gat

2nd Rule—Unceasing kindness in tone, look, word, and action, to all children
without exception, by every teacher employed so as to create a real affection
and full confidence between the teachers and the taught.
The Owenite colony had what we now call a theory of holistic schooling as its foundation, Owen
was a genuine messiah figure and his colony operated in a part of Indiana which was removed
from prying eyes. New Harmony, as it was called, was the center of the transatlantic upper-class
world’s fascinated attention in its short existence. Yet it fell apart in three years, slightly less time
than it took for John Dewey’s own Lab School to be wrecked by Owenite principles unmistakably
enough to suggest to Dewey it would be the better if he got out of Chicago. And so he did,
transferring to Teachers College in Manhattan, where, in time, his Lincoln School carried on the
psychological traditions of New Harmony before it, too, ultimately failed.
The Schools Of Hellas
Wherever it occurred, schooling through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (up until the last
third of the nineteenth) heavily invested its hours with language, philosophy, art, and the life of
the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome. In the grammar schools of the day, little pure
grammar as we understand it existed; they were places of classical learning. Early America rested
easily on a foundation of classical understanding, one subversive to the normal standards of
British class society. The lessons of antiquity were so vital to the construction of every American
institution it’s hardly possible to grasp how deep the gulf between then and now is without
knowing a little about those lessons. Prepare yourself for a surprise.
For a long time, for instance, classical Athens distributed its most responsible public positions by
lottery: army generalships, water supply, everything. The implications are awesome— trust in
everyone’s competence was assumed; it was their version of universal driving. Professionals
existed but did not make key decisions; they were only technicians, never well regarded because
prevailing opinion held that technicians had enslaved their own minds. Anyone worthy of
citizenship was expected to be able to think clearly and to welcome great responsibility. As you
reflect on this, remember our own unvoiced assumption that anyone can guide a ton of metal
traveling at high speed with three sticks of dynamite sloshing around in its tanks.
When we ask what kind of schooling was behind this brilliant society which has enchanted the
centuries ever since, any honest reply can be carried in one word: None. After writing a book
searching for the hidden genius of Greece in its schools, Kenneth Freeman concluded his unique
study The Schools of Hellas in 1907 with this summary, "There were no schools in Hellas." No
place boys and girls spent their youth attending continuous instruction under command of
strangers. Indeed, nobody did homework in the modern sense; none could be located on
standardized tests. The tests that mattered came in living, striving to meet ideals that local
tradition imposed. The word sköle itself means leisure, leisure in a formal garden to think and
reflect. Plato in The Laws is the first to refer to school as learned discussion.
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