Creating a School

by AGNES and ERNEST HOCKING

1

CAMBRIDGE is a school-bearing town, and justly proud of it. Wasn’t it Stanley Hall, psychologist , who, making a study of children’s fears, asking several hundred Massachusetts children what they were most afraid of, found two who answered “ignorance”? Their homes, he noted, were in Cambridge.

The Agassiz School, on the northerly stretch of Oxford Street, ranked high. Tts principal, Miss Baldwin, a Negro, held a critical community’s standing respect. Numerous children of Harvard faculty folk turned up in “Miss Baldwin’s school.”But now, in the spring of 1915, it was time for the old building to be torn down and rebuilt. Demolition set in well before spring closing, and refugee pupils were assigned pro tem to neighboring schools. These fugitive squatters in already crowded schoolrooms were doubtless made as welcome as human nature would permit; but nothing could abolish the fact of strain for both teachers and taught. Our eight-year-old son Richard began to bring home caustic teacher’s reports; long division was getting him down. What could a parent do?

It was this accidental situation that started a train of events. It so happened that Richard’s mother, Agnes Hocking, had a teacher’s impulse from early years, and not a little experience, first in Boston public schools, then at the George Junior Republic, Freeville, New York, where in 1905 she had spent her honeymoon. Later, she had carried on for two years a school in New Haven, an “open-air” grammar school, with the approval and under the interested eyes of local school authorities and a group of M.D.’s whose counts of red corpuscles were highly favorable, as was the record of the school during epidemics of flu and whooping cough.

As newcomers in Cambridge, this was no moment for us to start a school, and we had no intention of doing so; but if circumstances required, one of us was ready to meet a temporary emergency.

We had built a commodious back porch for our old house at 16 Quincy Street, open sleeping porches on the second floor, on the first floor an extra porch-room for anything that might happen along — why not school quarters for half a dozen of the refugees from Miss Baldwin’s school? After consulting with a few friends similarly discommoded, among them Mrs. Wallace Atwood, wife of the geographer, Agnes Hocking went into action. Young Richard found himself with former comrades and one or two new ones; and with parental aid from several sides, work went forward with such zest and good effect that at the end of the term there was call for continuance, with several new applications.

We had counted our teaching resources. They appeared good; we could have special help from the faculty families among us, and by pooling costs we could employ two or three regular teachers. We found Miss Greene for the three R’s and for general oversight and record-keeping; Mrs. Hocking was to teach history and poetry, involving reading and composition; Ernest Hocking was to come in for short periods of mental arithmetic. Mrs. Robert Duncan Reynolds was to teach Latin; Mlle. Thioux was to teach French. With this use of home talent, compensated by free tuition for members of the teacher’s family, expenses could be light (I believe our per capita share for the first year was $72). If we could recommend ourselves by the quality of our teaching, our program could be financially attractive, especially to faculty families. And so it proved: the school grew with a speed which was little short of embarrassing.

In the fall of 1915 we began, if I remember rightly, with a group of some twenty pupils. Before long we had between thirty and forty, and a sizable waiting list. School activities spread into the dining room, the front porch, the under porch, the garage, and, of course, the yard, under the curious eyes of the Harvard Union on one side and the Colonial Club on the other. There were important additions to the teaching staff: Mrs. James Sturgis Pray, pupil of Thomas Whitney Surette of Concord, laught music in a way that made music a part of the school temper and lured several uncertain singers into control of their voices; Mrs. Neal, wife of Professor Herbert Neal of Tufts and a biologist in her own right, gave nature studies and conducted bird walks; Mrs. Wallace Atwood, with the help of Professor Atwood, made geography a living interest. Mrs. Wright, wife of architect James H. Wright, gave lessons in drawing. The question was bound to arise in the spring, not whether to carry on — that seemed settled — but what to do with the waiting list for the ensuing year. At this point, I, who had to oversee physical arrangements and had been moving our piano from drawing room to dining room and back for the music periods, presented an ultimatum. The school must limit its numbers or move. It decided to move.

