thumbnail of Sunday Forum; Edward Yeomans: The Other End Of The Log
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The plan for the evening is almost 8:15 so we should be should have plenty of time. Here's I'm going to say who I am. And then I want to replay to say. Who they are and something like what town you're from maybe what you do it doesn't matter but something like that. And then. It's going to say who he is. And then I'm going to interview him for a little while. But 15 minutes and then for the next hour. I'd like everybody to to ask what questions come to mind and we'll talk that way. And then at the end of that time I thought we might allow 15 minutes for ed to. Finish answers if he didn't get a chance to finish collect his thoughts and say whatever give him some time at the end. Just that said so. My name is Will Fitzhugh. I'm on the children's museum staff and I'm from Sudbury.
And let's start father you want to start as you are. Think on that I live in reading children's museum staff and direct resources. And when he got leave of Iraq recross and I were recycled you're handsome. I teach in Cambridge. But. I don't know the answer.
I mean come on. I'm live in Dorchester. Wrestle with life from the perspective of energies in this event. Courage is. Something you're not you're here. For.
Worker of the Greater Boston Pizza center present a former teacher and headmaster at the school in Cambridge we had lunch together we planned No we didn't I couldn't and decided that what I'd say first and I think I'll start I I don't know it in some ways the one things I was saying that yesterday. I think this is an opportunity for me to do something I didn't get a chance to do when I was about 10 or 11 I went to a rodeo in Tucson. And sitting in a box with a friend of mine and there was a man along in the group who was introduced to me as Uncle Bill and Uncle Bill was there for about half way that threw the thing in front and then he left. And my friend just couldn't wait to tell me at that point that it was William O Douglass. And I was you know it's sort of late. And here's an opportunity at less good Yeomans here and I can use I'm going to get away and all our stuff for some time.
You know it's funny you know when you think of having an opportunity to sit on the other end of a log with somebody and what would you ask and what would you like to find out I think one of the main sort of series of questions that come to my mind when I meet somebody who is outstanding in his field and especially in education is sort of how did you get that way and who helped and things like. So but to start off let me see things like where were you born. I was born in Chicago. Did you grow up there. Until the age of nine and our family moved to California so my father could start a school. I was really raised in Southern California in a school that was here in a school very much so yes they don't sort of think of you. I sort of felt like just like my image was New England from the beginning you know. Did you when did you come here. I came here I came to Harvard to
college and I guess I enjoyed that experience and I saw that I've lived here ever since with certain periods away. But are we swear strong Paula back to Cambridge. Did your growing up in a school environment help. How did it influence your feeling about working in schools. Well I think it had a lot to do with it. It was certainly was the. Table conversation of the family and the families friends. This was an adventure in alternative education. I suppose we would call it that now. It was not that we didn't use that term but my father came into education if this would interest you. You had a rather unusual way from having been a manufacturer in Chicago. He served on the school committee and when that came a suburb and was so instrumental and helping to develop the when I go public schools
and these this goes back to the pre-war years 19 16 17 18 that period and became so interested in education in that capacity of the sort of citizen school board member that he began writing articles. And yeah I probs began writing articles which the Atlantic Monthly published and these led to an invitation to buy a group of parents to come to California and start a school that would in fact implemented the point of view that he had described. And the Ohio Valley School still runs it. It was in its day are known as a progressive school. It's much less progressive now used to be but it's still good. It certainly sounds that way for me it was isn't selling Philip Williams in Ventura County. So what was what was the what was it like growing up and what sort of school was it.
Well it was a day school for boys and girls Elementary with many of the things that we now think about as being very modern. And mind you this school started I think in 19 21. And for example we had I went to the school as a sixth seventh eighth grader. We used to make weekly contracts with our teachers now. Contracts are something that you hear about something rather you know vague if it was not at all unusual for schools to do that in those days and we had no schedule. Teachers were in their classrooms and there were teachers of geography and modern language and so forth and it was up to us the students to decide how we would spend our time during the course of a week we had to balance it
out. So you couldn't neglect anything completely. But we had a great deal of responsibility for developing our own sequences during the course of the week and we could spend all morning for example in the library. That's what we wanted to do. Interruptus but we had to have a plan. Must've had some feeling of adventure in there like it really wasn't one of the things that comes to mind is that it must be such a deja vu in some ways I mean you must have gone through cycles of it sort of coming in. Yes I think it has been cyclical because there are many schools like that and I was dazed and then subsequently there became many fewer and more recently and the cycle has turned again and we find these many of these same devices and points of view about learning are coming coming up again and people taking them seriously. You said you were there what 6 7 8 6 7 8 or so the school itself
ran from I think kindergarten through the ninth grade but you went there three years or so I did I went there as a seventh grader I guess and stayed three years and then I went on the preparatory school was a big contrast. Yes it certainly is what was that like. Well it was a contrast in that I wasn't at all used to having someone rang a bell every 40 minutes. Tell me that no matter how interested I had become in the thing at the moment that it was more important to somebody to lay that aside and do something else even recess. This took a certain amount of adjusting. And not only that but the classes tended to be much more didactic. You were given a textbook you were it was a prep school and there were requirements and there were exams and there was an honor list and there were grades and you had privileges and you also had punishments. If you if
you failed to get your CS and so forth. I want to hear you say that was sort of the conversation at the dinner table when you were at your father's school about education sort of generally did you feel that the school you went to to prepare for college or whatever it is was backward in a way or did you feel why didn't think about it in those terms because of course the thing I liked about it was the athletics. I took the work as given as something that you had to do in order to play baseball and all the rest of the life in the dormitory as a boarding school and we had great times a boy school called a Thatcher school which some of the main no weapon in the same valley as the Ohio Valley School. And so a lot of it was a fairly happy kind of experience but I don't know that I can look back to any great stimulation intellectually.
