Alexander wasn’t trying to start a progressive movement in education, specifically in teacher training, but he began his career, developed the concept, and initiated the process of creating his dream during a time when this philosophy was blossoming. The influence of Dewey, his experiences in Kirksville and Nashville, and his collegial connections at Teachers College would certainly have some part in the overall atmosphere of the creation of New College. As such, during its short existence, New College would become the most progressive teachers college in the United States.
Progressive Education is something that cannot be readily defined. In The Transformation of the School, Cremin (1961) said it meant different things to different people and so there was “no capsule definition of progressive education.” In modern terms it would be like trying to define the Internet. There is no central entity that one can go and see it in operation, but rather it is a collection of networks working independently with a loosely held identity being the heart of the Information Revolution. It also means different things to different people, and likewise, it has the chance to effect some change in education. This diversification of meaning could be illustrated by postwar German Progressive movements which did not arise from a central authority with a singular purpose but rather from groups of concerned teachers, parents, and community members seizing the chance to control their own schools and curriculum.
Progressive Education was the educational aspect of American Progressivism, the broad based bi-partisan reform movement steeped in democratic principles that arose in response to problems created by the industrialization and urbanization of the Industrial Revolution. The conservative voices in America were content with the status quo as long as it was profitable and ideas concerning worker’s rights, social justice, conservationism, and “extreme” democracy (a direct primary election? letting women vote?) were unnecessary. To some progressive Democrats and Republicans, the only way to achieve a true democratic society was through education.
Alexander was for the most part, apolitical. He was an academic first and foremost and never was bothered by being politically correct. Like his stance at Peabody during the First World War regarding German censorship he was never concerned about labels and chose rather to work toward a vision than sit and debate its philosophical implications. He knew the direction of New College was decidedly progressive, but it was less of an issue than the production of a competent and cultured teacher. Even though he considered himself a Republican, his progressive credentials came early as a young man by supporting Robert Marion La Follette, Sr., the fiery Wisconsin orator and proponent of Progressivism. According to Alexander’s son, he was more of a Theodore Roosevelt Progressive Republican, concerned with conservation and harboring a distrust of big business.
Alexander lived in a fascinating time of social change and place where educational ideas about the reconstruction of the American school were bandied about in an informal fashion by Dr. William Heard Kilpatrick’s famous discussion group. Whether or not Alexander attended any of the discussions is not known, but what is certain is that he was good friends with many of those who were considered regulars, like George S. Counts, Goodwin Watson (a future New College professor), and John Childs. He certainly had sympathies that were considered progressive but perhaps kept a low profile because of his desire to create his demonstration college. To create a college anywhere, much less at Teachers College, would need the approval and goodwill of many different people and to be controversial would be detrimental to the effort. Had someone like Kilpatrick or Counts proposed an experimental demonstration college the traditional elements of Teachers College would have assembled like an avenging conservative army. According to his son, since Alexander’s focus was on education severing the political side left him as a bit of a loner despite the fact he had many friends at Teachers College. Perhaps it was part of the reason his name infrequently comes up in historical context even though he was a member of this famously influential faculty.
Progressive education followed many different pedagogical theories the most prominent being that social change had been accelerated by the Industrial Revolution to a point where teachers would be teaching for an uncertain future. This is not unfamiliar to Information Age teachers today, whose mantra of teaching students to prepare for careers that haven’t even been created yet is often heard in classrooms, referring to website designers or computer software engineers. The problem was what method should be used to teach in a progressive classroom in a world of change? A problem solving, critical thinking pedagogy that could be generally applicable to the problems presented by the social world was considered the best course.
The groundwork for the New College curriculum, based on problem solving, had been set by Alexander at approximately the same time the idea of social reconstruction was taking hold. Alexander knew that the objective of New College was to produce a schoolteacher able to cope with social adjustment and responsibility, not only on the local level but also be aware of those changes on a global scale. This was necessary especially in the climate of the 1930s, where economic downfalls were coupled with the rise of totalitarian regimes.
This kind of knowledge required a new kind of teacher who was to have specific characteristics, understanding, skills, and abilities. Alexander wrote:
"In criticizing any curriculum for teacher training, one must lay down the principles underlying
the society in which the school is to function, sketch the attributes to the school best suited
to this society, define clearly the type of teacher required, and lastly determine the means by
which such a teacher may be trained."
The notion of the reconstruction of society through education was something that Alexander believed in, but not as a conscious effort to be part of any movement. The idea was that it was the right thing to do at this time for education which was typical of Alexander’s approach.