Under the circumstances, this meant — unless by a rare chance the Harvard Division of Education were to want us as a long-needed experimental school—buying land and building a school house or houses. And the new plant must be ready by fall. The undertaking was, on the face of it, quixotic. But Agnes Hocking had the necessary quixotism: and one of the parents, John Sturgis, the banker, had an equally necessary down-to-earth joint-stock plan for financing the dream, which, with several outright gifts from Richard Cabot, John C. Runkle, Paul Sachs, Mrs. Edward Forbes, and others, put the impossible within reach.

2

WE BEGAN with no preconceived educational theory. We had a few firm convictions stemming from experience as to what constitutes good education. We were definitely “experimental”; much in the way of method, personnel, equipment had to be improvised. If the Division of Education needed an experimental school we might possibly serve. The question was canvassed wit h good will on both sides. The outcome was a friendly decision against the transfer. But the discussion was far from fruitless: it made us clear about our own special character. Some of our improvisations, which certainly involved educational hazards, also held educational possibilities, and we as a small and personal enterprise could try them out.

For example, the parent-teachers. Professional educators could fairly consider them as amateurs. For us, while they were at the beginning an obvious mainstay of our economy, they had an independent value: it was in fact the amateur that we wanted, in the literal sense of lover-of-the-subjeet. In public schools, especially in the younger grades, the “room teacher” must teach whatever is to be taught, love it or not. We wanted teachers who loved geography or history or arithmetic, and we found them at first in our community of college parents. The same was true of the consequent admixture of parental control in school management which gave our enterprise from the first a certain invaluable domestic and democratic quality, not without problems of its own. We were first called “Cooperative Open-Air School.” So, too, with the constitutional aversion to textbooks, strongly marked in Agnes Hocking, who believed in bringing even children into contact with original sources!

In addition to these heterodoxies, there were others that at once set us apart not only from the run of well-conducted schools, but also from all “progressive” schools of that time. We were often classified as progressive — chiefly, I suspect, on the ground of a certain informality in our procedures which led to the supposition that, like the typical progressive school, we were consulting and catering to the existing “interests” of children. Our principle was the exact reverse of this. Interest was of course of the first importance, and we secured it; but not by bending our work to what was on the surface of children’s minds. We expected children to take an interest in what was worthy of their interest; and with teachers who cared for their subjects, they did so. We could therefore take the hard way rather than the easy way in the subject matter of teaching. We could hold to the further heterodoxy that we were bound to keep alive in children a love of thinking, and the ability to think. This was a far cry from the yielding morass of progressivism as it then was.

Our teaching of arithmetic may serve as an example; I can speak of it with some assurance as I was the first culprit. I was interested to refute a prevalent superstition to the effect that there are some children who are naturally averse to the subject of number. For this purpose I deliberately rejected every attempt to “make arithmetic interesting” by lugging in concrete activities, such as carpeting floors. My faith was that while the human infant has a native bent to counting, very few are congenitally addicted to floor-carpeting. Number has its own order and beauty, which is only obscured by irrelevant lumber.

But how about “learning by doing”? A noble maxim, if it is some skill you are to learn: one can no more learn to write without writing than learn to walk without walking. We made great use of learning by doing. But no maxim has been more misused. It has been taken to mean that we must learn everything by doing something with our hands, even when it is thinking we have to learn. Our position was that children learn to think by thinking, not by doing something else. So my exercises in mental arithmetic were not problems in traders’ profits, nor in weights and measures; they were exercises with numbers themselves, in all their airy emptiness.

The proof of the pudding, I pointed out to my pragmatic colleagues at Harvard, is pragmatic: these children were getting rid of acquired phobias about number, and believe it or not were beginning to enjoy arithmetic! Among other things, they were painlessly mastering multiplication tables, which many schools today approach with fear.

