I stumbled upon Caroline Pratt’s memoir I Learn from Children by chance today. I’d never heard of her before.
Who was she?
Caroline Pratt (1867 – 1954) was an American social thinker and progressive educational reformer whose ideas were influential in educational reform, policy, and practice..
Pratt is known as the founder of City and Country School; the inventor of unit blocks; and as the author of I Learn from Children, an autobiographical account of her life and educational experiments, philosophies and practices. Pratt's specific style of progressive education, focused on first-hand experiences, open-ended materials, and social studies..
~ Wikipedia
There is plenty to quibble with in the memoir1. She disparages knowledge, undervalues reading, and is suspicious of teachers, preferring a hands-off approach presumably derived from Rousseau.
So far so unremarkable - the same zeitgeist seized her progressive contemporaries in the UK and across Europe too. See Dalton, see Bryanston, see Bedales, Froebel, Dewey and so on.
But the photographs… oh, what a lost world they reveal!
To repeat - this was a progressive school! Its book-lined walls and regular reading time; its unflinching use of only traditional materials; its camps and dens and regular drama productions… today’s most traditional boarding prep school would seem a cauldron of modernity by comparison.
Do check out the rest of the archive. Its depiction of brave, happy, ingenious - and unsupervised - young children becomes an elegy for a world before digital technology: Haidt’s argument in 100 images.
But plenty to be dazzled by too…
“Pratt… was a special instructor in woodworking, training teachers to be proficient in skills such as gauging, squaring, sawing, chiseling, planning and boring, doweling, and chamfering.”