Ralph Borsodi

WHEN we were considering shaking the dust of the city from our feet, the school question was one which caused us a great deal of worry. Our boys were seven and eight years old; they had been going to school from the time they had entered the kindergarten classes in the city's public schools. At the time we were planning to leave the city they had already made more scholastic progress than other children of their age; one was a half-year ahead, and the other a full year ahead, of their chronological age. The credit for this, we now know, was due less to the elaborately organized public schools of New York City than to our use at home of same of the methods of child-training developed by Dr. Maria Montessori, the Italian educator, in whose theories the country was just then becoming interested. We had used the Montessori methods from the moment the boys were old enough to start feeding and dressing themselves. So impressed were we by her approach to the problem of child education that we constructed our own "didactic" apparatus because none of it was at that time on sale in this country.

Without having pushed our boys, but merely by giving them a chance to take advantage of the opportunities which the schools offered them, they were making excellent progress. Now we were committing ourselves to a way of living which would take them away from the educational advantages of city schools. Should we risk what would happen to them in one of the "littler red schoolhouses" which still abounded in 1920 in New York State? If we were confronted by such an emergency, would we prove equal to teaching them at home? We decided we would. When I compared Mrs. Borsodi to the average school-teacher in the public schools, I saw no reason why she could not teach the children just as well, if not better, at home. She might lack the technique for handling a large class, and she might not have been drilled in the syllabus required by the state Board of Regents, but when it came to individual instruction, I was confident that she could do more for the children than could public schools, no matter how well managed.

When we finally got to the country, our worst expectations were realized. The school in our district was impossible. The school board consisted of "old timers" whose principal concern was to keep the tax rate down. Not only were the teachers which the board selected unequal to their responsibilities, but the social and moral atmosphere was bad. In that respect it was worse than the city. There at least the contacts of our boys with children whom we considered undesirable were limited. And the number of children made it possible to select only those for companionship of whom we approved. In a small school, such as that with which we had to contend, the damage which the bullies or perverts are able to do is all out of proportion to the damage which they can do in a large one. The situation in our district, and I believe in the country generally, has in the past decade shown great improvement. The coming of the school bus has made it possible to eliminate most of the impoverished one-room schools, and in the large consolidated schools which have taken their place, city conditions of school organization are to a large extent duplicated.

We first tried cooperation with the school board and with the teachers. Most of the board members proved impossible. When we talked about educational problems to them, we found ourselves talking in a foreign tongue. The teachers were, in general, not quite so hopeless; at least they knew what we were talking about. But most of them were immature; most of them had been more or less ruined by the rigid regimentation which the state required of them. We did manage to win the cooperation of the first teacher to whom the boys were turned over, and as long as she was in charge of the school she tried to make the conventional scheme work. But the next teacher resented bitterly our interest, and reluctantly we decided that this method of trying to make the country school endurable was love's labor lost.

We finally decided to take the boys out of school altogether.

A talk with the county superintendent of education won his cooperation. In fact, he decided that the sort of education our boys would receive under the plan we outlined would more than meet the requirements of the law. Our plan was to use the regular textbooks, to follow the state procedure in teaching as laid down in the syllabus of each subject, and to have one of the public-school teachers who lived in the neighborhood come in once each month to put the boys through an examination which would insure their finishing up each year precisely as well as did the boys attending public school. This plan, we believed, would prepare them for high-school even though they had none of the "benefits" of classwork for a few years.

Thus began our experiment in domestic education. And again, individual production proved its superiority to mass production. Mrs. Borsodi found it possible to give the boys, in two hours' desk work, all the training which they were supposed to get, according to the state, in a whole schoolday plus the work which they were supposed to do at home. One of her first discoveries was that the training of the boys on such sheer fundamentals as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division had been so poor that mathematical progress and understanding were almost impossible. She made the boys retrace their steps. Some conscientious drilling on the A, B, Cs, and they were then able to gallop through the more difficult parts of arithmetic. Working closely with them, she knew whether or not they really understood. She did not have to rely upon an examination to find out - an examination which revealed little to the teacher because of its mechanical limitations. Two hours of such study, I agreed with Mrs. Borsodi, were sufficient for the sort of thing upon which the public schools concentrated; the rest of the day would prove of more educational value to the boys if devoted to reading and play. The play, in such a home, was just as educational as the reading. Productive and creative activities in the garden, the kitchen, the workshop, the loom-room furnished the boys opportunities to "play" in ways since adopted as regular procedure by the progressive schools. In our home, however, such play was directly related to useful functions; they were not merely interesting exercises.