The teaching of history and poetry was the special province and delight of Agnes Hocking. This is how she spoke of it in words written a decade after the founding, at a time when Shady Hill was outgrowing its second home, and she, contemplating her farewell, was recommending her now mature fledgling to her successors:

“It was our wish to keep alive the intellectual hunger, and the hunger of feeling, which are already in a child’s mind as he moves on from his world of play into his years of schooling. In trying to keep this eagerness alive, we found out several very simple truths. One of them came about in this wise. We had been studying Indian life for a month, visiting models of Indian villages in the Museum at Harvard, and making drawings of their houses, graves, flint utensils, etc. We had been reading the great chapters in Fiske’s Discovery of America that pictured Indian life in the days when this country lay undiscovered. We had hunted out. Indian songs, dances, and picture writings. In our handwork we had made Indian costumes and rugs. Our compositions had been, as nearly as we could make them, expressions of an Indian’s mind. And then came an anxious note.

“A careful mother felt that we would never ‘cover the ground’ which the (neighboring) school was completing this year in its fifth grade if we spent so much time on the Indians. I wrote her that she was entirely right; there was no possibility of our covering that ground. For we should spend yet another fortnight on the Indians, then a whole month in the same widely prying way in reading Washington Irving’s Life of Columbus, a further three weeks on Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico, and another week on his Conquest of Peru. There would be no hope of our doing more than getting within hail of the Revolution during the whole school winter. I told her that it would have been possible for us to inform the children in an hour about the arrival of the white man in this world of the Indians; but — and here is the truth she helped me to realize (and she happily joined me in seeing it) — information is not education. If we are to educate these children, it is life we must give them, not a few informing facts about life. Nutshell condensations of fact may be useful in later years; for children, they are the death of interest and the beginning of distaste.

“One learns gradually what are the books that hold life for the children. Curiously enough, they are offered later in the colleges as the great riches of literature; but the very thing that makes them ‘literature” often makes them fit for younger minds as well.

“To take one subject, history; three kinds of sources, we found, could help a child to live in a period: the great epics or the diaries written at the time, both of which unconsciously breathe out an age’s very atmosphere; then the work of the best historians, who have so steeped their minds in their subject that they can sometimes really re-live it; and thirdly, the works of men of genius like Shakespeare, Scott, Kipling, and endless others who by virtue of superb imagination are able without apparent effort to call an era to life. For those who were breaking their way to these treasures for the use of elementary schools, t here was of course much labor of discovery and selection of what could be available — a happy and growing labor of librarybuilding. But once they are found, a teacher with these three sources can hope to make the past with its riches a joyful possession of children also.

“And are the children able to digest these things, so far ‘beyond their years’? Yes, on one condition: if the teacher really enjoys and cares for them, the child’s interest will be there, and with the interest the gaining of what is the child’s own. And it is no shallow contagion or imitation that I mean; it is a real appropriation. Two little stories will give a hint of the children’s capacity to win not ours but their own personal understanding.

“In medieval history a class of eleven-year-olds had come to the Council of Nicaea — a knotty subject, you will very justly say. I believe Helen Crothers was in charge. They had read from Dean Stanley’s great book on the Eastern Church his account of the meeting of the Council, the assembling of the bishops, the arrival of Constantine, and of saintly sufferers held in the greater reverence the more twisted and deformed they had become, and of Arius and Athanasius — each one described vividly by persons who had actually seen them. Finally the arguments of the Council began, the theological puzzles that have been with us ever since. What did an eleven-year-old boy make of this whole incident? In his weekly composition, describing the Council, he ended with this judgment: ‘Constantine and those people seemed to think it right to be a Christian with your head and nothing else. Christ believed you had to be a Christian with your whole body.'

“The second story is of a boy who had been reading in and out of class his Malory. The Morted’Arthur each child owned in the Everyman’s version; he did not read it all — we would select a knight and read all we could find about him, and then another and another. One day after a long quiet time of reading, this boy looked up and said, ‘Malory is like what Ponce de Leon was hunting for in Florida.’ ‘And what was that?’ asked the teacher. ‘Why, the Fountain of Youth,’said he, ‘that is what knights are made of!' Now this child was not of a peculiarly literary mind, but it seemed to me that his comment was true literary criticism, He had had time for sufficient absorption to make his subject a real possession. Out of such personal discoveries come the permanent tastes of lift.”

