History of the International Modern School Movement for Libertarian Community Education
Introduction:
This essay deals with defining the foundations for innovations in community schools and celebrates the modern school radical educators in New York City established from 1909–1915. These progressive educators carried on an international movement which celebrated freedom of thought and action. The movement drew teachers from the amazing array of artists and intellectuals living or meeting in avant-garde Harlem and Greenwich Village. Together they opened a bohemian school for educating both adults and children called the Ferrer Modern School.
The school idealized the immigrant poor, the working class, and children. It encouraged independent thinking and promoted liberty and natural, universal humanitarianism unless of course you were the state or corporate monopolies. Then you were the enemy.
The Modem School leaders of class-consciousness led them to accept violence, terrorism, and murder or “propaganda by the deed” against capitalists. This forced these radical educators to the country to pursue their utopian social visions.
This essay begs the question: Is terrorism, or revolution, necessary to stop the oppression of the poor? This question has not yet been settled. It is our duty as educators to consider it.
Modern School Movement to Ferrer
When teacher Francisco Ferrer, founder of the Escuela Modema (Modern School) in Barcelona, was executed by the Spanish govemment in 1909, he became an international symbol of revolt against educational indoctrination.
When independent thinking American socialists, anarchists, and libertarians founded the Ferrer Modem School in his memory in New York City in 1910, they were also expressing the influences of late nineteenth and early twentieth century American radical theorists and activists who preceded the martyred Ferrer.
These New York City radicals were seeking through education to mold a new national culture from the modem technological revolution that was occurring simultaneously in Europe and America. Of course these men and women were nurtured by New York Citys bohemian subculture which was centered in Greenwich Village from 1909–1915.
Yet, the Ferrer Modern School of New York City, from where they based this effort at cultural transformation, stood as more than just an avant-garde school for children; it was a local libertarian meeting center for world-class intellectuals and a facility where adult workers from the city could read and discuss radical new ideas in the evenings.
Yet the Modern School movement was driven from New York City in its formative stage of development in 1915 by its association with bombers willing to kill innocent people to make a statement against their enemies: the church, the state, and capitalist monopolies.
This turn-of-the-century similarity to anti-government philosophy today is striking and still highly relevant. The educational techniques of the Modern School movement in New York City from 1909–1915 empowered students to think for themselves, experiment, create, and do. Reviving the spirit of these New York City radicals for the new immigrants will bring progress to every village, city, or rural school it touches.
The Modern School was a community school in every sense of the word. Financiers, urban planners, school administrators, professors, scholars, and teachers may notice it is again time for a revolution in education. The modern school movement carried by Rousseau into the eighteenth century died early in the twentieth century. It should be revived again in the twenty-first century. Educating students to be independent progressive thinkers ensures a society will flourish.
The international Modern School Movement celebrated independent thinking. The movement itself began in France even before Ferrer was executed. Much of the late nineteenth century thinking on it seems to come from Rousseau’s mid-eighteenth century emphasis on the experiential techniques he explained in his Emile. Ferrer’s Escuela Moderna, which he established in Barcelona in 1901, was actually based on French models. Louise Michel, who was “on the front ranks whenever the people of Paris rebelled against some wrong,” in the nineteenth century, established a school at Montmartre as an alternative to the “soul-destroying educational institutions” of the bourgeois which she believed were the originator of all social evils.
Following Michel’s model, Paul Robin established his Modem School at Cempuis in 1880 refusing the conventional belief that “the child must suffer for the sins of the fathers, that it must continue in poverty, and filth, that it must grow up a drunkard or criminal, just because its parents left no other legacy. Robin “took his children from the sfreet, the hovels, the orphan and founding asylums, the reformatories, from all those gray and hideous places where a benevolent society hides its victims in order to pacify ts guilty conscience.”
Ahough Cempuis was closed by the French govemment on charges of coeducation, which at the time was prohibited under law, other similar educational attempts were undertaken in France by Madeleine Vemet and Sebastian Faure. Faure developed in the children a love of study by awakening “the child’s interest in his surroundings by mak(ing) him or her realize the importance of observation, investigation, and reflection” and by teaching the student to never accept anything on blind faith.
Ferrer followed these precedents in developing his child-centered theories of education. Ferrer outlined the principles upon which a Modern School should be based. He proclaimed at the opening of his Escuela Moderna in 1901: “I am not a speaker, not a propagandist, not a fighter. I am a teacher; I love children above everything. I think I understand them. I want my contribution to the cause of liberty to be a young generation ready to meet a new era.” Ferrer knew that “the real educator is he who can best appeal to the child’s own energies.”