Oddly enough, Counts considered the New College interesting but did not think his ideas influenced the philosophical direction of the college despite the inclusion of a quote of his in the first bulletin. Likewise, Alexander appreciated the encouragement given to him by Counts and others when developing New College and regarded him as a good friend and able, creative man. He did not consider himself to be overtly influenced by him though.
It wasn't hard for Alexander to see the failure of the socio-economic system following the Great Depression in New York and overseas. The task of reconstructing society had to begin in the schools and for that to happen it first had to happen to the teachers in those classrooms. For students to become productive members in a democratic society they had to be taught. By extension, Alexander reasoned that preparing those teachers was the key. In order to prepare those teachers, it was necessary to build a college designed to do so from scratch. Alexander held that the teacher education necessitated the participation in community building. In a 1935 report to Dean Russell, Alexander stated:
"The goal of educating teachers for constructive educational, social, and economic leadership
at once elevates and broadens the traditional role of normal schools and teachers colleges.
Concerned primarily with training people to teach subjects from textbooks in classrooms teacher
training institutions frequently have lost sight of their larger responsibilities and opportunities.
Certainly there has been little in their programs to challenge youth to throw its strength wholeheartedly into education as a means of social reconstruction."
Love of the country and the rural life was in Alexander’s blood. Previously, he had already written years before that he could easily have been a farmer and often commented on the value of land ownership. Indeed, it came in handy when he was in need of financial help during his illness overseas. He was close to the people in Kirksville and knew everyone as it commonly was in a small town. The 1910 United States Census counts a little less than a thousand people total in the city of Kirksville proper. The main industry at the beginning of the century was the osteopath college, the teacher’s college and the shoe factory so if you worked in any of those concerns you probably knew most everyone involved in them. Alexander attended primary school within the normal school’s administration in the Model School Department as a youth, attended the normal school itself, and served as a principal of the Willard School. He was familiar with the Rural Life Movement, the Model Rural School and the work at Porter School, through his Kirksville letter contacts.
Alexander had the somewhat dubious fortune to study the educational pedagogy and practice in a country before and after a devastating war. Two major works, his pre-war dissertation The Prussian Elementary Schools (1919), or Volkschule, and his postwar 1929 tome with Beryl Parker, The New Education in the German Republic offers a comparative look into the impact of the community or country schools in Germany. The main difference has to do with nationalism. Envious of other global powers in the nineteenth century German leaders sought to assume a leadership role in Europe, particularly in commerce and world power. The accomplishment of this national ambition was to be done through education. School systems were organized by the ruling class with this purpose in mind. The definite goal needed a definite class system in which there were to be leaders and followers. The working classes, which made up about 95% of the population, were trained for to be part of a compliant and efficient German citizenship. From his dissertation, Alexander reasoned that before the war an efficient German citizen was one who was God-fearing, who was economically independent, and who was ready and willing to take his place in that part of the social order to which he belongs without question. The greatest difference Alexander found was that the Germans educated the individual for the state, whereas Americans make the state for the individual. There is little mention of the use of community as a teaching methodology, but then why would it? In Alexander’s pre-war German Volkschule world, communities would create an environment where self-sufficient collaboration for teaching and learning goes against “the felt need of producing in large numbers a type of citizenship easily amenable to the dictates of bureaucratic officialdom.”
The Germany that Alexander “tramped” through in his youth was in deep contrast to his observations of Germany in the mid 1920’s. Alexander was a good academic and he went back to some of the schools he had visited in Hamburg from his earlier trip to see if there was indeed a change. This would definitely give him a benchmark to begin with when planning his new book. The dull gray monotonous walls of the urban school that were once adorned with pictures of Kaiser Wilhelm II, his grandfather Wilhelm the Great, and Pestalozzi were now painted with brilliant hues of green and orange, blue and red. Before the war Germany had a very effective school system that produced good, hard-working, industrially efficient, law-abiding German citizens. The school had been the property of the state and an instrument of the government. The end of the war produced a void in the central authority of this educational landscape that was filled quickly by religious, political, and philosophical entities free to engage each other with competing pedagogies with hopes to determine or influence the new German social order. School reform in Germany right after the war was the result of experiments in single schools and classes throughout the land and not so much a matter of reorganization growing out of a directed national policy. Groups of teachers, parents, and community members seized the opportunity to control their own schools with freedom never known before. Within the schools themselves, organizing and keeping it alive was the teacher as a community leader and organizer. So was the genesis of the most radical of German “Community Schools”, the Gemeinschaftschulen. These schools placed social education above every other goal and formed the vanguard for other reform forces which would sweep through all German schools in the 1920’s.