There it was the life and the companionship. And that included the teachers who were splendid companions if not very stimulating instructors. And I got a grade for math in college was not at all difficult as a result I must say I was prepared because college teaches in very much the same way and I suppose prep schools can point to that. They DO I DO in fact prepare you for what colleges offer. I sort of I wanted to ask what Harvard was like but I sort of you came to the school in Ohio at the age to go in the seventh grade. So then before that you've been one Chicago. Yes I've been going to the one act of public schools so the sort of same question was quite a shift from there to your father's school. Yes so I suppose it was I don't even remember very well but that was not a problem at that age
people were very flexible actually adaptable. Your father's school was probably too small to have the kind of athletics that you got. Oh yeah yeah yeah. It was a made shift with a sort of sandlot teams and usual kinds of things in a small coed school as you can imagine. They're only I guess there are less than a hundred children I was school and I was and what the tour was held in London. Well it was a hundred fifty two but all boys and all high school age so we had many things in common. Being close close to an age. Did you play baseball however. No I didn't I rode none of that was new litter that was completely new. And something and something I enjoyed very much because partly because it was brand new in a way the east was new I suppose. Yes except that our family had when we were living in the Middle West had always come to Massachusetts to the ocean to the shore for summers so we had that kind of connection with this
part of the world and we still go to the same place. Think. You know it's there's so many threads to pick but one it's especially interesting to me is how you decide what you're going to do and when did you what did you think you were going to be when you were at school or. Well I think what I wanted most of all to be was a cowboy. We had horses and everybody had horses they were inexpensive and you could have two or three. And there was a pasture in lots of ways to have a horse was not at all a luxury and I lived on horseback and with my friends and and in the summers while I was there I had marvelous jobs in the mountains as a guide and as a cowboy Packer taking parties over the mountains and so had a great deal of the out-of-doors in the West and I think that's really what I wanted to be now the closest thing that I could find at college to that that was
in any sense as a profession was geology and so I prepared myself to be a geologist in college. For reasons that I don't remember too clearly partly because I was never very good at mathematics and a great deal of math was expected of us. I ceased being a geologist and didn't go on to graduate school either and that was partly I guess because I wanted a touch of the real world not the academic world and so I. Started teaching that there were going to cause you know the war came later. I've been teaching quite a while by the time World War 2 came along and I continued as a teacher throughout the war. People like I was with them. When other people chipped in. If you
write these days and. If you see any what the connections are between between that and your past or between that and your profession if any or is it totally an avocation I'd say totally an avocation. I have eyes like the sea and one of the summers when I wasn't at work in the mountains. I went to sea and sailing vessel and spent a good long summer coming across the Atlantic and so forth. And my father sailed I've always hoped to someday have a boat that I could sail and from the time came I did get one and I've been enjoying out ever since with no particular connection to my professional life. That was that was a great change and a great relaxation. Next summer I knew representing the United States or something like that and yachting in a schooner race in Canada or something. Yes yes yes that happened. Well this happened because I happen to have a very old boat.
Actually I'll be 50 this year. The design. And as boats where 50 years ago for ocean racing she's going to rig if you know what that means to mass gas. A traditional and somewhat out of date rate now and there are perhaps 20 left from that period. And so for five years ago we thought would be a nice idea for us to get together and have a kind of Regatta sail together and so forth this soon developed into a race. And the result is it was picked up by a group of enthusiastic and Blaster who and if you remember blaster was a great fishing port in the days of sailing fishing schooners. And there were international races between the
fishing schooners of Gloucester and those of Lunenburg Nova Scotia. And the tradition went on for a number of years with the Canadians winning most of them but now and then the Americans would win one and then it died with the passing of the sailing fisherman. It has now been revived and instead of fishing schooners they have schools like mine that are really pleasure boats but Quinn formed a certain rather rigid rig length and so forth. So having won the race last year I found myself being the nominee to race the Canadian winner this year so that that is a whole new adventure for me. We will go it alone and race the Canadians in July and apparently a good deal of interest is building up over this. That
sailor you know about two days and two nights something like that maybe three days. That's it's a good quick good voyage. But that's not education that's for sure. Relaxation education in another sense. Very interesting. You know for sure and I think you have an eye on your. New school. You know your brother has really I think the first thing that I.
Thought was missing with. Things and I think you. Mean you're much environmental and I don't you know we're just friends. Coming from you I was too bad I think it would be.
Very much to the point if such projects where there used to be cancer could tell us more about whether they still are if not why we used to have interesting projects that in-crowd want to do is a general problem. I don't know how you reconcile it. All I can say is that I agree that I think children need much more experience of that kind and I think one of the fundamental. Point of view about what we call open education now could have been called progressive education in the 1920s. Is that such experiences are very educated. And that children profit greatly from opportunities to work with adults in many ways as well as with each other and that the community has much to
offer to the growth and experience and maturity of children. And some schools manage that better than others I think that the practice is very uneven. It's interesting though to see how the practice is changing particularly at the secondary schools level with off campus work of all kinds that is credited. That's not just. Happenstance but it has to be carefully planned and followed through and reports written and all around it so that it becomes. It has prestige. And this of course nowadays is a very common part. Of the secondary school experience isn't it where you see this going on everywhere. It was not so long ago it wasn't. Thank you. Well perhaps it was. Yes. Yes.
