School Was Our Life: Remembering Progressive Education by Jane Roland Martin (review)

In School Was Our Life, Jane Roland Martin provides a moving account of her personal experiences in the early progressive education movement, later defined as constructivist, whole-child, or student-centered teaching/learning.¹ As a young girl during the Great Depression, Martin attended the legendary Little Red Schoolhouse in New York City’s Greenwich Village, then a patchworked neighborhood made of working-class homes. In the early twentieth century, “Little Red” was one of several grand experiments in universal public schooling– like the Francis W. Parker School in Chicago, Carmelita Hinton’s Putney School in Vermont, or the Marietta Johnson Organic School of Education in Fairhope, Alabama–all aimed at democratizing education and teaching for citizenship. John Dewey coined the term “New Education” to describe the movement:

If one attempts to formulate the philosophy of education implicit in the practices of the newer education, we may, I think, discover certain common principles . . . to external discipline is opposed free activity; to learning from texts and teachers, learning through experience; to acquisition of isolated skills and techniques by drill, is opposed acquisition of them as means of attaining errands which make direct vital appeal; to preparation for a more or less remote future is opposed making the most of the opportunities of present life …²

Martin was witness to a unique moment in U.S. history where new theory met new practice.

Now, this book is not about John Dewey or Francis W. Parker, though they hover politely in the background. Rather, Martin’s book concerns thirty alumni of the Little Red School House class of 1943, now in their mid-80’s, driven in their senior years to reunite, and to sing and talk about how one particular school seemed to shape who they became in life, and what they did with their life. In get-togethers, they marvel at their collective memories. In this way, School Was Our Life is a descriptive phenomenological account of something deeply felt more than a compendium of best practices in constructivism, or a history lesson about the progressive education era. Marveling at their collective marveling, Martin begins like all qualitative researchers by asking, why weren’t these stories told? What could we learn from hearing their voices? She intuits a gap in our knowledge. “For reasons that I have only come to understand in the course of writing this book, Little Red is scarcely mentioned in the standard histories of American education.”³ Armed with a Spencer Foundation award, Martin returns to these informal gatherings with a formal research question: “What, if any, do you believe to be the long-term effects of having attended Little Red?”⁴

The responses, washed by memory and time, range from the ineffable [“it is so much a part of the way that I have lived my life, I can’t imagine what my life would be like if I hadn’t … I think progressive education was the matrix for which all of my adult success in overcoming failures stems”]⁵ and the descriptive [“we also studied about transportation, that is, we talked about the boats that bring things in, the trains that bring things in, the trucks that bring things in. Transportation. We visited all these places: the train yards, oh and also the buses, bus stations, the boat piers where the boats were tied up”].⁶ Martin writes about a childhood spent wrapping mummies, conducting in 4/4 time (floor, door, window, ceiling), reenacting John Peter Zenger’s libel trial, and collectively researching the Black Plague. Most activities were rendered into magazines, plays, and musicals. The students at Little Red studied Native American cultures, built a two-story pueblo in their very classroom, and hiked recovered trails in modern Manhattan.

According to Miss Stall’s diary, after my class goes on a walk through the Village along what once were Indian [sic] paths, she reads them a story about fishing which the Indians prayed to their net and thank the...