At Peabody, Alexander had a chance to observe that college’s Knapp Farm and its sister institution, the Seaman A. Knapp School of Country Life and saw how they progressively augmented education by providing hands on experiences. This was reminiscent to Alexander of the German Country Home Schools, or Landerziehungsheime, which advocated close contact with country folk to absorb from them the fundamental virtues of simplicity, industry and frugality. Alexander described these schools as:
"The product of private bands of idealists that established ‘communities of youth’ in the heart
of forested hills or close to villages so that boys and girls might know rural life intimately and
share in the labors and the festivals of the peasant folk."
The idea was promoted that working for the common needs of the school community was the first duty. The best known community school to most Americans in Alexander’s time was Dr. Paul Geheeb’s Odenwaldschule where education was a “matter of determining the best social and material surroundings for children, because it was the environment that educates rather than the teacher, who is only one factor among many environing influences.” Alexander had been impressed enough to have his own children attend Dr. Geheeb’s school during their extended stay in Germany.
Alexander had first seen the rural communities come together for the common cause of their children’s education in Missouri. Then he saw the German movements after the war and saw how the Community Schools took their slogan “Vom Kinde aus,” “Begin with the child”, to heart and built different types of pedagogical communities around a teacher’s leadership in response to the needs of that community. To Alexander it made sense that these concepts of community could be applied to schools in America, but to do so they needed a cadre of teachers to implement it, and a college to train them.
Alexander wanted to emulate the rural communal experience for his teachers and sought out a place far enough away from New York to offer a complete sociological change, but close enough so that students could attend on a rotational basis. In 1935, in a letter to Dean Russell urging the purchase of the New College Community and Georgia properties, Alexander outlined the emphasis on community building which was based on the New College philosophy. The letter was accompanied by a report entitled New College and its Community Building Program (1935) which stated:
"The world vibrates of talk of and experiments of changed forms of government. No one is too
inexperienced to voice his views. No suggestion is too wild to gain a following. And within the din,
a clear voice (George S. Counts?) has challenged teachers to build a ‘new social order’. The
theories proposed have all been on a grand scale. They have been formulas, schemes, and cure-alls.
Their approach has been a wholesale one and is usually to be accomplished through some form
of national or international revolution. New College seeks to cut through this confusion of conflicting
ideas and wholesale proposals and attack the problem as primarily as retail one. Viewing society
as an aggregate of communities, it asks, ‘Along what lines should this, and this, and that community
be built?’ It will be necessary to bring to the problem a background of theoretical knowledge of
social organization, past and present. But it will be indispensable to know intimately the communities
to be developed. The plans of organization evolved must be a product of interweaving the theoretical
background and the very practical knowledge of immediate conditions."
Alexander proposed to provide for his prospective teachers a careful discipline in all that is most worth in all fields of human knowledge. Using the Persistent Problems as a framework, the curriculum proposed to balance theoretical study against the practical contact with life. The rural community offered a perspective of those problems in its most basic form. The work in community building was one phase of the New College program comprising of:
Alexander had seen the German educational system before and after the war, and the insight into the potential of the community, or Gemeinschaft, as the socially situated vehicle best suited to present education was not lost on him. Having completed his dissertation on the Prussian elementary school system, and more importantly on the teachers and their role, Alexander was now seeing the full bloom of German Progressivism in the post-war aftermath of national political and economic chaos. The emphasis on community learning along with the cooperative efforts of teachers, parents and students was not something that was nationally organized since any central educational authority was minimal at first. It was conceived and created by individual teachers and schools. Alexander saw the teacher as the glue that held the community together and the college he envisioned would produce that superior teacher.
At the very first gathering at Milbank Chapel of the new students and faculty, of which few if any knew each other, Dr. Alexander, as Chairman of New College told the assembly the reasons for the establishment of New College as he saw it. He first felt that something was wrong with education when he had to wait a year to be awarded his college diploma because he lacked a credit by failing to swim across a pool in time. The time spent overseas, particularly teaching in Turkey, taught Alexander that in order to appreciate your own country you must know another country. He learned that a competent and cultured teacher must appreciate the arts from his time as an usher at the Metropolitan Opera House. Alexander’s understanding of people and their labors was the product of work in the printing shop. More importantly, he realized the significance of these experiences in one’s education.