Perhaps one of the. One of the organizations that I've been involved in for the last 10 years is something called the Education and Richmond program program which is an attempt to do that by way of providing a interchange of children from the inner city of Boston with students in the 12 independent schools around the city in the summertime. And we have six to seven hundred children each summer for six weeks who come to us from the inner city Boston schools and some of their teachers come with them to the campuses of the independent schools and then are brought back again for visits so forth not only during the summer but during the subsequent winter to the schools where the inner city children come from. And this is been a nice learning experience for both groups I think. Isn't it all down actually when
spread out from there to the others. But what I thought Liz was asking was what about people working in groups or what about a sense of community. Not not our kids having a chance to work in the real world or out in the community. But what about their own community building in schools that would. Is that what you were I wasn't quite sure. And I think my next open education experience and something that youngsters from this program. Something.
Like. This. Yes you are right you have that kind of learning that can take place within the classroom. Isn't it true providing the classroom is not a rigid environment with an authoritarian adult in charge of everything.
This again is one of the principles of the kind of education that we're all involved in here at the museum and at the teachers center you know wanted to help teachers see that learning can in fact take place without rigidity and authoritarianism. And that in fact the motivation for learning can be very much greater that right now the kinds of learning could very well include should and will include when it's well managed a group experience as well as an individual one doesn't have to be. It doesn't have to isolate the individual. In fact it would be poorly done if you did that. Saying that who were singing the chorus with who will look away but there was something about the convention of both of the other boys and with the teachers as
well. Yeah and also something about the the athletics I know it's confusing it seems like people are rewarded for individual excellence but there is that certainly in baseball and in rowing is that there's they certainly talk about collaborative effort but you try to form some kind of a question out of this so I guess I'd want to ask you how you were was where you sort of reinforced for for individual excellence but then there was kind of a hidden curriculum that emphasize collaborative work. How did you get. Influenced by that sort of contrast as you were getting along. It's different on a team isn't it. It's not it's not quite the same thing as the sort of community efforts group work that we're talking about where individuals have to do a lot of compromising accommodating adjusting to the same extent a team has to perfect its its
unification in a way that you couldn't expect in a democratic aura. So each has its value but they're quite different values I think. And let me do a little more on this group experience because. I had an experience along the way that I think taught me a great deal and since one of the things that we're interested in tonight is influences on a person's thinking. This was certainly a major one in mine. Having taught for eight or ten years. It got to be nine hundred thirty five or six and the depression was all around us and I was very much aware as some of you were a car. Of the dislocations in this country. It canonically among other things. And the the port was very great and anyone
with sort of normal sensibility sensitivity to try and do something about that because it seemed all wrong that there should be such enormous suffering on the one hand and so little understanding of the reasons on the other. And so in order to try and acquaint myself with. Some of the things at least that seemed to be in people's minds. I left. The kind of teaching that one would ordinarily go on to do. And I went down to Georgia and spent four years. I ended up getting a job at the University of Georgia to be sure. But it was in community organization with adults. And I took my students from the university out to the farming communities of Carroll County which is in western Georgia near the Alabama lot. And we made arrangements with the little one and two room
schools of that county of which there were 33. So such that we could have not just practiced teaching which was going on anyway. A student teacher would be out there. No one no one would follow up very closely and practice teaching was done and so forth but it was very hit or miss. Our effort was to try and involve the parents of the schools in ways which would. Perhaps draw the community in the school close more closely together. And in that way proof provide a deeper educational experience for the student teacher who hopefully when he or she graduated would repeat the experience because he had a first hand sense of success and at least had seen it working. So we proceeded to hold two parent meetings community meetings in the little twos to room schools and so forth. Night after night I was never
home and I had a moving picture projector and I showed the plow that broke the plains member and the river in those great depression films the TV films. And then there would always be somebody who would. I'd like to have something to say about what we might do to make this a better community there's always somebody in a group who has good ideas about this and students would be taking part in any way that they could. Little by little those schools began to change as the parents began to come there more often and the first thing that they seemed to agree on in two or three of the schools was that it would be nice to have a hot lunch program and see things were very elemental element and elemental Yes lunch food. Children came to school hungry literally although they were all farm kids. But the
cotton was growing right up to the front door you know all the patterns of the South at that time and surplus commodities were available. But they had not built the kitchen staff it with them their volunteer help and so forth in order to make make them available and so we helped do this and the student teachers were wonderful and worked hard and this was a good learning experience for them they got the parents involved the fathers came and built and the mothers came and cooked and so forth and it went on from that to canning plant so that there could be fruits and vegetables and meat. And it went on to other kinds of services that the community needed. We brought the first tractors into that county. There had been no tractors. And Labor had gone off by that time too. To the war industries which are beginning to this was thirty nine by now which were beginning to call on manpower and the farms were left with a shortage so machinery became important to combine harvesters and all that. And here my
country experience in California was very useful because I dealt with all of these things before and it was it was useful therefore to to have that in the background but mainly I learned as I want to long and always thinking how can we make this a more vivid learning experience for the children. With the dowse and the teachers and the student teachers participate so that our. Our studies in the school be Kane. So our conservation and we made our own books. Rough mimeograph things I was sprayed by the children's over-the would cut in terms of the facts nutrition books and we developed the first rural education cooperative in that county and so forth it was all very basic changes. See now this is community
