Alternative schools of the past have been briefly researched.
Each member has chosen a school of interest. Today Nicole will present Mary Ward Catholic Secondary School, Malcolm will present Black Mountain College and Amber will present Deep Springs.
I. Mary Ward Catholic Secondary School
Nicole's research is based on a visit to this school and information derived from the Toronto Catholic District School Board's website for the school.
This school is unique for the city of Toronto in that students create their own schedules. They choose the classes they want to attend on a daily basis taking complete control of their schedules. They are not "expected" to attend class but are given 2 years to meet their grade level requirements. Discussions arose when members of the collective wondered if students without internal motivators would succeed in this environment.
II. Black Mountain College
March 14, 2009
Black Mountain College, 1933—1956
Presentation emphasized democratic structure of college as a whole as well as in individual classrooms. No legal controls from outside; owned and administered by faculty; student officers participated in meetings and decision making for college.
Students responsible for their own education. No distinction between curriculum and extracurricular activities; holistic approach; living, eating and sleeping on campus; students took part in labour and farm work, produced food.
Anti-academic, pro-experimentation, initially no grades.
Josef Albers aimed for highly structured, anti-academic classes, with strong experimentation.
Times changed: growth of administrative body; by 1949 students wanted degrees, students were becoming more conservative and wanted more conventional college structure that conformed to college system.
Monetary problems forced closure in 1956.
Discussed major figures: John Andrew Rice, Josef Albers and Charles Olson.
________________________________________________________________________
Black Mountain College : experiment in art
edited by Vincent Katz ; with essays by Martin Brody [et al]. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.
The Arts at Black Mountain College
Mary Emma Harris. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987.
Black Mountain College: sprouted seeds: an anthology of personal accounts
ed. Mervin Lane. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1990.
Josef Albers: to open eyes: the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale.
Frederick A. Horowitz and Brenda Danilowitz. London: Phaidon, 2006.
Great archive of scanned documents from Black Mountain College in Drunken Boat (online journal of art and literature): www.drunkenboat.com/db10/03bla/
III. Deep Springs.
Amber presented on Deep Springs, a liberal arts college in California. Here’s a bit of information about Deep Springs. She found it on the school’s website. This image is also from the school's website and shows the upper ranch.
- school’s campus includes an alfalfa farm and a cattle ranch
- ground rules: no drugs or alcohol, students not allowed to leave campus except for one term out of twelve
- three pillars of the school are academics, labour, and self-governance (“in order to help students prepare themselves for lives of service to humanity”)
- ACADEMICS: small, rigorous, seminar-like classes; the two requisite courses are public speaking and composition; all students must be proficient in oral and written expression
- LABOUR: each student holds a different position per term and puts in approximately 20 hours per week working; labour positions include the butcher, student cook, student librarian, gardener, student cowboy
- SELF-GOVERNANCE: various committees meet to decide on the students who attend the school, what teachers will teach there, and what courses will be taught; “self-governance teaches us the benefits and limitations of a democratic process”; idea of beneficial ownership; students can and do censure, suspend, or expel students from the school
What sticks out to me about Deep Springs is the idea of self-governance (which I like), the isolation of the students from the rest of society; and that it’s all male. I also get the sense that it’s a bit elitist.
A friend of mine attended Deep Springs in the 1990s. After doing some initial research on the website, I called him up and asked him some questions. Here are some of the things he told me:
- he confirmed the elitism I picked up on (he believes you could put anyone in Deep Springs and they would succeed; it has to do with expectations and environment; but that’s definitely not the theory of the school)
- sex was deeply repressed, and there is a lot of debate around co-education (there is this idea that the school would fall apart because people would be too busy and distracted having sex with each other)
- the school holds the theory that labour is educational (but the farm doesn’t turn a profit and the school has a ranch in the middle of the desert, so in a sense it’s busy work)
- the school’s trustees are mostly former students and so are a lot of the big donors to the school; so they have a lot of power over what happens (they might say they’ll pull their money out if the school goes co-ed)
- students are so busy working and studying they don’t have much free time
- what was cool and educational was that students figured out how to do stuff on their own; they’re definitely open to trying anything
- he changed his general life trajectory (he became significantly more ambitious in terms of what he thought he could do in his life); but a lot of people enter with that sense of ambition and elitism
- some of the good stuff about Deep Springs: learning how to problem solve, learning how to think about his relationship to others and to the government, and being able to talk about ideas all the time
- there’s not a lot of diversity within the student body; it’s pretty homogenous; he believes there are some really problematic reasons for that (one reason is that DS is looking for the smartest people and they are the people who have all the educational advantages, and a person who isn’t of that background – if he is in a position to choose between Harvard and Deep Springs – he’ll probably go to Harvard)
- overall, he thinks it was pretty suspect in every dimension, but he did get a lot out of the school
RERC was particularly intrigued by the mode of self-governance and also by the strange boys club/lost boys vibe of Deep Springs. Most or all of us felt that the school should be co-ed. We all liked the idea of student cowboys. We liked some of the theories and practices of the school.
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