Progressive Education is something that cannot be readily defined. In The Transformation of the School, Cremin (1961) said it meant different things to different people and so there was “no capsule definition of progressive education.” In modern terms it would be like trying to define the Internet. There is no central entity that one can go and see it in operation, but rather it is a collection of networks working independently with a loosely held identity being the heart of the Information Revolution. It also means different things to different people, and likewise, it has the chance to effect some change in education. This diversification of meaning could be illustrated by postwar German Progressive movements which did not arise from a central authority with a singular purpose but rather from groups of concerned teachers, parents, and community members seizing the chance to control their own schools and curriculum.
Progressive Education was the educational aspect of American Progressivism, the broad based bi-partisan reform movement steeped in democratic principles that arose in response to problems created by the industrialization and urbanization of the Industrial Revolution. The conservative voices in America were content with the status quo as long as it was profitable and ideas concerning worker’s rights, social justice, conservationism, and “extreme” democracy (a direct primary election? letting women vote?) were unnecessary. To some progressive Democrats and Republicans, the only way to achieve a true democratic society was through education.
Alexander was for the most part, apolitical. He was an academic first and foremost and never was bothered by being politically correct. Like his stance at Peabody during the First World War regarding German censorship he was never concerned about labels and chose rather to work toward a vision than sit and debate its philosophical implications. He knew the direction of New College was decidedly progressive, but it was less of an issue than the production of a competent and cultured teacher. Even though he considered himself a Republican, his progressive credentials came early as a young man by supporting Robert Marion La Follette, Sr., the fiery Wisconsin orator and proponent of Progressivism. According to Alexander’s son, he was more of a Theodore Roosevelt Progressive Republican, concerned with conservation and harboring a distrust of big business.
Alexander lived in a fascinating time of social change and place where educational ideas about the reconstruction of the American school were bandied about in an informal fashion by Dr. William Heard Kilpatrick’s famous discussion group. Whether or not Alexander attended any of the discussions is not known, but what is certain is that he was good friends with many of those who were considered regulars, like George S. Counts, Goodwin Watson (a future New College professor), and John Childs. He certainly had sympathies that were considered progressive but perhaps kept a low profile because of his desire to create his demonstration college. To create a college anywhere, much less at Teachers College, would need the approval and goodwill of many different people and to be controversial would be detrimental to the effort. Had someone like Kilpatrick or Counts proposed an experimental demonstration college the traditional elements of Teachers College would have assembled like an avenging conservative army. According to his son, since Alexander’s focus was on education severing the political side left him as a bit of a loner despite the fact he had many friends at Teachers College. Perhaps it was part of the reason his name infrequently comes up in historical context even though he was a member of this famously influential faculty.
Progressive education followed many different pedagogical theories the most prominent being that social change had been accelerated by the Industrial Revolution to a point where teachers would be teaching for an uncertain future. This is not unfamiliar to Information Age teachers today, whose mantra of teaching students to prepare for careers that haven’t even been created yet is often heard in classrooms, referring to website designers or computer software engineers. The problem was what method should be used to teach in a progressive classroom in a world of change? A problem solving, critical thinking pedagogy that could be generally applicable to the problems presented by the social world was considered the best course.
The groundwork for the New College curriculum, based on problem solving, had been set by Alexander at approximately the same time the idea of social reconstruction was taking hold. Alexander knew that the objective of New College was to produce a schoolteacher able to cope with social adjustment and responsibility, not only on the local level but also be aware of those changes on a global scale. This was necessary especially in the climate of the 1930s, where economic downfalls were coupled with the rise of totalitarian regimes.
This kind of knowledge required a new kind of teacher who was to have specific characteristics, understanding, skills, and abilities. Alexander wrote:
"In criticizing any curriculum for teacher training, one must lay down the principles underlying
the society in which the school is to function, sketch the attributes to the school best suited
to this society, define clearly the type of teacher required, and lastly determine the means by
which such a teacher may be trained."
The notion of the reconstruction of society through education was something that Alexander believed in, but not as a conscious effort to be part of any movement. The idea was that it was the right thing to do at this time for education which was typical of Alexander’s approach.
Oddly enough, Counts considered the New College interesting but did not think his ideas influenced the philosophical direction of the college despite the inclusion of a quote of his in the first bulletin. Likewise, Alexander appreciated the encouragement given to him by Counts and others when developing New College and regarded him as a good friend and able, creative man. He did not consider himself to be overtly influenced by him though.