building and I learned an important lesson from all of that and it was also education because the children whatever they may have missed in the specific reading sequences of the of the approved readers they got from having to go and get the government pamphlets and puzzle them out and get the information because they were writing a book about nutrition or our agriculture or whatever it is that was the result of a whole class effort. And that was consistent with much that I had heard around the dinner table as a youngster. Educationally it was very consistent although the setting was completely different. And but this is one thing that I. Look looking ahead a little bit and I'm talking too much now that I think I see and that is that there
is the possibility of consistency in educational sector educational thinking planning and accomplishment. With children of all kinds of backgrounds and those were there are an educated under educated parents in family groups there in Georgia providing one finds the reality for them. And in California it was one kind of reality it was much more Western and to a certain extent Ranchi suburban and certainly more affluent in Georgia. It was what it was it was very basic just a work related sort of you can you can maintain establish and maintain uniformly poor education consistently if for in each case you avoided the reality of it is true. I think that's the key to it I think. The reality factor
has to be there and whatever we do if it's going to be valid. You want me to go on with that line of thought. Or I just carry to think that through the next step and then I pause and we can examine any parts of it that you want. It so happened that one of my colleagues at the University of Georgia working in this community building field in teacher education which which was the rationale of it. Shortly after that I was appointed by the governor of Puerto Rico to go and develop a community center the Adult Education Plan for the Puerto Rican government. This was now in nineteen forty two or three during the war. And. He
had written a good deal and his his reputation had gone up beyond the small area that we are working in and so he went to Puerto Rico and put into effect a much that we had learned in Georgia about working with people from under privileged circumstances in a rural setting. Fifteen years later. And it involved the making of books the making of the holding of the evening kind of meetings of the same sort that we had the vomit of children a great deal in and out of school and so forth. Fifteen years later I accepted an offer to go to the Peace Corps. And train volunteers in Puerto Rico. Because I suppose for the same reason that he first went to the Puerto Rican government this project in Georgia
had apparently made in fact I think made a certain. I had an influence in people upon people who were interested in that approach to adult education. So he was there in the midst of his work. We joined up Peace Corps volunteers started coming and we trained them there for three months in a community building. And Spanish because these were the ones who were going on to Latin American assignments mostly as community teachers. So. You can see how a small beginning like that. Is apt to proliferate and expand things that you just made the connection and that's your most joyous but remember you're saying that that when you're your father get interested in the schools in Chicago and then there was the parents really. So the school that really school most of it what it was that parents were involved you know was a to a very great extent a very great extent. Yes they were
sort of regular meetings and decisions was it or was it operated jointly by them. Yes it was owned by the parents of the school in California you mean the one that said yes they really brought him there and they owned it. They put up the money they bought it for many independent schools began that way and that was it in those days they had no endowment whatever they just had a lot of very committed parents who worked like mad too for an idea. And that was one of them would sort of tell me to go into these. Yes yes many of them held right my house I couldn't escape. And so I was in the air you know thinking that there must have been in those meetings because the ruling team can't afford it. That's right that's right. I think all of that was contributory to a point of view. So now. It all come circle again full circle again
except that I'm not doing it myself the way I was in those days I'm doing it through backy prose. Beck and other people who are running workshops for teachers. But again the cause the consistency of point of view is. What to me is important that people are being respected as teachers for something greater than the syllabus the approved list of books. The schedule all the administrative requirements of the school but instead are being encouraged to develop again a learning environment that they can participate in fully with children and I think that's what open education is all about and that's what we're trying to help teachers to do.
Now. That's my thought. Yes you remember my own. Well I think two people come to mind. Three maybe as having had the largest share of the. Combined influence of a great many people. My father certainly was one and that goes back so far that I can't remember any one particular episode but as I say it was something that one took in with the air of the home. More specifically I guess I really learned technique and the kinds of discipline that are required. A more fluid to kind of approach to education. Because I'm not one who believes that this can operate without structure. I learned technique and those
disciplines from the headmistress of shady hill while I was a teacher there Catherine Taylor may be a name you heard she's an. Elderly lady but still very much alive. I talked to her for four five years before succeeding her as director of the school and she shared all of these points of view that we've been discussing here but was also a meticulous technician and really wanted proof that things were being done and that children were into learning and that those who had difficulties were being helped and not being lost between enthusiastic stools that you know they were too preoccupied with all of the glamour to know that some little child
here was not getting it. Now this is something I had to learn and everybody has to learn them. It was going to work in this way. And she taught me many other things too but specifically I think that. What was the thing that comes to mind. And then another very great individual had enormous influence by a man named Morris Mitchell So I doubt if any of you know he's a Quaker Southerner. Kind of a pacifist a cooperator in a sense that he believes in the Co-operative Commonwealth. He could have been a socialist in an earlier period but was not. And a great teacher. So I think he helped me broaden my point of view beyond the school because having been raised in a school having been a teacher in schools.
That's about all I knew. And except for the mountains and the ocean. Yeah but that's another area altogether. But he gave me a new understanding of the economy and the sociology of contemporary life. And the reason I went to the south. Was he said I liked it. And he was teaching in the south and he was a great student of the TV and believed in integration an equal opportunity way back there in the 1930s and was outspoken about it. Wherever he went as a Southerner he could do that more successfully than the Northerner could and so great deal to those people. So were did you go to us as well someplace where he taught or just knew him as a person.