Best of all, the new scheme furnished plenty of time for reading. The reading seemed to us all important. One of the terrible things which the average school does to its pupils is to kill their love for books. All books, to the child who has had to "read" in class, tend to become textbooks. The poetry, plays, novels, essays which are parts of their courses in English are read, not to furnish rich experiences and to expand the imagination, but as subjects for recitation and grammatical analysis. This is a process which dissects what should be a living thing, and the corpse of a poem which the child is made to study is no more what the artists who created it intended it to be than the corpse which medical students dissect is a living, breathing human being. The reading of Ivanhoe was a part of the prescribed course of English in the public school during the years they attended the district school. They were required to read in class a paragraph at a time daily. The idea horrified me. So I suggested that they read the whole story through at home without regard to their class work. The result more than pleased me. The boys discovered that Ivanhoe was a fascinating story; one of them read it through several times before tiring of it. Instead of hating the story, they learned to love it.

As a result of our insistence upon the fact that reading was fun, rather than work, books came to play naturally the part in their lives which they should play in every educated person's existence. Their imaginations were broadened; the provincialism of city and country so prevalent today became impossible to them; even the textbooks acquired, by sympathetic magic, an entirely different significance from that which they develop in schools. Instead of consisting of lessons to be memorized in preparation for "exams," they were found to be keys to the accumulated knowledge of mankind. We found, however, that the Encyclopaedia Britannica was better for this purpose than all their textbooks put together.

Most parents will probably shrink from considering such an undertaking because of the amount of time they believe they would have to devote to it. But such a supposition is a mistaken one. It really does not take much time. We have acquired our notions about the number of hours children should study daily from the amount of time which they usually spend in school. There is a dreary waste of time inescapable in the process of mass education. Most of the time of the children in public schools is devoted to waiting, not studying. Studying of a sort is prescribed as a means of filling in the time devoted to waiting. The children wait in classes, and they wait between classes. Occasionally there is an educational contact between teacher and pupil. In between these contacts, the children are kept out of mischief by an amazingly ingenious series of time-filling exercises. What I consider an educational contact is usually a fortunate accident in our conventional schools. Education is the exception, not the rule, because only when a child feels a need for information and explanation, and feels it emotionally and intellectually and not mechanically, is that educational contact established. Mostly when these needs develop in the lives of school children, the routine of the schoolroom prevents the teacher from responding to it, and the hunger is dissipated and replaced by boredom.

Our experience showed that in such a home as we were establishing these opportunities abounded. Education was really reciprocal; in the very effort to educate the boys, we educated ourselves. Indeed, it is a notion of mine that no real educational influence is exerted upon the pupil unless there is also an incidental educational effect upon the teacher. The average public school is operated upon the theory that this personal relationship is unwise; that the relationship should be impersonal, objective, and mechanical, the example of Socrates and the peripatetic school to the contrary notwithstanding.

With our method, we not only managed to avoid the handicap of a poor school, but the whole Borsodi family seemed to be going to school. But it proved to be a school so different from that to which most of us have become accustomed that I have had to invent a special name for it – the school of living.

In this school the members of the family, old and young, and those who have lived with us, have been both faculty and students. The subject which they studied has been living, the pedagogic system has been what might be called the work-play method, the textbooks have been anything and everything printed which touched upon the problems of the good life in any way. The absence of formality in this school may deceive the uninitiated, and the fact that a systematic educational activity is going forward may be overlooked. For that reason I once put down the various projects which have in one way or another been the subjects of our study, and found that they formed a fairly comprehensive curriculum falling into four major divisions - Art and Science, Management, History, Philosophy.

Philosophy is a subject remote and distant from life as it comes to most people in school. Yet there is no reason why it should be. We need desperately philosophy as a guide to life. We need it as a tool with which to train thought - logic for everyday use. But we need it also to form values and habits. We need for every-day living (1) economic policies, (2) physiological, (3) social, (4) biological, (5) psychological habits; and (6) religious, (7) moral, (8) political (9) educational, (10) individual values. Why should we not approach the practical questions which fall under these various academic classifications from a philosophic point of view? Yet as a matter of fact we make most of our decisions – or acceptances of decisions made by others--with utter disregard of their philosophic implications.