It wasn't hard for Alexander to see the failure of the socio-economic system following the Great Depression in New York and overseas. The task of reconstructing society had to begin in the schools and for that to happen it first had to happen to the teachers in those classrooms. For students to become productive members in a democratic society they had to be taught. By extension, Alexander reasoned that preparing those teachers was the key. In order to prepare those teachers, it was necessary to build a college designed to do so from scratch. Alexander held that the teacher education necessitated the participation in community building. In a 1935 report to Dean Russell, Alexander stated:
"The goal of educating teachers for constructive educational, social, and economic leadership
at once elevates and broadens the traditional role of normal schools and teachers colleges.
Concerned primarily with training people to teach subjects from textbooks in classrooms teacher
training institutions frequently have lost sight of their larger responsibilities and opportunities.
Certainly there has been little in their programs to challenge youth to throw its strength wholeheartedly into education as a means of social reconstruction."
Love of the country and the rural life was in Alexander’s blood. Previously, he had already written years before that he could easily have been a farmer and often commented on the value of land ownership. Indeed, it came in handy when he was in need of financial help during his illness overseas. He was close to the people in Kirksville and knew everyone as it commonly was in a small town. The 1910 United States Census counts a little less than a thousand people total in the city of Kirksville proper. The main industry at the beginning of the century was the osteopath college, the teacher’s college and the shoe factory so if you worked in any of those concerns you probably knew most everyone involved in them. Alexander attended primary school within the normal school’s administration in the Model School Department as a youth, attended the normal school itself, and served as a principal of the Willard School. He was familiar with the Rural Life Movement, the Model Rural School and the work at Porter School, through his Kirksville letter contacts.
Alexander had the somewhat dubious fortune to study the educational pedagogy and practice in a country before and after a devastating war. Two major works, his pre-war dissertation The Prussian Elementary Schools (1919), or Volkschule, and his postwar 1929 tome with Beryl Parker, The New Education in the German Republic offers a comparative look into the impact of the community or country schools in Germany. The main difference has to do with nationalism. Envious of other global powers in the nineteenth century German leaders sought to assume a leadership role in Europe, particularly in commerce and world power. The accomplishment of this national ambition was to be done through education. School systems were organized by the ruling class with this purpose in mind. The definite goal needed a definite class system in which there were to be leaders and followers. The working classes, which made up about 95% of the population, were trained for to be part of a compliant and efficient German citizenship. From his dissertation, Alexander reasoned that before the war an efficient German citizen was one who was God-fearing, who was economically independent, and who was ready and willing to take his place in that part of the social order to which he belongs without question. The greatest difference Alexander found was that the Germans educated the individual for the state, whereas Americans make the state for the individual. There is little mention of the use of community as a teaching methodology, but then why would it? In Alexander’s pre-war German Volkschule world, communities would create an environment where self-sufficient collaboration for teaching and learning goes against “the felt need of producing in large numbers a type of citizenship easily amenable to the dictates of bureaucratic officialdom.”
The Germany that Alexander “tramped” through in his youth was in deep contrast to his observations of Germany in the mid 1920’s. Alexander was a good academic and he went back to some of the schools he had visited in Hamburg from his earlier trip to see if there was indeed a change. This would definitely give him a benchmark to begin with when planning his new book. The dull gray monotonous walls of the urban school that were once adorned with pictures of Kaiser Wilhelm II, his grandfather Wilhelm the Great, and Pestalozzi were now painted with brilliant hues of green and orange, blue and red. Before the war Germany had a very effective school system that produced good, hard-working, industrially efficient, law-abiding German citizens. The school had been the property of the state and an instrument of the government. The end of the war produced a void in the central authority of this educational landscape that was filled quickly by religious, political, and philosophical entities free to engage each other with competing pedagogies with hopes to determine or influence the new German social order. School reform in Germany right after the war was the result of experiments in single schools and classes throughout the land and not so much a matter of reorganization growing out of a directed national policy. Groups of teachers, parents, and community members seized the opportunity to control their own schools with freedom never known before. Within the schools themselves, organizing and keeping it alive was the teacher as a community leader and organizer. So was the genesis of the most radical of German “Community Schools”, the Gemeinschaftschulen. These schools placed social education above every other goal and formed the vanguard for other reform forces which would sweep through all German schools in the 1920’s.