I don't know him but he was so when he was teaching at Columbia before he came there for a while I heard about him and read some of his articles. And so I went down there and spent a week visiting. And that led to this adventure in the south first with him. He took me there and then I went back and stayed. But by that time I had a family and it was a rather major decision I had to come to all that much later. And I think it's different for different people you just can't prescribe for anybody and what works for one may not work at all for another. Yes. Brother grew up with Southerners come out for our door to get to work and there was a very
successful resolution that sort of stuff. I was wondering if you could only wrote a letter to the sort of music you saw for him that he had met there or what you might encounter in an artist right here. Yes to answer your question in another way. If I had been growing up today as a young teacher I would be very much inclined to put all my energy into the urban scene in those days it wasn't as critical
or we didn't think it was. All the germs of the present dislocation where there are of course but it wasn't. People's minds in the same way the rural south the rural Midwest was suffering from the depression that was these kind of dramatic. Place where the action was with the TVA and the CCC camps and the reconstruction. You know that the government through the New Deal was attempting to do. Question over education or progress. This is one of the real choice between those years and
what I think I know. I think there might have been a little easier than that for one thing. I may be wrong about this but it seems to me that the graduate experience was perhaps a little less required in those days. Unless you want to teach in a university. But if you want to teach in schools there is not the oversupply of papers that they were there and you could go and do a thing like that and come back and still feel that you could get a job. So I think you have more latitude more choice in those days perhaps. I'm not sure. There were lots of sort of political currents. Of course a total different cultural
conflicts or something. But I don't think so and I can experiment you have some YES Prep's So yes I think that's true I think things had hardened perhaps quite so much we hadn't had the McCarthy era. We didn't have anything quite like the John Birch Society. If on the other hand working in the south. In those days where we hadn't had Martin Luther King either you see it was a very different place and people felt. I used to use the term occupied country. I felt that I was living in an occupied country in Georgia town which was the governor. And we had to be very careful. So what you didn't have in
one part of the culture you knew more than had in. Mind was still a very active force in the south with a good deal of perforating forces play. Yes we want a group of like with a group of like Windsor. Yes and we work in both. But they were originally separate and you have to be a black student teacher and you have black and we don't know it. We had nothing but white students in our college there was a black training school as it was cart which was really a high school and we were also involved with those young people in their little country school. But you had to be up to me to complete that there could be no intermixed except in funny ways.
You know all of these patterns have their ironies and peculiarities because it would be perfectly proper for example you know I can't plan for black mothers to come with their tomatoes and meat and so forth to belong to the planet to be members of the co-operative because these are all co-ops and to participate in a kind of economic institution like that in the community but not not in each other schools. Or churches. I think that that would be a byproduct of very practical things. And I'm not sure that it was. I'm not sure how that happened. But the only way you could work would be on this very practical
to have taken a moral position as a northerner. It would have been completely futile. Whereas my friend Morris Mitchell always rode in the back of a bus. And when they when the bus driver would come and say the fight's seat from the front he would say well I'm 8 percent in a you know in a broad accent like I said 8 percent and then he get this all makes you what made you and he play games like that which he could do it so well. School is similar to that any kind of morality or what have you with it as a byproduct of whatever in the urban setting. No I think everything is different today.
In the first place our society has become a metropolitan urban one in a way that it wasn't in those days so that the actual focus on so far is in the cities. That's number one. Number two I think people generally in the intervening years have become much more conscious educated aware read more think more and I mean people at every level. And so that it's it's quite a different scene now from the kind of primitive isolated scene that we met in Georgia and that we later met in Puerto Rico. This is very true. If Boston is any example and sure it is one of our culture. And probably Chicago and New York are even more outspokenly articulate
and informed in Center City. Boston perhaps is somewhere behind many other big cities. The development isn't in the development of a conscious. Probe chain. We're on our.
Parents. You can't tell me what to do with my time and how the parent was not there. And I want to run a little harder. I don't think you know I think it's been around a long time and it simply seems to me a byproduct of the despair and on the
one hand and anxiety on the other of having so many so many hopeless problems. People have to be aggressive. As a form of self-defense. And we won't we won't change that. Until we find ways in which people can solve some of those most pressing problems with the same thing was true in a great deal of violence and hostility. Even in families we don't have. Extraordinary examples of the opposite. Also with people being wonderful parents in the midst of hopeless circumstances. And so you've got a great range. I don't think I don't think it's no good.
Yes perhaps certainly the most visible one that touches the children each day and vulnerable therefore but also I'm afraid some of that reputation has been well earned. By teachers who had I who have a lifestyle that requires. Really putting down others who live a different way. And this is a very deep seated obviously psychological problem of intercultural school system that will take a long time to overcome. And how you can reach that dimension in a teacher's personality is really baffling. Yeah I suppose you go
on providing opportunities for interchange and conversation and joint and divers of various kinds and hope that in time some meeting of the minds will take place. But it's a long long process. Course you were the one.
You know what I'd like to focus back on you for a second. My impression of you is is as successful and then I see you that way. Do you feel that way. I mean that's that's probably too too big but how do you do you really I don't know how to answer that. And you have a way of looking at your work and self-worth and feeling. I suppose that I'm trying to be trying to be absolutely honest and straightforward about a thing that is a little hard to get hold of. I suppose that in a sense from an outward point of view that was judged by the kinds of positions one has had and so forth
and that that's true. On the other hand it's such a far cry from. Those are rather superficial identifications through the goal that one has always seen clearly and has never reached and never will. But one hopes that by the time he reaches the sixties that he could be a little closer than he was 20 30 years ago. And I think I am because I understand more clearly now than I did then. The degree of this technique and commitment and self-discipline. That's required whereas I think as
a younger man I felt perhaps energy and enthusiasm and caring would get me there. Well they didn't. They were useful and helpful but it was that combined with care for detail. And planning and all the rest that seems to make the difference. It doesn't mean less of the vision and idealism but it means more of the of the planning and care. Well I think. What I see is. That a school system. And I make no distinction between public and private schools anymore. I speak of schools a lot I'm a private school and I've long ago lost that particular separation in my own work and in
my own mind I do certainly most of my work now is with public school teachers. Just because a lot more like the poor and no God created the bottom of the Lincoln set must love the poor and made so many of us love the public school or the school system that is so is so effective with the whole. Of the community that it serves not only children but adults that it can become a positive influence for democracy and interpersonal relationships positive ones in our society. You see I think that that's very different from saying schools are designed to get you into the next school.
I think that is a byproduct of formal education and you should be prepared to take the next step and most people most people can be if they are interested in taking it. But I see education as something much bigger than that. That and that has been could have. Whether it has or not could have an effect on the social order. There was a great book written by a man named George counts that some of you have read called dare the school build a new social order. That was a book that came out of the Depression. He was a he was a teacher at Columbia yet still a very good book and he simply uses all of the possible experiences that schools could offer to their communities in terms of collaborative activity the sort of community participation that you've been talking about this art of intercultural thing that we've just touched on.
