due to fiscal insolvency, however, Isaacs collected enough

data to articulate methodologies and models for pedagogic practice, combining the work of

Dewey with some of the psychoanalysts she became interested in, such as Melanie Klein.

In essence, Isaacs provided children with a wide range of environments in order to spark their

curiosity and/or follow their individual interests. She also encouraged and legitimated the use of fantasy as a bridge to genuine inquiry in the classroom. She conducted her research on children's

learning and development and shared it widely with parents, childcare providers, early childhood

educators, school inspectors, educational researchers, policy makers, psychologists, teacher

educators, psychoanalysts and training analysts. 24 Not unlike the earlier women progressives,

Isaacs underscored the importance of starting with the interests of the children, attending to the

questions they posed, and the ideas they posited. She differed from them, however, in the

significance she placed on children's fantasies as important starting points in learning. From 1933-

1943 Isaacs was Head of the newly formed Department of Child Development at the London

Institute of Education, the University of London. During that time she wielded a great amount of

influence over the education community, particularly among practitioners, teacher education

" students and school officials. Ultimately her influence crossed the Atlantic through interest in the

United States in the British Infant School Movement.

The phenomenon of English primary classrooms organized around children's open-ended

exploration of centers began to circulate in America, largely through the work of American

educator, Joseph Featherstone's three articles in The New Republic. Written from August through

September, 1967 these articles described in detail, the infant schools for children age 4 to 7 as

activity centered, noisy classrooms where children could move from activity to activity on their

own volition, in which the curriculum was integrated, and the teachers acted as facilitators. Jody

Hall argues in her work that the British Infant School Movement is evidence of Isaacs' impact

on school practice.25 Although Hall's argument may have overstated the case, nevertheless, many

American educators, tired of traditional practice in their schools visited the UK to observe these

new classrooms, which along the way became known as "Open Classrooms" and returned to their schools as change agents. Significantly, the English experience, American school reformer Lillian

Weber (1917-1994) wrote in The English Infant School and Informal Education (1971) - her

1965-66 study of 47 state schools in England "should encourage us to search for possibilities and steel us against a polemic that rejects these premises as inapplicable or as failures without

26 permitting any real trial."

Lillian Weber

Lillian Weber was born Lillian Dropkin to Russian Jewish immigrants in East New York,

Brooklyn in 1917. Her father was a union activist, and her mother, a Yiddish poet. Weber was one of five children, the middle child. Interestingly, Weber's background is strikingly different from the earlier "founding mothers" who were middle to upper middle class Protestants, often from rural areas, nevertheless, she represents a direct link between the earlier group of child centered reformers (pedagogical progressives) and what I have termed, the neo-progressives. She is particularly important to the history of women in progressive education because she sought to bring child-centered progressive education exclusively to urban multicultural public schools.

As Weber's father moved from union activist to businessman, Weber attended public schools in Brooklyn, West Virginia, Virginia, and Fall River, Massachusetts. In all, she attended four different high schools, graduating at the age of fifteen, in 1932. She began college at Hunter

College, but after her marriage to Frederick Palmer Weber in 1935, transferred to the University of Virginia, graduating with a degree in sociology in 1938. After living in Washington D.C. and giving birth to two sons, she returned to New York City in 1944, settling in Riverdale, in the

Bronx. Shortly after her move, Weber and her husband divorced. Typical of Weber's activist personality, she became involved in the Spuyten Duyvil

Infantry, a parent cooperative nursery school her children attended, first as a volunteer in 1944, then as an assistant teacher in 1946. She spent twenty years there as a teacher and finally became

its director. During her time there she completed a Master's Degree in Early Childhood Education

at Bank Street, in 1959. Her pedagogical epiphany occurred at during a summer conference at

Vassar College in the early 1960s, where she heard about the work of British early childhood

educators in the British infant schools. Transformed by what she heard, she took a leave of

absence to study in England. She received an Associate's Degree from the University of London,

after her book The British Infant School and Informal Education (1971), based on her

observations during her year and one half stay, was published. She joined the City College of

New York education faculty in 1967 as a Lecturer. Working with student teachers in the local

Harlem public schools, she developed the Open Corridor classrooms partially based on the British

infant school model. As described by some former participants in the Open Corridors, teachers

interested in changing their pedagogic practices were placed in classrooms that were grouped

together on the same corridor. This encouraged them to work together, sharing methods and

materials, and fostering a sense of community. According to Beth Alberti, Weber's former

colleague and compiler of her papers,

The Open Corridor Program invited teachers to develop multi-age classrooms equipped

with open-ended materials that would stimulate and support children's active learning.

