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Derek, If you were a school kid there in the 1950s, then it was still operating as a school within a teacher training college after the time the book was published. It seems that the college has kind of upgraded itself (though I know that many such promotions are in name only) but am I right in thinking that the actual school where kids like you got their elementary education, was closed at some point. Is that right? If so do you know the circumstances of that? Andy (Brunswick, Victoria) mike cole wrote: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Derek Patton <derekpatton19@gmail.com> Date: 2011/7/29 Subject: RE: John Dewey school at Towson Maryland To: lchcmike@gmail.com ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** Dear Mike,**** ** ** Yes of course, please feel free to share my email.**** ** ** Thanks for your response. I usually don’t bother people like you, whom I imagine are so so busy to pick up anything additional, but something nagged my unconscious I suppose, and I am so glad to have offered something useful and therefore please pass it on to whomever it might help. My Quaker upbringing tells me to listen to the Inner Light and sometimes I interpret usefully (I won’t say “correctly”). **** ** ** I will add a few bits about the Experimental elementary school, Lida Lee Tall, for those who may be interested, and you can post this too. If anyone wants to contact me, you can also share my email address.**** ** ** Lida Lee Tall, taught to be active citizens, using participative “democracy” where we had elections for class officers every few months so everyone had a better chance of being one, but we actually had a treasurer who collected real money for real class projects. I remember the school “giving us” access to some woods next to the school where we planned and executed woodland gardens and little landscape designs. Another one was the trust license we all voted for each other in a secret ballot. The cute boy at the centre of most trouble was inevitably scored the lowest since his trouble making got all of us in trouble. Any mess about the place at the end of the day, the WHOLE class stayed to clean up. Group social responsibility quickly leads to the group disciplining its own members, not that we got violent, just assertive. Interestingly, just like a school you mention in the article, a number of us have reminisced about being unable to spell. For me, I had a remedial specialist test me and was astounded to find the huge and to her unique divergence of my spelling and composition ability at 3rdgrade level, and my reading comprehension at 11 th grade level. Partly due to my parents allowing only 1 hour of TV per week, except for specials like National Geographic, or an important Orioles baseball game or Colts football game. My father would additionally demonstrate how the commercials were subtly trying to influence us and dramatically would pretend to stuff the tube of toothpaste back down the presenter’s throat. This was memorable, great fun, and we have all been as immune as one could get of such influences.**** ** ** Reflecting on my own childhood, I am sure I did not have an ordinary upbringing where I not only had a progressive school, but other ‘training’ in how to think, such as the Quaker bible study classes before our one hour silent meditation meeting, where we sat around in a small group and the so called teacher would give us some things to think about from some text, but never told us what to think or the passage’s official “meaning”. These things were always up for discussion. I had a home dad who had his photographic studio there, and a black ****Baltimore**** grandmother during the work week, while my “white” (but part Cherokee) mother practiced her child psychiatry trade. Least people think that my black mother was treated as a servant and nanny, although I suspect she acted somewhat that way, remember this was a Quaker household where we prided ourselves on our underground railroad ancestors troublemaking. Evelyn sat at the head of the table as the “elder” and we boys cleared and washed up. My father sat across from us 3 boys partly to be able to stare down any shenanigans. My white mother would almost always show up late from downtown and take the corner next to Dad. She had instructed Evelyn that she didn’t really care if the house was dirty, the laundry undone and dinner was out of a can, if we boys needed attention, a story or whatever, that was number one priority. So when people talk about the “culture” a child is raised in, I was already on the road to multicultural mix-up just in my home. Then add to that summers in Canada at a First Nations inspired summer camp from 8 – 17 years old where we had all the wilderness craft plus council fire which the “Chief” did in a native language, (he was also a Johns Hopkins child psychiatrist classmate of my mother), then you have a real “mixed up kid”, except in fact it all made complete sense to me. **** After marching on Washington with Martin Luther King in 1963 at the age of 13 (yes, militant Quakers allow their children into the battle) I went off to a 4 year Quaker boarding school (Westtown) outside Phili, and then a Quaker University in Indiana, (Earlham College), and getting up to other such 60s militant efforts (most people think that “militant pacifist” is a contradiction but my father’s hero was Gandhi ), with the resulting violent reactions in the later 60s, I decided to be more subtle, as many of my African American classmates did.**** ** ** When I entered into the “normal” work world to find that actually very few people really knew how to think clearly about almost anything except how to make money, keep power, or use psychology to sell us junk.