If the social order itself were to be influenced. Yeah I think I'm really sort of pushing Bruce's question again I was thinking but you know it's very abbreviated but I know you were interested in baseball when you wrote it harder and you got into geology because you sort of want to be outdoors and things like that and then when the question I want to ask is What did you teach what was your subject but the more general one is it seems to me in part what you're saying is that the goal for you personally is closely related to the goal of better education. Yes so what. And I guess reading into it that you shouldn't How would how would you define. How did you shift from sort of wanting to be a tourism being enjoyed as to how would you describe the sort of well. The outdoor thing. It changed. Perhaps partly as a result of the
college experience from having been a rather a rather oversimplified outdoorsman without many professional skills. I tried to become a professional outdoorsman and that somehow dimmed the laster of the out of doors. I could see myself slaving away in a lab a lot of the time and I didn't care for that and the result was that I began to teach and I taught science. I also taught English History The other kinds of things that came along in a secondary school. I've found that that indeed was a very satisfying occupation and I have found more and more interest in him becoming and becoming a student again for a purpose rather than just to pass an exam. Then a major turning point took place which I have already mentioned and that was when I was asked by
Catherine Taylor to come to the shady Hill to teach a sixth grade I've been teaching high school students before that. And this seemed to be just wild that I would be able to know what to do with these little 11 year olds. My own my own children were not that old at that time they were very young indeed and I had no experience with them so it was rather traumatic the first three months. But it wasn't long before I realized that that's where I wanted to work. No question about it. And it is been so ever since with the exception of that period in in Georgia and Puerto Rico where I was teaching teachers but in Georgia they were teachers of young children for the most part. And I've been an elementary school man ever since and I've been very happily so I felt that. The possibilities are young with then young children were just enormous. And the more I thought the more I began to see these
these promises all around me. So then as a headmaster I was able to do a good deal more about it than I had been as a teacher and I began to bring people to the school who could somehow widen our horizons as a staff. And some of the people who came where people who at that time were at the beginning of their careers are now well-known like the deans who developed the Dean's blocks what you have here in the museum and Katherine stern with her new arithmetic puzzles and blocks and games and Laura Rasmussen whom we discovered in a little suburb of Philadelphia called me Kwan and brought here her bill ha was on my staff and he was beginning to develop some of his attribute games and things that he went on and Perth and developed at DC. And we had a brilliant series of people passing through the school we had bar bell in hell who
came from Geneva. And spend a month with us she was a colleague and we became fascinated with some of the experiments that she did with our children in a little room that we gave her which were research. And so all of this you see became a very fascinating new and prefer a new professional dimension for me. And we went on from there to try to of find ways of extending all of this from one small school to others and of course the teacher training program at the school was one way of doing that. And after all these years the teacher center is another. And so it's there's been a certain consistency here of goal of
vision and ways of approaching young children so that the promise could be more nearly realized. And it hasn't seemed to have hurt their chances of doing on to the next level and this of course is what we believe all the time. If in fact I think next schools by and large rather prefer children who've had to rein interest in activities and have not just been drilled and show nothing but a mere facility. How are we going for the less we have left something out of someone have something else that you'd like to live where we live like an OS. Yes that is my point.
And between the traditionalists in the parent teacher I find in situations that I'll find some tremendous calm and I wonder I know my own mind how much it hurts. Me. I don't. Mind a war going. I'm
sure you do I'm sure. And it's inevitable to a certain extent because change producers conflict inevitably. There has always been and there always will. And an element in every group community what you will know that is threatened by change itself. Never mind what the change is. Because its security lies in the status quo. And this I think you can accept as a given. And then there's always an element in every community that wants change because it's unhappy with the status quo. And this you can accept as a given. And so your job as the change agent teacher or what have you Minister. It is
to her if not to reconcile at least to bring about a modus vivendi of those two elements so that they don't destroy one another. And I think. That can. Not always but I think that can be done if care is given to technique. You see if I'm sure it can't be done just on goodwill and hard work takes hard work. But I think it's the skill. That animates the hard work that will make the difference. Now let me give you an example in schools that I'm familiar with. There are people who advocate open education as a great new and superior. Philosophy of teaching.
You know the books and you've seen evidence of this. This point of view. Now look what that does to the first group and every community that hears it. Teachers and parents alike. And the principal maybe who have done a pretty good job in their view in a traditional way. That says to them between the lines the lines you just to have somehow missed the boat and everything you've been doing for the last 30 years. It impugns I guess that's the right word. The quality of a dedicated life and these people are dead and they were terribly hard. And suddenly somebody comes along and says I'm sorry you've been alright with harming these children you see. Now the more subtle and I think more effective approach to that situation than a school is to say open education has much to offer.
So does traditional education and we value it and we value both. But we'd like to be able to offer some alternatives in this school such that those teachers who are more comfortable in an informal type of classroom with a lot of materials around and so forth are how an opportunity to develop that kind of classroom with our support and backing. And those teachers who feel they only can function at their best in a room in which the desks are in rows and the schedule is like clockwork. If they're doing a conscientious job of teaching they should have that too easy now. In that way you avoid. The double risk of building up the new thing too much and too quickly before people are sufficiently skilled to
carry it off. And the other risk of impugning the the traditionalist who is very conscientious and has been successful will knock a lot of kids if not all. But nobody is going to be successful with our art so you start off with this hopefully a sense that you're going to offer alternative styles within a school and among schools. Some schools can be more informal than others and depending on their faculty their parents are and what you will find nine times out of 10 is that if the traditionalists feel respected they will gradually mollify and soften and see that this is not so threatening as they feared terrorists. Little by little they will offer at least fewer objections. I won't say they all come in and pick it up and go with friends but I
think that's your hope. Does that sound impossible in your setting. That was just in one particular case. I really was. Actually it didn't actually happen. What did happen. You know everybody's very confusing when you the moment you set up. I think what happened was nobody felt sure of themselves. They were doing and so consequently this community feeling all over again and never existed because they were doing so many different things.