Children were given stretches of time to work and were encouraged to work and talk

together. The changed classrooms were clustered together on a corridor and teachers too

were encouraged to work together-to plan, share materials and ideas, hold class events,

17 allow movement of children between their rooms, and in other ways create a functioning

sense of community within the school. 27

Weber founded the Workshop Center for Open Education at New York City College in 1972, loosely based on what she had learned in her 18-month study of English schooling coupled with the influence of John Dewey and Jean Piaget, emphasizing inquiry and observation. The Workshop

Center, funded by private foundations and federal monies served City College faculty, public school teachers, paraprofessionals and administrators, children and parents in the community and visitors from abroad and had multiple uses: classes, meetings, demonstrations, lectures, to name a few. Weber had also organized a group of "advisors" or master teachers, beginning in 1970, who worked with teachers in public schools throughout the city who wished to change their pedagogy. These advisors were personally selected by Weber, and would work in schools during the week but meet every

Friday in the Workshop Center to discuss what they had encountered in the schools and how to proceed.

According to Hall, Weber initially began her reform impetus to bring what she considered

good independent school practices to public school children, modeled after the British schools she

had visited, based on child centered, individualized instruction. However,

Gradually...her notions about informal schooling changed, she reported, to a

theoretical perspective stemming from Susan Isaacs: "Informal, as I understand it, refers to

the setting, the arrangements, the teacher-child relations that maintain, restimulate if

necessary, and extend what is considered to be the most intense form of learning, the already

existing child's way of learning through play and through the experiences he seeks out for

himself."28 Interpreting this italicized definition, Weber underscored a child's curiosity as a

18 driving force: "The active force ... is ... curiosity, interest, and the needs of the child's own

search for definition and relevance." Susan Isaacs had provided the rationale for informal

education: "She gave an objective basis, in the context of genetic psychology, to previous

generalities on natural development, on the deep connections linking inner and outer reality,

29 emotional and intellectual life."

Weber's influence can be seen in the course of study in City College catalogues, under the

School of Education, beginning in 1972 and continuing through today. She designed a course of study for graduate students called The Child and the Individualized Curriculum. The Program continued until 1997; now vestiges of it exist in individual courses. Core readings included Susan

Isaacs, Jean Piaget, and John Dewey.

Weber worked tirelessly to bring child-centered progressive education to underserved groups of children in New York City public schools. A former teacher who worked with her characterized her as both" wonderful and exasperating." A colleague stated of her, "she was always teaching you something." Not everyone in the School of Education at City College agreed with her vision, as is the case with all educational reformers; nevertheless, there is general agreement that she was an important figure in progressive education. Significantly, she was the first woman educator to deliver the John Dewey Society Lecture in 1973 in Chicago and a founding member of the North Dakota Study Group She retired from teaching at City College in

1987 as full professor.

Deborah Meier

Although Weber's work is no longer circulating actively in the American schooling communities, her work inspired contemporary progressive educators, including Deborah Meier.

19 Meier30 heard Weber speak around 1967 soon after moving back to New York City from

Chicago. Weber assisted half-time kindergarten teacher Meier and her P.S. 144 colleagues in

Harlem to start a cluster of classes that ranged from Pre-K to grade two. In 1970, like many other American educators, Meier spent five weeks visiting and studying English schools. After leaving P.S. 144, Meier worked with Weber at the Workshop Center at City College for a year.

She subsequently began a program connected to City College in District 2, working with teachers interested in "open corridors." She went on to start a small public elementary school in 1974,

Central Park East that eventually became part of the elementary and secondary schools that now comprise Central Park East. Meier chronicles her work in The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for

31 America about Central Park East in Harlem.

Hall notes that,

At the outset Meier and her colleagues regarded their children as having been

"driven into dumbness by a failure to challenge their curiosity." Their own kind of

classroom, Meier wrote, was "literally full of stuff: books of every sort, paints as well as

paintings, plants, animals, radios to repair-things. The curriculum we sought was both

conceptual and tangible. We wanted children to fall in love as we had with stories of the

past, including their own; we wanted schools that would evoke a sense of wonder." Asked

how Weber influenced her work, Meier replied, "I think Weber affected my work in so

many ways that it would be hard to describe briefly. For one thing she was one of the first

tough, politically savvy, well-educated Renaissance women I had met with an interest in

early childhood education and a commitment to public education. She was an inspiration

and probably sealed it for me - that this was where I would devote my life's work." As