At Peabody, Alexander had a chance to observe that college’s Knapp Farm and its sister institution, the Seaman A. Knapp School of Country Life and saw how they progressively augmented education by providing hands on experiences. This was reminiscent to Alexander of the German Country Home Schools, or Landerziehungsheime, which advocated close contact with country folk to absorb from them the fundamental virtues of simplicity, industry and frugality. Alexander described these schools as:
"The product of private bands of idealists that established ‘communities of youth’ in the heart
of forested hills or close to villages so that boys and girls might know rural life intimately and
share in the labors and the festivals of the peasant folk."
The idea was promoted that working for the common needs of the school community was the first duty. The best known community school to most Americans in Alexander’s time was Dr. Paul Geheeb’s Odenwaldschule where education was a “matter of determining the best social and material surroundings for children, because it was the environment that educates rather than the teacher, who is only one factor among many environing influences.” Alexander had been impressed enough to have his own children attend Dr. Geheeb’s school during their extended stay in Germany.
Alexander had first seen the rural communities come together for the common cause of their children’s education in Missouri. Then he saw the German movements after the war and saw how the Community Schools took their slogan “Vom Kinde aus,” “Begin with the child”, to heart and built different types of pedagogical communities around a teacher’s leadership in response to the needs of that community. To Alexander it made sense that these concepts of community could be applied to schools in America, but to do so they needed a cadre of teachers to implement it, and a college to train them.
Alexander wanted to emulate the rural communal experience for his teachers and sought out a place far enough away from New York to offer a complete sociological change, but close enough so that students could attend on a rotational basis. In 1935, in a letter to Dean Russell urging the purchase of the New College Community and Georgia properties, Alexander outlined the emphasis on community building which was based on the New College philosophy. The letter was accompanied by a report entitled New College and its Community Building Program (1935) which stated:
"The world vibrates of talk of and experiments of changed forms of government. No one is too
inexperienced to voice his views. No suggestion is too wild to gain a following. And within the din,
a clear voice (George S. Counts?) has challenged teachers to build a ‘new social order’. The
theories proposed have all been on a grand scale. They have been formulas, schemes, and cure-alls.
Their approach has been a wholesale one and is usually to be accomplished through some form
of national or international revolution. New College seeks to cut through this confusion of conflicting
ideas and wholesale proposals and attack the problem as primarily as retail one. Viewing society
as an aggregate of communities, it asks, ‘Along what lines should this, and this, and that community
be built?’ It will be necessary to bring to the problem a background of theoretical knowledge of
social organization, past and present. But it will be indispensable to know intimately the communities
to be developed. The plans of organization evolved must be a product of interweaving the theoretical
background and the very practical knowledge of immediate conditions."
Alexander proposed to provide for his prospective teachers a careful discipline in all that is most worth in all fields of human knowledge. Using the Persistent Problems as a framework, the curriculum proposed to balance theoretical study against the practical contact with life. The rural community offered a perspective of those problems in its most basic form. The work in community building was one phase of the New College program comprising of:
- A careful discipline through the study of the four major fields of human knowledge, physical sciences, social sciences, philosophy, and art.
- A period of practical experience in industry and commerce.
- A period of residence and study abroad.
- Training in the history, theory and technique of teaching.
- Mastery of the subject matter in one or more fields of instruction.
- Participation (theoretical and practical), over several years, in a program of community building.
- Successful experience in teaching through a supervised interneship.
Alexander had seen the German educational system before and after the war, and the insight into the potential of the community, or Gemeinschaft, as the socially situated vehicle best suited to present education was not lost on him. Having completed his dissertation on the Prussian elementary school system, and more importantly on the teachers and their role, Alexander was now seeing the full bloom of German Progressivism in the post-war aftermath of national political and economic chaos. The emphasis on community learning along with the cooperative efforts of teachers, parents and students was not something that was nationally organized since any central educational authority was minimal at first. It was conceived and created by individual teachers and schools. Alexander saw the teacher as the glue that held the community together and the college he envisioned would produce that superior teacher.
At the very first gathering at Milbank Chapel of the new students and faculty, of which few if any knew each other, Dr. Alexander, as Chairman of New College told the assembly the reasons for the establishment of New College as he saw it. He first felt that something was wrong with education when he had to wait a year to be awarded his college diploma because he lacked a credit by failing to swim across a pool in time. The time spent overseas, particularly teaching in Turkey, taught Alexander that in order to appreciate your own country you must know another country. He learned that a competent and cultured teacher must appreciate the arts from his time as an usher at the Metropolitan Opera House. Alexander’s understanding of people and their labors was the product of work in the printing shop. More importantly, he realized the significance of these experiences in one’s education.
