Tumbling Toward Curriculum Reform

[Julie]

On Tumblr, you can travel along with me as my thoughts morph from some pretty wide-world questions about how our general education curriculum should be reformed to encourage deep and lasting learning, to a much more specific exploration of education movements of the last century, specifically the Modern School Movement of the early 20th century, and the philosophical anarchists who championed this learning, among whom were members of my family.

My text post on tumblr, "Curriculum Reform or Pondering the Possibility of a NEW Modern Sch... explores my first questions, and asks the reader to think with me about how we learn, why we remember what we learn, and why we have a current system that seems so antithetical to these ideas. From there I move into a new post, "An Imagined Chat about Learning, Testing and School Reform.".

Exploring the idea of putting up a video link was a challenge for me. Blogging, for me, is all about text -- and occasionally about images. Working in a variety of modalities was a stretch -- but in a very productive way. I found a lovely video clip that consists of an interview with Nellie Dick, one of the educators from the Modern School in Stelton, NJ, where my father and my aunt Emma went to the school that existed there in various forms from 1915 to 1953.

The quote that I felt best embodied some of my thoughts about where..., and where it might go, is from Harry Kelly, an anarchist who was very much a colleague and cohort of my grandfather's in a number of educational and living experiments/colonies/communities that they developed, worked in and led during the first half of the 20th century. Unfortunately, I don't know when he made this statement, and the attribution's not particularly helpful. Another topic for more research...

I had some trouble embedding this old photo, but I finally got it to look almost as I wanted it to. It's very airy and free and joyful, and personifies, in some way, the longing that I feel for an educational system that might be symbolized by this image.

It's my hope that some of you will be as fascinated by this subject as I am, and want to know more about the Modern School Movement, and what it may have to teach those of us who feel at a loss to influence or change current trends in education. This website is a good place to begin.

And in completion, I taped a sound clip this morning. What I wanted was an interview with my 95-year-old father about his experiences in Stelton, at the school. But he has a hard time formulating words for his thoughts, although the thoughts are all still there, and the pressure of the microphone was a bit too much for him. So I recorded some of my own thoughts, and me telling a couple of his stories about Stelton.

What this mini-inquiry has given me is a burning desire to know more about the Modern School movement, and to think further about how we might begin a serious overhaul of the current system of education and its curriculum, to move toward some of the ideals of the richer learning experiences that always arise from a curriculum of choice.

[Wendy Farkas]

Julie, I think we all deal with this dilemma in one form or another. You have first hand experience with differentiated education, however, because your family is in the thick of it. I have no personal experience to rely on because I barely remember my grade school education and no one in my family did anything out of the "ordinary" when they were in schools. Public schools then are virtually the same as public schools now and isn't that a comment on the sad state of affairs?

[Sonali]

My grandparents and my parents were involved with education as well, but unfortunately, they didn't quite have the Montessori school experience. I'm lucky to have been a student in a Montessori classroom and other schools that practiced some of the same values.