Modern School (United States)
Encyclopedia
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
school
School
A school is an institution designed for the teaching of students under the direction of teachers. Most countries have systems of formal education, which is commonly compulsory. In these systems, students progress through a series of schools...
s, established in the early twentieth century, that were modeled after the Escuela Moderna
Escuela Moderna
La Escuela Moderna was a progressive school that existed briefly at the start of the 20th century in Catalonia ....
of Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia
Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia
Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia was a Spanish Catalan free-thinker and anarchist....
, the Catalan educator and anarchist
Anarchism
Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
. They were an important part of the anarchist, free schooling, socialist
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
, and labor movements in the U.S., intended to educate the working-classes from a secular, liberal, class-conscious perspective. The Modern Schools imparted day-time academic classes for children, and night-time continuing-education lectures for adults.
The New York City Modern School
The first, and most notable, of the Modern Schools was founded in New York City, in 1911, two years after Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia’s execution for seditionSedition
In law, sedition is overt conduct, such as speech and organization, that is deemed by the legal authority to tend toward insurrection against the established order. Sedition often includes subversion of a constitution and incitement of discontent to lawful authority. Sedition may include any...
in monarchist Spain on 18 October 1909. Commonly called the Ferrer Center, it was founded by notable anarchists — including Leonard Abbott
Leonard Dalton Abbott
Leonard Dalton Abbott was an English-born American publicist, politician, and freethinker. Originally a socialist, Abbott turned to libertarian anarchism in the first decade of the 20th century. He is best remembered as a leader of the so-called "Modern School movement" of those years.-Early...
, Alexander Berkman
Alexander Berkman
Alexander Berkman was an anarchist known for his political activism and writing. He was a leading member of the anarchist movement in the early 20th century....
, Voltairine de Cleyre
Voltairine de Cleyre
Voltairine de Cleyre was an American anarchist writer and feminist. She was a prolific writer and speaker, opposing the state, marriage, and the domination of religion in sexuality and women's lives. She began her activist career in the freethought movement...
, and Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman was an anarchist known for her political activism, writing and speeches. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the twentieth century....
— first meeting on St. Mark's Place, in Manhattan’s Lower East Side
Lower East Side, Manhattan
The Lower East Side, LES, is a neighborhood in the southeastern part of the New York City borough of Manhattan. It is roughly bounded by Allen Street, East Houston Street, Essex Street, Canal Street, Eldridge Street, East Broadway, and Grand Street....
, but twice moved elsewhere, first within lower Manhattan, then to Harlem
Harlem
Harlem is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan, which since the 1920s has been a major African-American residential, cultural and business center. Originally a Dutch village, formally organized in 1658, it is named after the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands...
. The Ferrer Center opened with only nine students, one being the son of Margaret Sanger
Margaret Sanger
Margaret Higgins Sanger was an American sex educator, nurse, and birth control activist. Sanger coined the term birth control, opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established Planned Parenthood...
, the contraceptives-rights activist; Man Ray
Man Ray
Man Ray , born Emmanuel Radnitzky, was an American artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. Perhaps best described simply as a modernist, he was a significant contributor to both the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal...
, too, was a student.
Starting in 1912, the school’s principal was the philosopher Will Durant
Will Durant
William James Durant was a prolific American writer, historian, and philosopher. He is best known for The Story of Civilization, 11 volumes written in collaboration with his wife Ariel Durant and published between 1935 and 1975...
, who also taught there. Besides Berkman and Goldman, the Ferrer Center faculty included the Ashcan School
Ashcan School
The Ashcan School, also called the Ash Can School, is defined as a realist artistic movement that came into prominence in the United States during the early twentieth century, best known for works portraying scenes of daily life in New York's poorer neighborhoods. The movement grew out of a group...
painters Robert Henri
Robert Henri
Robert Henri was an American painter and teacher. He was a leading figure of the Ashcan School in art.- Early life :...
and George Bellows
George Bellows
George Wesley Bellows was an American realist painter, known for his bold depictions of urban life in New York City, becoming, according to the Columbus Museum of Art, "the most acclaimed American artist of his generation".-Youth:Bellows was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio...
