Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Emma Goldman 101
design and create a set. Those students who are more adept to working with tools could help build
a set that would reflect the story of the text and the creativity of the students themselves. Those
students who are creative writers could help develop the text into a script. The possibilities are
endless and what ultimately happens is this book slowly comes to life for the students.
Since the book itself would be acted out as a theatrical production, the process of actually
critically looking at the text becomes important. Characters in the play would have to have
personalities developed so the students would have to attempt to get into the minds of the
individual that he or she would be playing. The abstract story in the book becomes more and
more real and students start to look at it more holistically instead of linearly with the hope of
making a “good grade” at the end of the class. Of course approaching a text in this manner would
take a longer period of time than just reading it and memorizing certain details of the book that
will be forgotten as soon as a test is over. What one should question is which example would be
more appropriate in educating students? Do we want to teach our students to memorize a great
deal of abstract data that will be forgotten as soon as they are out of school, or would we rather our
students be able to approach things with a critical mind and view them holistically, developing
skills and techniques that they can apply to everyday tasks?
CONCLUSION
Emma Goldman dedicated her life to being a voice for those oppressed, to speaking out for the
rights of workers, women, and for children and to standing up against any form of authoritarianism.
She was also instrumental bringing the ideas of the Modern School and its philosophy to this
country. Because of her beliefs and determination in advocating her views she became very
unpopular with those in power and the government which resulted in her being jailed numerous
times and several death threats were made against her. It was with her support for the Russian
Revolution of 1917, when the Communists and Bolsheviks took over power in that country that
she was perceived as more of a threat to the United States. She was also very outspoken about
the First World War and finally, during one of many Red Scares in the United States, she was
deported back to Russia in 1920, even though she was a legal citizen and resident of the United
States. She spent only a few years in Russia before she escaped that region, once again railing
against overt authoritarianism of the Soviet government. She eventually settled in Canada and in
1940 at the age of 70 she died of a stroke and was brought back to this country and buried in
Chicago.
The last Modern School in the United States that Emma Goldman worked so tirelessly to
start in this country closed in the early 1950s, although students and educators of these Modern
Schools started meeting again in the 1970s to continue to promote its ideas and philosophy.
Though it made it through several Red Scares in the early twentieth century in the United States,
the Modern School could not survive McCarthyism of the 1950s and several leftist groups such
as the Communists and Anarchists were attacked for their philosophical and ideological beliefs.
Since the Modern School in the United States were founded and supported by the Anarchists,
they eventually became an ideological victim of those dark times.
The question that we should be asking is not what the Modern School provided to the landscape
of contemporary education, but what it should have provided if the contemporary formal
educational setting had listened. At the time of the Modern Schools, formal schools were very
rigid and structured in their classroom setting, and testing, grades, and competitiveness were
valued over students’ ability to learn and grow independently. What has happened now, however,
is that the formal developmental and behavioral psychological model has become more and more
pervasive in the contemporary school setting and standardized tests have become the only norm
for evaluating a persons intelligence and ability to learn (even though research has demonstrated