Benutzer:Polibil/Ferrer Center

Das Ferrer Center war ein anarchistisches Kulturzentrum in Manhatten, das eine nach dem Vorbild der Escuela Moderna gegründete und durch Francisco Ferrer inspirierte Schule beherbegte. Die Schule wurde 1910 in New York gegründet und zog 1914 nach Stelton, New Jersey um, wo sie den Mittelpunkt einer anarchistischen Siedlung darstellte. Sie schloss 1953.^[1] a^[1]

Ferrer Center

Francisco Ferrer, nach dem das Projekt benannt wurde

Im Jahr 1909 wurde der Freidenker, Pädagoge und Anarchist Francisco Ferrer in Barcelona hingerichtet, was ihn schnell zum Märtyrer machte. Die daraus resultierende Ferrer-Bewegung führte zur Gründung antiklerikaler Privatschulen nach dem Modell seiner Escuela Moderna auf der ganzen Welt.

Am 12. Juni 1910 gründete eine Gruppe von 22 Anarchisten und Sympathisanten die Francisco Ferrer Association in New York City. Gemeinsam errichteten sie ein Kulturzentrum mit angeschlossener Abendschule, das sich zu einer experimentellen Tagesschule und schließlich zu einer Siedlung außerhalb von New Brunswick, New Jersey, ausweitete. Der Verein bestand über 40 Jahre und hatte drei Ziele: die Verbreitung von Ferrers Schriften, die Organisation von Treffen zum Jahrestag seines Todes und die Gründung von Schulen nach seinem Vorbild in den Vereinigten Staaten.^[1]

Das Hauptquartier des Vereins, das Ferrer Center, veranstaltete eine Vielzahl von Kulturveranstaltungen: Vorträge über Literatur, Debatten über aktuelle Themen, avantgardistische Kunst und Aufführungen, Tanzveranstaltungen und Kurse für interessierte Gäste.^[1] Auch wenn viele Lehrer eine Anti-Establishment-Haltung vertraten, wurden relativ klassische Themen unterrichtet. Einige Kurse wurden von angesehenen Personen unterrichtet: Die Maler Robert Henri und George Bellows unterrichteten Aktzeichnen, der Sohn von Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, Bayard Boyesen, unterrichtete vergleichende Literatur und Will Durant unterrichtete die Geschichte der Philosophie. Das Zentrum veranstaltete auch einen Abendkurs für Englisch, dessen Themen oft die Geschichte des Proletariats und aktuelle Angelegenheiten umfassten. Eine Gruppe studierte Esperanto. Vorträge behandelten freies Denken, Religion, Sexualität und Hygiene. Margaret Sanger schlug Müttertreffen zur Geburtenkontrolle vor. An Wochenenden veranstaltete das Zentrum Diskussionsrunden mit Rednern wie dem Journalisten Hutchins Hapgood, dem Dichter Edwin Markham und dem Reporter Lincoln Steffens.^[1]

The folklorist Moritz Jagendorf started a "Free Theatre" at the Center in late 1914. The group performed new manuscripts, including a world premiere of a Lord Dunsany drama, as well as their own original plays, which had social themes. The theater had a very limited budget and some of its performers struggled to speak English.Vorlage:Sfn They also hosted Floyd Dell's troupe and others from Greenwich Village.Vorlage:Sfn

The Center had an air of radical affability and cosmopolitanism. Historian Laurence Veysey described the Center, with its unrestricted discussions on social subjects and wide representation of nationalities, as potentially the country's least inhibited and most stimulating small venue at the time.Vorlage:Sfn The Center's radical politics made it a haven for anti-capitalist revolutionaries,Vorlage:Sfn anarchists, and libertarians.Vorlage:Sfn It hosted children from the 1912 Lawrence textile strike, supported Frank Tannenbaum's 1914 mobilization of the unemployed, and fed protesters.Vorlage:Sfn The Center's formation coincided with a resurgence of interest in radical politics: the rise of syndicalism, multiple revolutions (including Russia), and strike actions. While assimilation had eroded immigrant interest in radical politics for several decades, with this optimistic turn, anarchism had begun to escape the stigma of the 1901 McKinley assassination.Vorlage:Sfn By 1914, the Center's adult membership was in the hundredsVorlage:Sfn and Jewish people formed the largest contingent of its many represented nationalities.Vorlage:Sfn The social foundation of the New York Ferrer movement was the relationship between Jewish immigrants, who valued education, and domestic Americans, who approached teaching with alacrity.Vorlage:Sfn