Before his execution in 1909, Ferrer claimed he was wrongly accused of taking part in at least two conspiracies to overthrow the Spanish government. In 1906, he was charged with being implicated in a plan to kill King Alfonso and in 1909 of leading an anti-military uprising in which peace and order prevailed while the people had control of the city. From his prison cell, Ferrer wrote on October 4, 1909 that he was being accused of being the leader of the movement of the world’s anarchists because of his visits to London and Paris around 1900 and that “with such infamous lies they are trying to kill me.”
The indictment against Ferer did not even accuse him of participation in the uprising which provided an opportunity to arrest him; instead it alleged that he was guilty of “having organized godless schools and godless literature.” Ferrer was a danger to Catholicism and to the Spanish govemment because he wanted education removed from the yoke of the church and the state. Ferrer stated that “power is based almost entirely on the school and they [govemment officials] therefore insist on retaining their monopoly on it.”
Ferrer’s real affront to the Spanish govemment was his effective organization of education to free people from governmentally imposed religious and political propaganda. Between 1901 and 1909, Ferrer organized 109 Modem Schools and induced the liberals of his country to organize 308 other such schools. He also equipped a modern printing plant and produced 150,000 copies of modern scientific and sociologic books and rationalistic texts. Ferrer was a danger to state control of education, of what people learned to think for the rest of their lives.
Ferrer’s Execution Launches International Education Movement
Ferrer’s execution on October 13, 1909 started an intemational Modern School Movement. Modern Schools were quickly established in England, France, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, China, Japan, and the United States.
In America, Modem Schools would open in 1910 and spread to various parts of the country until they died out in 1961 because of financial distress. The Modern Schools of America were first established in New York City in 1910, and then in Chicago and Philadelphia in the same year, and in Detroit, Seattle, Portland, and Salt Lake City as well by 1915. There was a reason this educational counter-culture moved across America from 1910–1915 and it had to do with the residual European and American libertarian traditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
America had its own tradition of thought regarding utopian communities that placed child-centered education at the heart of its pursuits. Englishman Robert Owen, who founded the New Harmony community of Indiana in 1825, believed that “the individuality of the child must be sacred” and that the relations between a teacher and a pupil must be based on and controlled by love.” Jo Anne Wheeler, a teacher at the Stelton Modem School (1915–53) and the Mohegan Modem School (1912–41 ), believed that Bronson Alcott’s Temple School established in Boston in 1834 was a strong influence on the movement. The Concord Transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, set up models for revolt against the oppressive nature of education in America. Emerson said: “Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude. “ Thoreau walked out of teaching in part because he was being pressured against his will to inflict corporal punishment on his students which he would not do.
But, as the recommended reading lists of the Modem School Magazine (1912–22) demonstrated, it was a combination of European and American educational theories that were at the center of its libertarian philosophy of education The Modem School Magazine reading lists suggested books by mostly nineteenth century American and European educational theorists such as Rousseau, Stimer, Froebel, Fourier, Owen, Alcott, Emerson, Spenser, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Tolstoi, Dewey, A S. Neill, and Bertrand Russell.
John Dewey of Columbia University was one of the earliest proponents of the Modern School movement in America. Dewey “almost singlehanded, accomplished one of the significant cultural revolutions of his time.” Dewey successfully argued for scientific and experimental educational theories which many American and European libertarian educators had been advocating throughout the nineteenth century but were largely ignored by the educational establishment. Dewey made it clear to conventional society that modem science meant nothing unless people could be taught use their individual talents to build cooperative relationships with themselves and the world. Libertarians associated with the Modem School in New York City, including Emma Goldman, were well aware of the importance of Dewey’s theories and thus invited him to come to visit the school which he did many times.
Dewey opened his Laboratory School in Chicago in 1896, thirteen years before Ferrer’s execution, to investigate educational propositions for a democracy. The school’s philosophy was centered around teaching the young to be independent and useful, not impulsive. Children would learn by doing at the Chicago Lab School as it was affectionately called. Deweys Lab School teachers survived to teach their students to build up and solve their own problems and to openly exchange ideas and give mutual respect, friendship and love. He also sought to “train [the] power of re-adaptation to changing conditions so that future workers would not become blindly subject to a fate imposed upon them.”
A global sense of quickening multiplicity, despair, and needed renewal permeated European and American societies in the early twentieth century. The Education of Henry Adams (1918) demonstrated that in Europe and America the whirling dynamo of modem technological revolution and “anarchy was a momentary stage toward order and unity” which “accelerated progess, concentrated energy, accumulated power and multiplied the intensity of force, reduc(ing) friction, increas(ing) friction, increasing velocity, and magnify(ing) momentum.”
