Liberating Young Minds
THORNE, AHRNE
Liberating Young Minds The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States by Paul Avrich Princeton. 447pp. $30.00. Reviewed by Ahrne Thorne This is the second installment...
...His dwelling on the bombing may have the unintended effect of reinforcing the popular stereotype of anarchists as terrorist bombers, and of somewhat diminishing their contribution to education...
...Avrich concludes that this was the handiwork of Alexander Berkman, who was active in the Modern School Movement, but 1 do not believe the violent episode is germane to the history of anarchist education in the United States...
...Unfortunately, Ferrer was not allowed to pursue this task for very long...
...As Avrich himself emphasizes, the students at the Modern School were always taught to reject all violence...
...Ferrer's ideas, however, were to fall on fertile soil in New York's Lower East Side ghetto, among the Jewish anarchists and working class activists...
...Returning to his native country in 1901, he committed himself to the advancement of libertarian education as the only way to lead mankind to freedom and social justice...
...I will not conceal from them one iota of fact...
...It also received important support from anarchist branches of the Workmen's Circle, the then rapidly growing fraternal organization of immigrant Jews...
...The Modern School in Stelton, New Jersey was the last to close, in 1953...
...His real crime was opposing the powerful Catholic Church...
...One of the most interesting vignettes in the book tells how Will Durant, a former Catholic seminarian, came to be an anarchist teacher...
...Avrich discusses Ferrer's pioneering efforts to establish the first anarchist school in the context of other libertarian thinkers who stressed the importance of education, among them Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, Thoreau, Emerson, Kropotkin, and Tolstoy...
...An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre," published two years ago, is a dramatic study of one of the movement's most colorful figures...
...Reviewed by Ahrne Thorne This is the second installment of Paul Avrich's projected multi-volume history of anarchism in America...
...They included Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, Jack London, Edwin Markham, Man Ray, Rockwell Kent, Lincoln Steffens, and Upton Sinclair...
...Instead of a chronological approach, the author has decided to tackle his fascinating subject in a series of separate monographs, some of them biographies...
...In 1909, after a trumped up trial at which he was accused of participating in an "anarchist plot," he was executed in the Montjuich fortress...
...One of the branches was even named for Ferrer...
...Avrich, Professor of History at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, begins the book with a moving portrait of Francisco Ferrer, the turn of the century Spanish anarchist and founder of the Escuela Moderna in Barcelona...
...Their relevant biographies, and those of lesser-known teachers and activists, combine to make a fascinating narrative depicting an educational experiment that survived for half a century, significantly influenced the development of progressive education generally, and graced the lives of thousands of students...
...The general reader, too, will experience here the joy of discovering an exciting intellectual movement sensitively chronicled by a gifted historian...
...Such individuals, Avrich tells us, "were perhaps the first educational theorists to defend the rights of children, whom they regarded as fundamentally equal to adults, with the same need for freedom and dignity...
...Beautifully told, too, is the love story involving the 27-year-old Durant and a 14-year-old Jewish student, Ariel, who later became Will's wife and coauthor...
...My only quibble with this remarkable book concerns the author's decision to include the notorious "Lexington Avenue bombing," (carried out in retaliation for the massacre of workers in Ludlow, Colorado...
...I will not ram a dogma into their heads...
...Avrich is similarly skillful at sketching the other famous men and women associated with the Modern School Movement in this country...
...I will teach them not what to think but how to think...
...I will teach them only the simple truth," Ferrer said...
...Although most of the pupils in New York's Modern School were Jewish, many of their teachers were not...
...He set out to develop in children (and adults, too) the ability to make that distinction...
...The observation by British historian George Macauley Trevelyan that "education has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading," summed up Ferrer's concern as well...
...Nevertheless, for the serious student of American political and cultural history, Paul Avrich's book is a must...
...The first Modern School in this country, named after him, was enthusiastically championed by the Freie Arbeiter Stimme, the Yiddish-language anarchist weekly...
...The present volume deals with anarchism's most constructive and lasting achievement in this country, the Modern School Movement...
...Ferrer grew up in Paris where he became immersed in radical causes, including the defense of Dreyfus...
Vol. 63 • October 1980 • No. 19