**** ** ** So more power to anyone trying to change this. I now satisfy myself with the more acceptable but ultimately subversive ways of unseating the power brokers with my research into how to teach children to think, independently and creatively.**** ** ** Here in ****Australia****, the ordinary person who rises up to challenge the system is honourable called and remembered as a “stirrer”. The way they say it in their broad open vowels is a wonder to behold. I love it.**** ** ** Bless you all for your dedication to improving things for the future generations.**** ** ** cheers**** derek**** ------------------------------ *From:* mike cole [mailto:lchcmike@gmail.com] *Sent:* Saturday, 30 July 2011 1:22 PM *To:* derekpatton19 *Subject:* Re: John Dewey school at ****Towson** **Maryland******** ** ** Oh, what a beautiful gift. So the article sparked a very good idea. Would it be ok if I posted this message to XMCA, the discussion group we engage in around ideas in the domain of that article. I think it would be a wide and sympathetic net you would be throwing your story in to. Perhaps one of the talented people there can pick it up and find way to document the long life and causes of death of such an interesting and worthwhile innovation. mike**** n Fri, Jul 29, 2011 at 6:21 PM, derekpatton19 <derekpatton19@gmail.com> wrote:**** Dear Michael, Hi. Just read your 2010 What's culture got to do with it? article, very good, and thanks for picking up on Sarason's long campaign. You may not know that there was an extremely innovative primary school based partly on John Dewey philosophy that operated within the campus of Towson State Teachers College, now Towson University in Towson Maryland which started in 1866 and may have closed about 1990 or so, named first the Laboratory school, then Model school, and eventually called Lida Lee Tall, after a renowned College Principal. We have a Facebook group of ex-students, and I have been trying to find if anyone within the University did research on this school or other accounts. Could do some retrospective if we had enough graduates and matched them (us) with graduates of local schools. There is an online free history book up to 1941 that has a chapter on the "* ***Laboratory** **School****: Children on Campus" at this address: http://www.archive.org/details/seventyfiveyears00stat My mother who was an MD Johns Hopkins U graduate told me it was a John Dewey school, and that was why we were all sent there. Anyway, I went there as did my 2 brothers in the 50s and now that I know a lot more about school culture and learning, I realize how exceptional it was. We basically escaped Baltimore County school system restrictions and limitations and because the College was considered "expert" in how to run a school, being the main trainer of teachers and originally was the "highest authority in the State on all educational theories and practices within the sphere of the public school system." p. 86. I am not sure when some bureaucrats hijacked this ideal situation, but in my time as a student they got away with doing much differently than the county schools. They sent faculty off to study under Dewey, Frank McMurry and William Bagley. The book says at one point they considered that children from 6 - 10 "should do all their work within school hours. Home lessons for such children are an injury to the home, to the school, to the child and to the teacher." p. 86, and "children learn by *doing *more than by merely looking and saying...It has been proposed of late to make both reading and writing the subordinate instruments of a scheme of real instruction...An acquaintance with *things *takes precedence over more verbal instruction." (Allen's *Mind Studies *was one of the books listed for the teachers.) p. 87 Teachers were trained in: "principles of all true teaching are emphasized: means of securing the attention of the pupils and the power to keep them busy are dwelt upon." "They are taught to trace here the effect back to cause, to note the processes of the development of the subject in the minds of the several children, and to form their own laws for the same; to study closely the relationship existing between pupil and teacher, the influence of the teacher upon the mind and habits of the pupil, and the cause of this influence, etc. The students (student teachers) report upon their observations, inferences, etc., in a conference help weekly, conducted the the teacher in charge of this department." Anyway, maybe you have academic contacts in ****Maryland**** or nearby who would be interested in this. Given the length of time they did innovative things, one would think there is some evidence around in the form of long term outcomes such as the lives of those who were students there. The school also did a lot of testing of students, which one would hope is stored somewhere. It could be a gold mine sitting there right within a university's ownership waiting to be tapped. One problem of course is the question of what the actual curriculum and practice were at different times, and then what were the results of that on the children compared to other schools. I tried emailing someone in the University, but it seems this didn't attract any attention. All that happened was finding this free book online of the first 75 years of the teachers college. just a thought, cheers derek --
*Andy Blunden* Joint Editor MCA: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=g932564744 Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/ Book: http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=227&pid=34857 MIA: http://www.marxists.org |
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