20 for what she had absorbed from Isaacs and the example of English schooling, Meier

reported that their work had "that wonderful combination of detail - actual children

appeared in ways that captured both my imagination and my attention - along with a

theoretical curiosity about how such stories and anecdotes could be understood." In

addition to their way of seeing and responding to children, English educators, according to

Meier, were "intellectually curious people who found young children's minds of serious

interest." Meier had previously found herself similarly curious, but in the American

context had "felt in many ways isolated with that idea - like a freak. Few serious people

in my larger world of politics and academia could imagine taking the ideas of children so

seriously, and finding these ideas so provocative and fascinating." In the tradition of

Dewey, Isaacs, Gardner and Weber, Meier acts as an intellectual and wants the same for

her students. In The Power of Their Ideas she wrote, "We might even want all our young

people to be intellectuals-all of them. That's where my vote would go. ... If we agree

that what we want are citizens with a lively curiosity-who ask, How come? and, Why

and, Is it truly so?-we'll have the start of a new definition of 'well-educated.'"

In "Schools of Tomorrow, "Schools of Today, we argue that Deborah Meier has attempted to provide public progressive education for low-income students and students of color, in stark ) contrast to the earlier founding mothers, such as Pratt and Parkhurst, whose schools educated primarily white, upper 32 middle class and upper class students. Central Park East and her new charter school in Boston, Beacon, are significantly different in tone and climate from recent successful urban public charter schools such as North Star Academy Charter School in Newark,

New Jersey and KIPP Academies in Houston, Texais and New York City, which are far more traditional, with students required to wear uniforms. 33 These schools, unlike Meier's, believe that low-income children and children of color need strong discipline and basic skills to make up for educational disadvantages and that progressive education is based on what Lisa Delpit argues is the well meaning but incorrect middle class codes of white progressives, that are often misunderstood by low income students and students of color.34 Meier, however, is convinced that the type of progressive education British sociologist Basil Bernstein argued was the invention of the new middle classes, is indeed successful for students from low-income backgrounds.35

Conclusion .> C

The founding mothers of the early twentieth century, exemplified by Caroline Pratt and Helen

Parkhurst were heavily influenced by John Dewey. Although committed in theory to the child-r centered, community and egalitarian aspects of Dewey's writings, their schools, City and Country and Dalton, became far more emblematic of the individual, child-centered and community features of progressive education, with the egalitarian, social reconstructionist thread visibly absent.

Although both City and Country and Dalton were committed to the vision of a democratic community, thr-e own communities were primarily upper and upper middle class. Most importantly, as private schools they illustrate one of the significant problems of American progressive education, where the more child-centered and community based types were found in private schools and with progressive education in public schools more often than versions of administrative progressivism, with its emphasis on vocationalism, life-adjustment and testing.

Although both Weber and Meier were influenced by the individualistic, psychological and child-centered work of Susan Isaacs, their versions of progressive education were also far more concerned with issues of social justice and the egalitarian aspects of social reconstructionism.

22 Both Weber and Meier worked exclusively in public education with low-income students and students of color. Both were committed to applying the child-centered features of progressive education to create more equal educational opportunities for disadvantaged children. And in doing so, they reconnected American progressive education with its early Deweyan democratic principles.

...

F

A NOTES

1. David Tyack, and Elisabeth Hansot. Managersof Virtue: Public School Leadership in

America, 1920 -1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1981).

2. Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The MetropolitanExperience (New York:

Harper and Row), p. 229.

3. For a detailed discussion of these schools and historical case studies see Susan F. Semel

and Alan R. Sadovnik, "Schools of Tomorrow, "Schools of Today: What Happenedto

ProgressiveEducation. (New York: Peter Lang, 1999).

4. Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School (New York: Random House,

191), p. 179.

5. Ibid., p. 181.

6. Kraushaar, American Nonpublic Schools, p. 81.

7. For a full discussion of Caroline Pratt's philosophy see her book Experimental Practicein the City and Country School (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1924).

8. Cremin, The Transformation of the School, p. 213.

9. Joyce Antler, Lucy Sprague Mitchell: The Making of a Modern Woman (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 1987).