The Association and Modern School leaders were mostly domestic Americans.Vorlage:Sfn Among the early leaders, only Joseph J. Cohen was an immigrant, and he arrived three years after the Center's founding. The rest were not immigrants: the early spokesperson and first Association president Leonard Abbott, Harry Kelly, and early financier Alden Freeman. Journalist Hutchins Hapgood, who lectured at the Center, came to write about Yiddish culture following his interactions there.Vorlage:Sfn Gallerist Carl Zigrosser wrote of the Center expanding his understanding of New York society beyond the knowledge he had received from books.Vorlage:Sfn

Several anarchists from the association decided to take the school out to the country.Vorlage:Sfn

The Center served as a model for schools across the United States in Chicago, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, and Seattle. But while these schools mostly closed within several years, the schools in Stelton and Mohegan would last for decades.Vorlage:Sfn

New York Modern School

As was originally intended, the Ferrer Association established a day school for children within the Ferrer Center in October 1911. In practice, the New York Ferrer Modern School was based less on Ferrer's method than his memory. The New York school's founders were propelled by their sense of injustice at Ferrer's execution and their belief in the liberatory prospect of his approach, but they made no concerted effort to replicate his example. The American movement for progressive education was a more likely influence on the New York founders' interest in starting a school, as was the importance put upon education in Jewish culture. New York anarchists believed in the liberatory role of the school partly because, as European anarchist émigrés, they believed in the power of ideas to change the future and wanted their children to share their values.Vorlage:Sfn

The school's early character was unplanned and undogmatic. The Association sought "the reconstruction of society upon the basis of freedom and justice" and accordingly, the founders wanted their school to let children develop freely and through this freedom, develop a sense of social justice. The Association was essentially anarchist, unwedded to a particular ideal, but to the free expression of opinion and exchange of ideas. The school would be both a protected island against the influence of middle-class America, and a force to propel cultural and political revolution.Vorlage:Sfn

The Association found little agreement on school policy apart from that education was a process of educing a children's latent talents rather than a process of imposing dogma.Vorlage:Sfn The founders had little experience with education or parenting, apart from some having taught in the Workmen's Circle radical Sunday Schools,Vorlage:Sfn and trusting no authority, would hold long debates with no effect. Some Association members interfered in the classroom to the objection of other members.Vorlage:Sfn The day school teacher was not expected to uphold a religious or social dogma but instead to "have the libertarian spirit" and answer children's questions truthfully.Vorlage:Sfn The teachers had low salaries and high turnover, including multiple scrambles for staffing. No principal stayed longer than a year between 1911 and 1916.Vorlage:Sfn

The Ferrer Modern School also suffered its environmental conditions. The Center's original location at 6 St. Mark's Place was established in haste and could not house a day school for lack of outdoor play space and park access. It moved several blocks north to 104 East Twelfth Street just before the school opened for the school year in 1911.Vorlage:Sfn This location had an outdoor play space but the building continued to lack standard school equipment and was less accessible to radical families, so the school moved farther north in October 1912 to an older building in East Harlem, 63 East 107th Street, which had a stronger immigrant population and rested three blocks from Central Park.Vorlage:Sfn The three-story building included an unusable ground level floor, a large room on the second floor where two classes occurred at once, and a small office and kitchen on the third floor, where the adult anarchists congregated.Vorlage:Sfn

Enrollment rose despite the school's conditions. By 1914, the school taught 30 children and turned away half its applicants. Historian Laurence Veysey attributes this rise to the expressiveness and love shared between students and their teachers,Vorlage:Sfn and to a cultural "union of enthusiasms" in the Ferrer movement, in which new Jewish immigrants, whose families tended towards warm affection and interest in education, met a body of Americans who equally wanted to be their teachers. The day school's students were predominantly from immigrant, garment industry worker families with radical or anarchist politics.Vorlage:Sfn Like the Association itself, early principals of the day school were native born, largely with degrees from Ivy League schools and not Jewish. They were possibly propelled by their interest in upending the status quo, altruism for the poor, and a curiosity for bohemian life in the ghetto, as juxtaposed against their urban, predictable upper-middle class lives.Vorlage:Sfn