There wasn't a there wasn't. That was with us go outside school. Yeah right right. And I think people from here in New York would really get into society and just better people from where school in Tennessee were were quite strict. I would guess you might even know that I may be right and. I think that day. Really just better. Latin scholar that I wasn't. I don't well I don't know you're a writer really you integrate and cooperate better than I care to read carry in school I would. Guess.
Perhaps I don't know how I can only say that I think we would make a mistake to believe that any of these innovations from Montessori right on through to every other you can think of. Has the answer for all. I'm sure there's no disagreement about that but sometimes it sounds as though school principals and superintendents were really believe that and that I think it's dangerous sort of thing. Somehow you managed to pretty well escape the kind of trauma on her a star like princes in your father's school that was the group there and Im sure the doctor there was the school board or the California plan for turning to Harvard in the shady Hill in Georgia and for even so you haven't had then only that kind of you know the term ex cathedra here it was done a month or so and everybody now.
I guess the nearest I came to that was when I was in the government service but that was I was far enough away from Washington so that in effect my No that's true I have. I have to see it through the eyes of friends and teachers who are working in the school system like Boston summer schools. I can imagine how difficult that I have any illusion about who it is or if that isn't getting worse or maybe what Lloyd was saying earlier about the media and the politicization and that there's a lot of the prince of the Carnegie thing and Silberman and suddenly the whole sort of sweeps the country that now you know the last chance to get on the train is partly because of the media and the word travel so there must be more of that kind of pressure on people. You see I was so much guilty of furthering that whole Thanks and initially having been very much captivated by the British schools that I visited and it's awfully easy to do it to come back with a message
and start writing I see I did I wrote pamphlets and. What was done to me I meant an important message but it didn't take long I'm glad to say. Before I realized that there was going to happen and that many other people were coming back there was a thunderstorm was writing at the same time that I wasn't and his words were much more widely read and so forth and that the thing that I could do and that would act as well not a break because I didn't want to break back the understanding of what was going on in England but I wanted to perfect the technique. I come back to technique again what the trained teachers. And so that's. What I began doing with the enthusiasm that I had and it was supplemented sublimated and we set up a summer workshops around the country and invited teachers to come and.
And these were directed by British had masters and had had mistresses and we whom we brought over and they are meticulous technicians. They've gone way beyond most of them. The euphoria. And in fact I think they're much more afraid than we are of the harmful effects of euphoria in a movement of change of this kind. And there are sticklers for a specific account. Moment and evaluation and all the rest of it so that you know what you're doing. And these workshops were the forerunners of the teacher center and that's the neat I still feel that and I think that's where our efforts should go. As much as it can possibly you know all of our centers whether at a museum or whatnot it's a little bit of the rest.
But I just made the connection with feeling a sort of in effect it would be to be sort of enthusiastic about sailing and not have technique just that you know a little experience I've had I know how much every little bit sort of a one for one correspondence between the skill and the effect it is it must be. I think that's part of your interest and probably is you probably as I have a great respect for weather for climate whether it is in the social science or in the natural sense. I think one works with and the winds and tides and doesn't think that for a moment that he has overcome them. We're going to take the safe for the voyage. Yeah this is a great metaphor we're getting you know just for you to work. Well you know what's interesting now we have as
you know of this this so-called rebel computer center with workshops going on teachers coming to them and so forth. There's been a little public today some of the parents of various school districts have become interested and so forth. And I guess perhaps three quarters of the requests for help in a school sit in school systems get in touch with us are initiated by parent groups rather than by school administrators. And we find ourselves being asked to work and in times like Hall in situ where that and and others on the south shore and then around the Route 128 and places not the big school system so much there. Their request tends to be much more central and administrative when it comes but in the smaller ones it comes from
parents and they say we have been reading the articles and hearing and hearing and hearing it on the radio and what not and we'd like to know more about it. But you come here and that has led to a number of interesting sort of sustained assignments with the faculties of schools. Again quite voluntary on their part for the most part. Once or twice they've been dragged. We don't do that anymore we don't accept any such arrangements. But what parents behind them are saying we really want you there to learn about this kind of interesting. When that happens you know one thing. There was a parent teacher
and there were a lot of pressure to work. We want to thank goodness. I want him was a wife I would say three years. Of change to take place. Sure. As I recall the process from that is to say we had a hole in and I was teaching at the time you know which is open. Now they were saying Hold fast keep the lid on let's not do anything let's just keep everybody satisfied or try to which was impossible of course. And then the parents of the black section of town got
together focused around the church and started to move things in that direction which will lead to four years later a citywide committee that shows. Three people to go out and seek a new superintendent. The other fellow had decided I had enough of this business I don't think I'll retire early in did. And subsequent to that they chose Marcus Foster Dr. Foster who was from Philadelphia and he is a happens to be black. But if the blackness was not so much help really. And he came in with a whole new form that was we must have community involvement and we'll start with the parents first. And you read that right. Because the whole thing has now shifted in that direction so there is a possibility that if you wait that way if you work hard enough and committed enough that in maybe seven to 10 years you can get that far
that ministration to turn around and come back when you meet going together to where the parents the companies that were working up through the system and the system is finally changing enough that it will work toward the goal with you when you kind of go together. Now they're in the process of this now. It's it's rough going and so on but at least it seems the teachers the community and industries are now working parallel with each other rather than going at each other to the extent that they're even going to Sacramento or requesting fines and getting bus loads of people like $3000 to the legislature and sit in the door and say we need money for the school and they're not getting it but at least there are they're trying. I'm glad you spoke at the time factor. Because I think impatience is often our undoing when we're involved in a social change of any kind and particularly in education.