10. Cremin, The Transformation of the School, pp. 280-286.

11. Marie Stone, ed. Between Home and Community: Chronicle of the Francis W Parker

School (Chicago: Francis W. Parker School, 1976) and Marie Stone, The ProgressiveLegacy:

Chicago'sFrancis W Parker School (1901-2001) (New York: Peter Lang, 2001).

12. Susan Lloyd, The Putney School: A Progressive Experiment (New Haven: Yale Uni-

versity Press, 1987).

13. Edward Yeomans, The Shady Hill School: The FirstFifty Years (Cambridge: Windflower

Press, 1979).

14. For a discussion of the Gary schools see Ronald Cohen, Children of the Mill: Schooling and Society in Gary, Indiana, 1906-1960 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); and Ronald Cohen and Raymond Mohl, The Paradox of ProgressiveEducation: The Gary Plan and

Urban Schooling (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennidat Press, 1979); for a discussion of the

Winnetka schools see Carleton W. Washburne and Sidney P. Marland, Winnetka: The History and Significance of an EducationalExperiment (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1963).

15. See Michael James, Social Reconstruction Through Education (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex,

1995).

16. Susan F. Semel and Alan R. Sadovnik, "Lessons from the Past: Individualism and

Community in Three Progressive Schools" Peabody Journalof Education (Summer 1995), pp.

56-84.

17 For a summary of this research see National Center for Educational Statistics, School Quality:

An IndicatorsReport (Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, 2000).

18. For a discussion of the paradox of leadership see Susan F. Semel, "Female Founders and the

Progressive Paradox." Pp. 89-108 in Michael E. James, Social Reconstruction Through Education

(Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1995). For a discussion of the paradox of democratic education for the elite

see Semel and Sadovnik, "Schoolsof Tomorrow, "Schools of Today (New York: Peter Lang, 1999). 19. For a discussion of Bernstein see Alan R. Sadovnik (ed.) Knowledge and Pedagogy: The

Sociology of Basil Bernstein (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1995). For a discussion of the social class

dimension of progressive education see Semel and Sadovnik, "Schools of Tomorrow," Schools of

Today.

20. While I tend to believe that many of their child-centered schools did create important communities, the historian Lawrence A. Cremin takes a less sanguine view in The Transformationof the School, which I have cited earlier. Readers should entertain both points of view; therefore, for a different perspective of Caroline Pratt's school, see Cremin (1961: 201-207).

211I am indebted to Jody Hall for inspiring me to examine the relationship between the ideas of Susan Isaacs, Lillian Weber and Deborah Meier. Hall was the first to examine this relationship in her chapter on Susan Isaacs, Jody Hall, "From Susan Isaacs to Lillian Weber and Deborah Meier: A Progressive Legacy in England and the United States," in Semel and Sadovnik, Founding Mothers, pp. 237-252. 22Jody Hall, in Founding Mothers, p.237. 23 Susan Isaacs, An Introduction to Psychology (London: Methuen, 1921). 2 For a discussion of her writings, especially her educational contributions, and a complete bibliography, see Lydia A. H. Smith, To Understandand To Help: The Life and Work of Susan Isaacs (1885-1948) (Cranberry, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1985). _ 25 Hall, "Psychology and schooling: the impact of Susan Isaacs and Jean Piaget on 1960s science education reform," pp. 153-170. 26 Weber, The English Infant School and Informal Education, p. 274. For a more detailed examination of the British infant school see Joseph Featherstone's important series in the New Republic, which had significantly more impact on American educators than either Weber or Isaacs: Joseph Featherstone, "Schools for Children," New Republic, August 19, 1967, pp. 17-21; "How Children Learn," New Republic, September 2, 1967, pp. 17-21; "Teaching Children to Think," New Republic, September 9, 1967, pp. 15-25. 27 Beth Alberti, Lillian Weber: An Ample View of Teaching. New York: City College Workshop Center, 1995, p. 2. 28 Weber, p. 11. 29 Weber, p. 171. 30 Interview of Meier by Hall in August 2000 and e-mail correspondence between Meier and Hall in October 2000, cited . t.. in FoundingMothers, p. 252. 31Deborah Meier, The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). 32 Semel and Sadovnik, "Schools of Tomorrow," Schools of Today," Chapter 13. 33 For further discussion, see Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom, No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003. 4 See Lisa Delpit, "The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children," Harvard C Educational Review, 58:3, August 1988, pp. 280-298. u See Basil Bernstein, "Social Class and Pedagogic Practice," In Basil Bernstein, The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse. London: Routledge, 1990, pp. 63-93.