, and its guest lecturers included writers and political activists such as Margaret Sanger, Jack London
Jack London
John Griffith "Jack" London was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone...
, and Upton Sinclair
Upton Sinclair
Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. , was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle . It exposed conditions in the U.S...
. Student Magda Schoenwetter, recalled that the school used Montessori methods and equipment, and emphasised academic freedom rather than fixed subjects, such as spelling and arithmetic.
In July 1914, radical anarchists who frequented the Ferrer Center, and loosely associated with its adult education program, plotted to bomb the mansion of tycoon industrialist John D. Rockefeller
John D. Rockefeller
John Davison Rockefeller was an American oil industrialist, investor, and philanthropist. He was the founder of the Standard Oil Company, which dominated the oil industry and was the first great U.S. business trust. Rockefeller revolutionized the petroleum industry and defined the structure of...
. On failing to enter the Rockefeller estate, they took the bomb back to the Lexington Avenue apartment of Louise Berger
Louise Berger
Louise Berger was a Latvian anarchist, a member of the Anarchist Red Cross and editor of Emma Goldman's Mother Earth Bulletin in New York. Berger became well known outside anarchist circles in 1914 after a premature bomb explosion at her New York City apartment , which killed four persons and...
(a school habitué and an editor of the Mother Earth Bulletin), where it exploded, killing four people, including three of the bombers, and wounding many others, and brought political notoriety upon the Ferrer Center.
Other Modern Schools
After the 4 July 1914 Lexington Avenue bombingLexington Avenue bombing
The Lexington Avenue bombing was the July 4, 1914 explosion of a bomb in an apartment at 1626 Lexington Avenue New York City, killing four people and injuring dozens.-The conspirators:...
, the police investigated and several times raided the Ferrer Center and other labor and anarchist organisations in New York City. Acknowledging the urban danger to their school, the organizers bought 68 acres (275,000 m²) in Piscataway Township, New Jersey
Piscataway Township, New Jersey
The township consists of the following historic villages and areas: New Market, known as Quibbletown in the 18th Century, Randolphville, Fieldville and North Stelton...
, and moved there in 1914, becoming the center of the Stelton Colony. Moreover, beyond New York City, the Ferrer Colony and Modern School
Ferrer Colony and Modern School
The Ferrer Colony and the associated Ferrer Modern School was an anarchist intentional community founded in 1911 in New York City and moved to Piscataway Township, New Jersey in 1915. The Ferrer Modern School opened later. It lasted for more than 40 years before finally closing in 1953...
was founded (ca. 1910–1915) as a Modern School-based community, that endured some forty years.
In 1933, James and Nellie Dick, who earlier had been principals of the Stelton Modern School, founded the Modern School in Lakewood, New Jersey, which survived the original Modern School, the Ferrer Center, becoming the final surviving such school, lasting until 1958.
The Modern School magazine
The Modern School magazine originally began as a newsletter for parents, when the school was in New York City, printed with the manual printing pressPrinting press
A printing press is a device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium , thereby transferring the ink...
used in teaching printing as a profession. After moving to the Stelton Colony, New Jersey, the magazine’s content expanded to poetry, prose, art, and libertarian
Libertarianism
Libertarianism, in the strictest sense, is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view...
education articles; the cover emblem and interior graphics were designed by Rockwell Kent
Rockwell Kent
Rockwell Kent was an American painter, printmaker, illustrator, and writer.- Biography :Rockwell Kent was born in Tarrytown, New York, the same year as fellow American artists George Bellows and Edward Hopper...
. Artists and writers, among them Hart Crane
Hart Crane
-Career:Throughout the early 1920s, small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane’s lyrics, gaining him, among the avant-garde, a respect that White Buildings , his first volume, ratified and strengthened...
and Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...
, praised The Modern School as “the most beautifully printed magazine in existence.”
Further reading
- Paul AvrichPaul AvrichPaul Avrich was a professor and historian. He taught at Queens College, City University of New York, for most of his life and was vital in preserving the history of the anarchist movement in Russia and the United States....
, The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States (AK Press edition) - Avrich, Paul, Anarchist Portraits, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1988), ISBN 0691006091