And it may seem and often does seem that it will never be accomplished in our lifetime. Another generation of children have to be sacrificed too and I remember vividly in 1933 when I started teaching at Chez Hill that parent body going down to the school committee meetings and making their putting their weight behind the Cambridge Public schools although they were financing a private school but their overriding interest was public education came because they realized that that was the only thing that would affect the whole society again school and society and for and for all of those intervening years. Hard work was put in by groups of all kinds and
not just that one. You mean to try and effect change in the Caymans with a superintendent who had tenure Mr Tooke Mr Tobin was there I think for 34 years. And things just didn't change and they just kept on working and then freeze already came in you know the history of Cambridge in recent years and finally and that's from 1933 to 1973. And you do what you've described is just now beginning to happen with an administration that is beginning to move a little bit towards against all kinds of obstacles and he may not last. Yes it will. Some of it can be a very long process on the other hand. You've just described one that in which something happened for you and there are many in between. All right well I
thought I think you said mainly what I wanted to say if you'd like me to summarize. You know in a very few minutes let me let me say this that while open education to use the term it is unquestionably the new thing at the moment and it is increasingly occupying our attention. And many successes will be developed and many catastrophes will be equally developed. The key to having more successes than catastrophes is I believe technique attached to vision. And that this is a process that requires great skill great patience a
sense of. And more than anything else. An opportunity for teachers and hopefully principals though the principals are I find relatively hopeless as a group. Having been one I can say that. Time to make the interchange that will that is essential for an institutional change can take place and you don't have to be a latin and greek scholar you couldn't be a scholar of music or a scholar of English or a scholar of anything and have been taught in the traditional manner and you won't put shark trust in authorities. Those of the lecture platform Those are the textbook those of the person who sits in judgement and passes you are fails you. You can resist and rebel but that's not changing it. Neither is it changing anything inwardly.
So the task for teachers and school people generally and parents as well. Is to. Find new ways of learning in which one changes the accepted authorities to others which can be your peers. Which can be the materials in a room like this with all of the marvelous choices and options all of which are educated because they've been selected by people who know what is worth doing and what isn't so they eliminate the things that are they put in the things that are. And here it all is. And with no one saying you must do this and I will sit in judgment on your success or failure. Instead in an environment that evokes interest. And and choice and a sense of the expansiveness I've learned not just the pleasure though that's part of it but out the other growth
that's possible. When one is learning for its own sake rather than because it's a task assigned. Now. That doesn't happen quickly with any of us trained as we are. That requires patience and much opportunity in order actually to do the puzzles to work the problems to see the environment to to draw the designs to paint the pictures and to throw the pots. And to interact with other people who are developing in similar ways. As if that happens inward confidence grows. That this is a valid form of learning that it's not mickey mouse that it's for real and that it has a promise for a kind of satisfaction that the kind of lasting and sustained
interest that goes way beyond anything we were required to do for the sake of a corps. Now. At that point the teacher goes back to her class with a greater trust in the possibilities of learning in those ways on the part of her children. And she may try some things that fail badly and she's got to pull everything back and start all over again but as long as she can keep an honest connection between what she's learning herself as a learner and the opportunities that she's offering her children. Which don't have to go on all day they can go on just for an hour. At first and keep that. Sense of observation and appreciation of the children's promise.
To function to learn to relate in these ways then I think it's possible for change to take place that is more than manipulate it. And you see what's going to happen without that inner transformation. The adage. Is that people will think you can just move the furniture around put in a lot of attribute blocks and games and things and you've got an open educate you happened. You could have the same oh the rigidities with all that material that you had before. So we've gained nothing. Now that's why the kind of training is a poor word for let's call it professional opportunity for teachers is essential for a change to take place that doesn't collapse.
And this is going to take time. That's my sermon. I think you are all very good to come out and see me as a kind of experiment and I think we all deserve credit for the idea that I have enjoyed the opportunity thank you well and thank you.
Series
Sunday Forum
Episode
Edward Yeomans: The Other End Of The Log
Producing Organization
WGBH Educational Foundation
Contributing Organization
WGBH (Boston, Massachusetts)
AAPB ID
cpb-aacip/15-59c5bc3n
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Description
Series Description
Sunday Forum is a weekly show presenting recordings of public addresses on topics of public interest.
Description
Series of five programs of informal discussions with outstanding educators. Edward Yeomans, Director of the Greater Boston Teacher Center and the former Headmaster of the Shady Hill School in Cambridge.
Created Date
1973-04-10
Genres
Event Coverage
Topics
Public Affairs
Media type
Sound
Duration
01:40:24
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Credits
Producing Organization: WGBH Educational Foundation
Production Unit: Radio
AAPB Contributor Holdings
WGBH
Identifier: 73-0107-07-01-001 (WGBH Item ID)
Format: 1/4 inch audio tape
Generation: Master
Duration: 01:40:00
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Citations
Chicago: “Sunday Forum; Edward Yeomans: The Other End Of The Log,” 1973-04-10, WGBH, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed March 29, 2024, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-15-59c5bc3n.
MLA: “Sunday Forum; Edward Yeomans: The Other End Of The Log.” 1973-04-10. WGBH, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. March 29, 2024. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-15-59c5bc3n>.
APA: Sunday Forum; Edward Yeomans: The Other End Of The Log. Boston, MA: WGBH, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-15-59c5bc3n