The school moved multiple times and ultimately closed in 1953.Vorlage:Sfn

Students would "often" not learn to read until ten or twelve years old.Vorlage:Sfn

Stelton colony

Selection

Harry Kelly arranged the move to Stelton, New Jersey, about 30 miles from New York City. The anarchist printer and Association member selected the site, a farm within two miles of a railroad station. The group bought the land and resold plots to colonists at fair market value while setting aside land for the school. As anarchists, the colonists did not uphold a common doctrine towards property, and disagreed on whether private property should be preserved or abolished. Plots were individually owned such that, in the spirit of anarchist volunteerism, anyone could sell and exit the colony at their prerogative.Vorlage:Sfn ... They hoped the colony could form the center of a national libertarian education movement.Vorlage:Sfn

Stelton Modern School

The school at Stelton was founded in 1914. It floundered in its first years. In 1916, the socialist William Thurston Brown, who had experience operating modern schools, became Stelton's principal.Vorlage:Sfn

Stelton's lessons were non-compulsory and the school had no discipline or set curriculum, same as it was in New York City. Students joined in craft and outdoor activities. In addition to students from colonist families, between 30 and 40 children boarded at the school in what was formerly a farmhouse. Next to the farmhouse, Stelton built an open-air dormitory.Vorlage:Sfn Their winters were cold. Margaret Sanger's daughter died of pneumonia contracted in the boarding house.Vorlage:Sfn

Nellie and James Dick operated the boarding house for children, known as the Living House. The couple had formerly opened Ferrer schools in their original England and elsewhere in the United States. They promoted freedom and spontaneity in education. In their dorms, the Dicks taught personal responsibility.Vorlage:Sfn

In 1920, Elizabeth and Alexis Ferm became Stelton's co-principals. The couple had previously run schools in New York City. Their methods emphasized manual work and crafts—e.g., pottery, gardening, carpentry, dance—held in the schoolhouse's workshops. Alternatively, students could study in the library with James Dick. Following disagreement with some parents, who wanted the school to put more emphasis on reading and class-struggle politics, the Ferms left the school in 1925 rather than compromise their technique.Vorlage:Sfn

The school briefly floundered between 1925 and 1928, when the Dicks returned as co-principals. They renovated the dilapidated children's dormitories, resurrected the children-run periodical, and added a range of adult activities. The Dicks left in 1933 to pursue their longtime wish of opening their own Modern School in Lakewood, New Jersey.Vorlage:Sfn

The Ferms were recruited to return in the mid-1930s, when the school population declined as the Great Depression depleted family incomes. The American government established a military base adjacent to and with negative effects for the colony. Elizabeth Ferm died in 1944 and her husband retired four years later. The school had diminished to 15 pupils at the time. The school closed in 1953.Vorlage:Sfn

Legacy

Laurence Veysey described the association as "one of the most notable—though unremembered—attempts to create a counter-culture in America".Vorlage:Sfn Of its accomplishments, Veysey counted the association of (1) college-educated native Americans with recent, Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, and of (2) intellectuals with laborers. Veysey called the Ferrer Modern School one of the few "truly advanced" American progressive schools of the 1920s.Vorlage:Sfn The Friends of the Modern School was founded in 1973. It was incorporated as a not-for-profit organization in around 2005 with the mission of preserving the legacy of the Stelton Modern School. Regular reunions of former students continued until the late 2010s and were recorded and are available at the Rutgers archives. The records of the Friends, as well as the Modern School itself, can be found at Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers.^[2]

Notes

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References

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Kathlyn Gay, Martin Gay: Encyclopedia of Political Anarchy. ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, California 1999, ISBN 978-0-87436-982-3, Modern School Movement, S. 145–146 (archive.org).
Kathlyn Gay, Martin Gay: Encyclopedia of Political Anarchy. ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, California 1999, ISBN 978-0-87436-982-3, Stelton School and Colony, S. 197–198 (archive.org).
Laurence Veysey: The Communal Experience: Anarchist and Mystical Counter-Cultures in America. Harper & Row, New York 1973, ISBN 978-0-06-014501-9, The Ferrer Colony and Modern School, 77–177 (google.com).

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