Abstract
The Little Red Schoolhouse, founded by Elisabeth Irwin in 1921, was regarded as the first school in New York City based on the principles of educational progressivism. When the New York public school system withdrew funds for Irwin’s experimental classes at Little Red in 1932 during the Great Depression, the school became an independent elementary school. In 1941 Elizabeth Irwin High School was added and the school became PreK-12. Today the historical descendant of the school, Little Red School House and Elizabeth Irwin High School (LREI), is an independent coeducational progressive school for PreK-12 students, emphasizing critical thinking, creativity, courage, and citizenship (see www.lrei.org).
Music became an integral part of the curriculum in many progressive schools of the 1920s, and especially at Little Red. The term “progressive education” was used to identify a movement away from the traditional practices of the nineteenth century. 1 Miller discusses several phases in its appearance. A third phase, social reconstruction, was concerned with music and art for a fuller life for all individuals within a democracy. This philosophy became a motto of the Music Supervisors National Conference, “Music for every child.” Music curriculum in schools was expanded to include singing through rote song in addition to note reading, rhythmic activity including movement and rhythm instruments, listening to music, instrumental music, and creative expression. 2
Jane Roland Martin, Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the author, writes about Little Red from a broad cultural perspective. She fondly remembers her years at “Little Red,” and recounts the detailed memories of her classmates. She does not attempt to write a history of progressivism within Little Red based on documents, but rather how progressivism was realized in this one institution during the 1920s based on collective memories of the students. For this book, she uses a cross-disciplinary qualitative methodology.
Martin sees the Little Red of her childhood as “a microcosm of one of the many experiments in education” between the two world wars (p. 2). Former students of the Little Red School House, who had graduated from eighth grade in 1943, met for a reunion in 1989 and for several years afterwards to reminisce about their years in elementary school. Martin recorded memories of 30 schoolmates. The memories were varied: positive, negative, and sometimes even conflicting. Schoolmates, now in their late eighties, remembered daily poetry periods, field trips, grammar lessons, and group projects. They reported actively doing things and learning responsibility. As a composite, these memories are a rich cultural resource. Using this collected material, Martin critically comments on the progressive education at Little Red in the late 1930s and the early 1940s, and on progressive education in general.
Music played a strong part in the school. Schoolmates recall daily music classes where they learned the many songs remembered decades later. Their teacher was Beatrice Landeck Marks (1904–1978) before she became well known for publishing American folksong collections and editing Making Music Your Own by Silver Burdett. The students collected songs in loose-leaf songbooks. Famous folk singers visited the school—Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Leadbelly, Burl Ives, Josh White, Richard Dyer Bennett, and John Jacob Niles. The schoolmates fondly remember conducting to the phrase “Floor-door-window-ceiling.” There were daily poetry readings, and a special “rhythms” class included both dancing and calisthenics.
The progressive education philosophy of Little Red was a reaction against the traditional schooling of New York City’s public schools. Irwin’s book of the 1920s, Fitting the School to the Child, refuted the idea that the child had to conform to the school; rather the school should be conforming to the child. Little Red is remembered as a child-friendly school. There was drill and practice at Little Red, but it did not consume the students’ school lives. Students did not receive grades or written reports, and tests were limited to some placement tests. “Children learn by doing” is a slogan of most progressive education philosophies. Martin noted that all schooling is “learning by doing,” but the curriculum at Little Red was learning about life through creative projects, not artificial tasks. For example, the class production of their magazine, The Composing Stick, was an interdisciplinary project. The students wrote poems and compositions, edited new work, set the type; designed a cover, and printed and assembled the pages. This creative project became a vehicle for teaching academic skills including grammar, punctuation, and handwriting, plus the social skills of working as a team.
Martin discusses misconceptions about progressive education, quoting Dewey: “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself” (p. 62). Martin notes that there were many different educational reform movements in the 1930s, and historical educational accounts tend to combine these movements into one “progressive education,” ignoring the complexity of reform. There is a misconception that progressive schools were for elite children of the upper classes. But John Dewey, Francis W. Parker, and other members of the progressive movement wanted a sound education for as many children as possible, rejecting nineteenth-century methods of drill, tests, and memorization. Little Red, located in Greenwich Village, a neighborhood in New York City known as an artists’ haven, had children of all economic classes.
A misconception of progressive education has been the assumption that the curriculum was all unstructured play, frills, and superficial anti-intellectual activities. Little Red classmates remember learning together, studying real anthills, creating murals, building a model of the Colosseum, and doing the necessary research connected with these projects. Play productions included research, writing, designing scenery, acting, and directing. Classes were large, with as many as 43 students in a class. The teachers changed each year, but the students stayed together, moving to each new grade as a group and developing a sense of identity. The philosophy at Little Red claimed education was not preparation for a specific work force, but preparation for life.
School was our Life is not a chronological history of the Little Red School House or a summary of progressive education in the era. The book is a collective memory, a reflection by a group of schoolmates who experienced Little Red in the 1920s and the 1930s, and are now in their late eighties. Their memories may not be always accurate or consistent, but a composite memory produces a self-checking and detailed story, as individuals contributed their versions and confirmed or contradicted each other. Since the interviewees are not identified, the reader does not develop an understanding of the views of individual schoolmates, with the exception of the author. This composite is not a reproduction of events of the 1920s and the 1930s, but an adult viewpoint reflecting on the experiences of the schoolmates. While it is difficult to grasp the objective philosophy of the Little Red Schoolhouse from this book, the reader develops an understanding of the values and mission of this school and the place of the arts in education as former students remembered it.