History is another subject which undergoes a transformation when it too is domesticated. History really has three aspects with us: (1) past - which is the aspect to which it is usually confined; (2) current history – to which the schools have only in recent years awakened; and (3) future history, which is to me most important of all. We have to make plans, we have to adopt policies, we have to determine values - but these cannot be formulated wisely unless one projects past and present into the future. Yet there is scarcely a day in our lives when such planning might not be made to add immensely to our comfort and happiness if it were approached from a historical standpoint.

Art and science - sundered by the specialists into whose care their study has been intrusted by our schools - need to be brought together in selecting and preparing food, in designing clothes and costumes, in building and furnishing our homes. We need more chemists in our kitchens, and fewer in our laboratories; just as we need more artists in them and fewer in our large advertising agencies. Every single step in practical living has both its artistic and its scientific aspects, and we do not live richly unless we bring to bear upon these apparently humble and yet all-important living problems all the accumulated wisdom and skill of the ages.

Finally, we need to study management - the management of living, not of business. We have management problems as individuals, as families, as civic groups - why should we not apply to home problems the care and thought and attention which we now bestow upon production, purchasing, marketing, and finance in business? Every family has to finance itself; every family has purchasing of many kinds to carry on - and how poorly that is done only those familiar with Consumers' Research can realize; every family markets services or produce, and practically every family produces more or less in its kitchens, sewing-rooms, gardens. Under the scheme of living with which we have been experimenting, domestic and individual production becomes so immeasurably more important, that study of it is essential if it is to be efficiently carried on.

Here are most of the subjects taught in our schools and universities, but in a new guise. As we have studied them they are not subjects so much as essential parts of the whole problem of living. In the schools, specialization and the division of labor among the teachers, and preparation for a life of specialization and the division of labor among the students, has led to the isolation of each particular subject. In the intense concentration upon each narrow field, the relationship of each subject to life as a whole is distorted and the true significance of what is studied is obscured. We ought, for instance, to study chemistry in order that we may live more richly; instead, we live in order to develop and promote and expand chemical activity and chemical industry. Means and ends are thus reversed, just as in our factories today men and women take it quite for granted that it is sane to devote their lives to the production of something to be sold or marketed, instead of devoting the best part of each day to the creation or production of something which enriches their own lives.

In nothing is the present-day mistakes of educational institutions more apparent to me than in the separation of art and science into separate, air-tight, and mutually opposed specialities. We have not only separate teachers and separate courses--we have separate schools for the arts and for the sciences, with not a little contempt on the part of each group for those devoting themselves to the other. As a result, we are busily producing artists who are ignorant of science, and engineers who are ignorant of art. If beauty and richness be considered the ends and objects of living, and the scientific and engineering techniques the means for attaining this end, then we are actually producing painters, writers, sculptors, poets who are supposed to specialize on the ends or objects of living, and scientists, engineers, chemists who are taught the means but not the ends to be attained. The result is a sterile art, divorced from life, and a meaningless multiplication of sky-scrapers, subways, sewers, dams, bridges, and engineering works of all kinds.

In the homely things of life, so important in the aggregate, this separation of art and science is now almost universal. For instance, take such a homely thing as bread - the staff of life. Bread ought to be nutritious and it ought to be tasty. One without the other is an absurdity. Yet we have chemists in our universities studying bread scientifically. They produce all sorts of facts about vitamins, about fermentation, about nutrition. And then we have, even today, many housewives baking bread and governing their approach to the problem primarily by taste. The one sees bread as an object, scientifically; the other sees it as a flavor much as might an artist. Because of the housewife's ignorance of science, she may ruin her family's health; because of the scientist's ignorance of art, bread is produced which is unfit for consumption by cultivated palates. Of the two, the scientist may actually do more harm than the housewife, though it is hard to be certain about the matter. At least the housewife's bread may taste well and so add to the pleasures of the table, but the scientist may reduce eating to the level of stoking a boiler.

Some day I hope a group of intelligent and cultured people may find it worth while to establish such a school of living. Such a school, if it included enough families to determine really what is the good life experimentally, would furnish a demonstration of how to live to which the whole world might listen. Such a group would demonstrate that it is possible for men and women to make themselves independent and economically secure, and that centering educational activities directly upon the problems of living would add immeasurably to mankind's happiness and comfort.

The world is badly in need of such a demonstration. All that the Borsodi family has thus far managed to do has been to show how badly it is needed.