American culture in particular had been undergoing fragnentation, professionalimtion, increased specialization, complexity, and atomization in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This time of revolutionary technological and cultural change was reflected in New York City from 1909–1915 and in the life of the Modem School movement there during that time.
New York City Modern School (1909–15): Artistic and Intellectual Community Education Center
The need for cultural renewal during revolutionary technological change weas acutely observable in New York City, particularly in its bohemian epicenter, Greenwich Village, from 1909–1915. New York City intellectuals were looking for new combinations of thought to establish a new revolutionary order. Leslie Fishbein, in Rebels in Bohemia: The Radicals of the Masses, 1911–1917 (1982) astutely observed that European and American ideas were intricately fashioned in New York City’s Greenwich Village before America’s entry into the Great War in 1917. Fishbein noted that pre-World War I radicals were searching for ways to attack oppressive social institutions, such as schools, and the general “tyranny of convention.”
Writers gathering in New York City, particularly Greenwich Village, from 1909–1915 were part of what Hemingway in 1930 called the “Lost Generation.” These writers were middle class; the children of lawers, doctors, and teachers, “yet they had the illusion of belonging to a great classless society.” They felt akin to the misunderstood Romantic reformers whose good intentions got them crucified.
A ‘New Paganism” celebrating personal sensuality arose at the turn of the century to defy the Puritanism which had extinguished the pursuit of passions in America. Experiments with drugs and the Black culture of Harlem were undertaken by some radicals from Greenwich Village in defiance of the Victorian-American “genteel tradition. “ Mabel Dodge, a patroness of radicalism and the arts who turned her home at 23 Fifth Avenue into a salon, agreed with German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche that God was within each person and that each should develop as he or she saw fit.
The city of New York’s unique search for cultural renewal can be seen in its surge of radicalism from 1909 to 1915. The Modem School’s presence there attracted many intellectuals from Greenwich Village and the Rand School of Social Science. Interaction between cultural theorists and educators were quite common during this period. The Rand School of Social Science, then on East Nineteenth Street, stood as a center of socialist light and learning.” Radicals met at Polly’s Restaurant on MacDougal Street and the Hotel Brevcourt as well. The Modem School could only flourish in such a colorful turn-of-the-century urban intellectual climate.
The preeminent American scholar of anarchism, Paul Avrich, has called the Modem School’s adult Ferrer Center the “Academy Humane” for its gathering of counter-culture rebels and artists. Harry Kelly recalled that “those who gathered at the center formed the most dynamic group of men and women of its kind ever brought together in this country. “ Sadakichi Harmann, who fried eggs and discussed poetry with Walt Whitman and corresponded with Ezra Pound met other radicals there. Carlos Tresca, an Italian militant who attended many of the talks, noted that there were all shades of radicals, from pacifists to terrorists, in attendance.
People young and old gathered from 1910–1915 to hear Jack London, Lincoln Steffens, Upton Sinclair, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Clarence Darrow, Hutchins Hapgood, Hippolyte Havel, Eugene ONeill, Theodore Dreiser, Max Eastman, Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger speak on the need for libertarian cultural transformations. The topics ofeconomics, politics, sex, literature, art, law, psychology, psychoanalysis, socialism, anarchism, and syndicalism were all discussed. The ideas were exciting and relevant to the issues of the day and were attractive to plain working men as well as avant-garde intellectuals. The Ferrer Center was simply aiming toward the “reconstruction of society upon the basis of freedom and justice.”
The Modem School and Ferrer Center of New York City developed out of this local, national, and movement for counter-culture. The movement grewout of the Francisco Ferrer Association of America, which was formed at the offces of the Harlem Liberal Alliance located at West 116th Street in New York City, in 1910 in response to Ferrer’s execution. Harry Kelly, Jamie Vidal, Leonard Abbot, and Alexander Berkman, editor of Emma Goldman’s radical newspaper Mother Earth and the man who tried to assassinate Andrew Carnegie, organized the first Modern Sunday School in the United States in New York that year. Lucy Parsons, whose husband Albert was executed as a Haymarket (Chicago) anarchist in 1887, spoke there on that topic and Will Durant spoke about literature and philosophy. But, the early days were rough. Financial crises always loomed as we shall soon see. In the meantime, consider how these early lessons can fuel the Modern School Movement as it evolves in the post-modern era.
