by Sara
I was invited to two New Year's parties tonight, but I am tired of not being home and among my books, and cooking the food I like. Later tonight I will make the second installment of Oyster Stew -- having bought two pint's of good Oysters prior to being diverted to emergency duty.
But my New Year's hope is that the Alumni and the donors to Antioch College, and others who understand the need for strong Progressive Institutions, will succeed in rebuilding what Holiday Magazine called, in 1956, that Great Quaker Workcamp in the Woods. The College is not really a Quaker institution -- hardly, in the last several decades, but elements of it have survived the onslaught of business minded boards of trustees, (business sometimes is about mergers and acquisitions actually and too many folk who keep secrets as if they were CIA and FBI and all rolled into one.) Too many folk went around quoting Horace Mann about winning victories for Humanity, without a grounding in what dear old Horace really meant. Hard to win one unless you have a sense of what contemporary mass humanity is all about.
Horace Mann's great contribution to American Culture was an understanding of what was necessary to "keep a Republic" as Ben Franklin expressed it -- Mann was, as I see it, the second generation of the Founding Fathers. He spent his political career, I think it was 18 years in the Mass. Legislature, and 2 years in Congress, advocating free public education for everyone. His years as a legislator were involved with finding a means to both tax for a public education system -- and provide oversight on the funds thus raised to see to it that they were honestly spent for that purpose. He did not succeed till 1839, but when he did, he assumed the leadership of the Boston School Committee so as to set an example as to what oversight of Public Education would involve, and in those days it involved three things. First, Set a secular curriculum. Second, build the necessary schools, buy books, and fuel the classroom stoves, but make certain no dollar is misspent. Third, accredit teachers as at the time no teacher training academies existed.
After more than a decade setting the Boston School Committee as the leading example of how to administer a Public School System, Mann was attracted by a project of his friends, some of them Brook Farm Folk -- the locus of Jo's father in Little Women -- Lousia May Alcott's father -- but also a mite of Emerson and Thoreau. But the project was that of the Christian Connection -- an early effort at ecumentalism that was less than successful because of hidden sectarian tendencies, but just the same, they tried around the matter of abolitionism. Some of them were also transendentalists. That idea survived but without sharp defination. Yes they were abolitionists -- afterall they founded a school with no gender or racial proscriptions. Beyond that they did not go -- at least for the next 60 or so years after Horace Mann charged the first graduating class with the mission of winning victories for Humanity. (many died or were seriously wounded in the Civil War -- the college closed so the students could join the Union Army.)
In 1866 Antioch beat Ohio State 66 to 0 in a football game. We hold that victory out as "fair game" -- given that we have more prizes for non- muscle competitions.
Antioch went into dead null after the Civil War -- they had a religious war about doctrine, and all the rest, and the place went dead. (Lesson). What was that Christian Connection all about? Well it was not settled.
What brought life again was an odd sort of Capitalism. Very few folk these days know much about Arthur Morgan's ideas about the importance of small communities owning their own industries and capital formations, but Morgan was the source of rebuilding Antioch in the 1920's. and he was favored by FDR and Eleanor until he opposed the court packing plan in 1937. and published his objections in the Wall Street Journal. FDR fired him from his TVA Trusteeship, and that was that. (Personally, I think Morgan should have known better.)
Morgan had a unique sense of who should teach at Antioch. He needed a Historian, so he hired a former Monk to do European History. He ran into Manmatha Nath Chatterjee at an engineering Conference in Chicago in 1928. and he instantly converted him into a Sociologist, in large measure because he was the personal representative of Gandhi in the US, and it was Chatterjee who taught Coretta, and it was Coretta who taught Martin. Virtually every Historian of the Movement has missed this as too many are overly male oriented.
But that is not why Antioch should survive -- it is about moving that tradition into the future. Right now as the Alumni Association is essentially buying back the college from the board that wanted to destroy the college -- it is hard to make all the arguments, but once things are settled and determined, the story is going to blow minds.
Jodi -- much of what you read in the Dentist's office was swiped from my posts to private Antioch lists. I recognize my wording. I too have read that article, and I have done the contrasts/comparisons with my own materials, and yep, whoever wrote it, had access to my (password protected) materials. Of course I am a critic of a Board and all the rest who crashed my college. Remember, I was there between 1957 and 1962. But I know a good deal about what happened after I graduated.
My hope is that you would wish us well in fixing things so that we can educate and train 10 Martin's and 10 Coretta's in each graduating class.
But it is going to take hard work -- very hard work.
And that is my wish of 08 -- Hard Work that manifests itself.
- - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - -
Save your money honey
put it in a sock
When your kids grow up don't send them to Antioch
Save your money, S----ave your money,
Save your Money Honey, ..CCNY is Free.
(folk song from the late 50's)
Comments