We regarded poetry not as an ornamental way of saying things but as a vehicle for conveying faith without dogma, and with the conviction—equally unorthodox— that the conveying of faith is an obligation of the school second to nothing. It was here that poetry became a staple of the school diet; for poetry assumes without argument a universe living, not dead — a world in which every queer detail is bathed in the light of love and symbol.

For this reason we, in a form-fearing era, held to an item of ritual — the “morning exercise.” There was no dogmatism; but there was faith and imagination — music, too, as a path to the free upper air without words. If anyone felt like saying the Twenty-third Psalm or the Lord’s Prayer, he said it. There was no routine. And so far as I ever heard, nary a warped soul to protest against these universal utterances as sectarian. At Shady Hill, poetry as interpreted by Agnes Hocking became a major means of providing what every child’s soul needed, for want of which a desiccated schooling dries life up at its roots.

3

CREATING a school is like any other job of creation; there comes a time calling for all there is in you, and more, even for heroism. The summer of 1916 was our heroic passage. Everything which normally would be done serially had to be done simultaneously: incorporating the school; determining what land to buy and buying it, as we did from the old Charles Eliot Norton estate — “Shady Hill”; making plans to fit the land, and getting all concerned to agree on them; getting estimates, bids, contracts signed; starting land-filling, excavation, drainage, building itself; pacifying good and respectable neighbors who had reasonable doubt of the desirability of a school next door.

To keep this intricate mesh of interdependent events moving toward a datable school-opening required some one dedicated head, able to carry unlimited detail and to endure endless worry and non-performance, infinitely unwilling to give up. There were several of our members who at much sacrifice carried the burden of special tasks, notably architect James Hayden Wright. There was just one person who had heart and will to hold the threads together, and she should at the time have been somewhere else — in northern Vermont taking care of her three children. She achieved a certain ubiquity by shuttling back and forth in hot and dusty trains. Her husband in early summer, having previously signed on for Plattsburg, was as good as nonexistent for school or home. Other school officers were on vacation; many an imperative decision had to trail through rural mails. At the same time, the staff’ for the coming school year had to be completed — her special responsibility. How Agnes Hocking, who always disclaimed “executive capacity,” carried all this, God only knows.

Open on time the school certainly did not. For a set of buildings to be used in September, mid-August is a fairly late beginning. By August 12, the main contract was awarded and work begun, though our contractor proceeded on faith since the legal paper was not signed until a month later. By September 14, we could see our financial situation in the clear: liabilities, the total investment, $10,704; assets $97,50, the gap fillable by a modest mortgage. We then planned to begin schoolwork, and as I recall, we began on October 16, 1916.

But in retrospect our delayed opening had its advantages. We should have been the poorer if, having everything in order by Labor Day, our pupils had been deprived of the joy of putting finishing touches on their own school. There were benches to be made; there was painting to be done. We had engaged a teacher of carpentry, Mrs. Bangs of Newton; indeed, one of the smaller buildings was to be “the carpentry building.” Learning by doing? Yes, by all means. Learning what? To use tools and brushes? Of course. But this was incidental. What, then, was the purpose?

To give freedom of constructive imagination in a hundred small tasks auxiliary to our teaching in history, dramatics, and so forth? Yes.

To set standards of workmanship to symbolize and enforce the mental standards proper to the school? Yes.

To create a sense of tangible investment, and so of spiritual proprietorship such as every good worker begins to feel in his work? Yes, that too. But then, this also and chiefly: —

To give every child an experience of the inner glory of a physical task done with love and with a wish for perfection. This experience is part of all understanding of human history, medieval or other; and of the woe of history wherever the love of perfection in labor has no scope.