Adler, Felix (1851-1933)

Felix Adler (1851-1933)

Founder of the ethical culture school

Sources

A Tradition of Philanthropy. Felix Adler, the son of a rabbi at Manhattan’s Tempie Emanu-El, grew up accompanying his mother as she visited and helped impoverished New York families. As a young professor of religious history and literature at Cornell University, however, he carme to believe that private charity alone could not alleviate the position of the “perishing classes” driven to mob action by starvation and idleness. Adler believed that philanthropy had to “penetrate to the root itself and help the poor to help themselves.” The depression of 1873 and the bloody riots that were its urban aftermath convinced Adler that “It is necessary to resort to radical measures, if we wish to help the poor. Education is the only accepted means of doing this, and therefore, all who have given the subject of human misery careful thought unite in the opinion that education—the best and most thorough education—is what we preeminently need.”

Free Kindergarten. Adler founded the Ethical Culture Society in 1876, a movement devoted to the belief that man must develop morally and aesthetically as well as logically if he is to be truly educated. In 1878, at age twenty-seven, he and his friend Alfred Wolff distributed handbills through New York’s poorest areas announcing the opening of a free kindergarten, the first in the city. Eight children appeared on opening day at the converted dance hall on West Sixty-fourth Street that housed the school. Soon eighty children were enrolled under the tutelage of Miss Fanny Schwedler, the school’s originai teacher. The kindergarten’s stafl provided a full-service philanthropic institution—washing, feeding, often clothing the children. Their mothers were also helped. The kindergarten worked closely with the district nursing service and a volunteer “ladies committee” in meeting home problems.

The Workingman’s School. In 1880 Adler established the Workingman’s School in New York, an institution to model innovative techniques far superior to what he called the “revolting” practices of the day. Adler condemned the “common schools,” saying they were organized as a “combination of the cotton mill and railroad with the model State-prison. . . . From one point of view the children are regarded as automatons; from another, as India rubber bags; from a third, as so much raw material. They must move in step, and exactly alike.” Adler was determined that this new institution should have meaning and interest at its center. The “ethical ideal of progress” was to pervade every course of study. History, for example, was to be taught as the sweep of civilization’s advance in the “direction of democracy, liberty, equality, and fraternity,” not the serving up of “dry facts hardly connected among themselves.” Science was to be the study of the facts of nature through firsthand contact whenever possible. The reading tastes of the students were to be “watchfully cultivated” and composition “taught as art” with “little pieces complete in meaning” produced regularly in both narrative and descriptive formats. Students were encouraged to observe, to reason independently, and to refer, whenever possible, to original writings as support for their reasoning. The school flourished, and in the 1890s its name was changed to the Ethical Culture School and it was moved to a site on Central Park West, where a special laboratory, food study, and cooking were introduced. On 27 December 1891 a reporter from the New York Tribune wrote, “Eureka! I have found it at last! A school where children actually like to go. A school where the shiftless boy with the good memory does not stand higher than the painstaking boy who may possess ten times his mental powers. ... A school which teaches the eye and the ear and educates the fingers while it is expanding the brain.” The opportunities at Adler’s school, including classes small enough to encourage individuality, stood in strong contrast to the meager opportunities and huge classes of the city schools in the 1880s.

Effects. In 1888 Adler helped organize a society for the scientific study of children, a group that became the Child Study Association in 1907. Furthermore, Adler’s school became a model for other schools. In the 1890s the American education establishment felt the stirring of the “New Education,” a movement based on the idea of “correlating studies around a central core,” usually history, literature, or nature study. Along with the “cores” carme an injunction to relate the subjects of the curriculum, to make them meaningful. Students would be taught in a manner that interested them, because the subject matterà significance would be clear. The Ethical Culture School served as an example of how this theory could be translated into action. Although Col. Francis Parker and John Dewey are perhaps better known as the founding fathers of progressive education in America, Felix Adler’s contribution was to illustrate how a school could provide a cooperative social enterprise in connection with an ethical end in education.

Sources

Felix Adler, Creed and Deed (New York: Putnam, 1877), p. 63;

Robert Holmes Beck, American Progressive Education: 1875-1930 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1965), pp. 16–51.