The School

For 12 years, from 1979 to 1991, I had the honor and the responsibility of directing the Ethical Culture Fieldston School. Now retired and living in South Carolina, I do manage to keep up with what is happening. For example, when I left, computers were just becoming a regular part of the curriculum. Today, they are as necessary as books and laboratories and as omnipresent. With new needs today’s School is in the midst of a building program that will provide new opportunities for younger teen-agers in 7th and 8th grades in what we call in the US a “middle school.”

Located in Manhattan opposite Central Park and in Riverdale (the Bronx) where the city touches the suburbs, the School serves more than 1500 students from 4 year olds through high school graduation or what in the US is called pre-kindergarten though 12th grade. Students come from many ethnic, economic, and religious backgrounds. A large and well-trained faculty of about 300 includes classroom teachers, specialists in the arts, sciences, the social sciences, and physical education. Just about all of the School’s students go on to college.

The School is “private” or what is called here “independent.” It receives no financial support from the state. It depends on tuition and fund raising for meeting its expenses. Fortunately, too, since its founding in 1878, thousands of generous and committed members of the Ethical Society, student’s families, and alumni have contributed to a growing endowment whose income meets some but by no means all of the School’s needs. Despite a multi-million dollar annual budget, maintaining high educational standards, offering the varied program that a modern school must, and meeting its costs was for me as for my predecessors and successors a continuing challenge. We managed but it was hard work.

Finally, the School is not “parochial” or as one might say in Europe, “confessional.” To be sure, it reflects the Ethical Culture and Humanist tradition in which it was born. Of course, it has a commitment to democratic polity and to social service and social reform. But, it does not engage in doctrinal teaching, not even Humanist doctrinal teaching. Indeed, the diversity and variety of students, families, and staff is an educational resource and an expression of the ideals that led to the School’s founding and that still guide its existence.

Felix Adler’s Free Kindergarten

It was in 1878 that Felix Adler, the founder and pioneering leader of the Ethical Culture Society, established a “free kindergarten.” Motivated by the needs of poor working families and by the emerging progressive tradition in education, this first step became within two years what was called “The Workingman’s School.” Over the next decades it grew grade by grade.

It was among the first to provide science laboratories, art studios, music and drama as well as traditional academic subjects. Discoveries in the psychological development of the child led to a more and more sensitive curriculum. By the 1890s, it would be fair to say that the Workingman’s School (Fieldston would come later) was indeed a “model” of what education could achieve when attention was paid to how children grow and learn. And indeed, others did model themselves after its program.

In the early 1890s, many of the families in the Ethical Culture Society whose support had helped create the School complained that it was unfair for their children to be excluded simply because they were not “workingmen’s” children. Consequently, the School changed it name and in part, at least, its mission. As a condition of the change, it was agreed that there would always be a significant scholarship program so that those who could not afford the school’s fees could still attend.

Many experiments followed including an open-air school on the roof of the building, a summer camp, the organization of parent study groups, a teacher-training program, and an arts high school. In the 1920s, Adler who was nearing 80 and his colleagues conceived the idea of a new high school, one where students could benefit from a rigorous academic program and, at the same time, be active participants in the arts and sciences, in vocations, and, not least of all in school governance. With support from the Ethical Society and some of its wealthier members and with a grant from John D. Rockefeller Jr., the property in Riverdale was purchased, the school built, and opened in 1928. By the mid 1930’s an elementary school was established on the site as well.

The School then, much as it does today, consisted of two pre-Kindergarten through 6th grade units, a middle school (Grades 7 and 8) as part of the Fieldston School and a high school (Grades 9-12). The roster of alumni is rich with individuals who have excelled in the arts, the theater, the sciences and in business and the professions as well. Adler’s vision of educating “reformers,” modified by the realities of an urban industrial culture has been realized over and over again as the School passes its 130th birthday.

Continuing the Ethical Culture Tradition

To be sure, Ethical Culture Fieldston must live in a world of academic requirements, college admissions, balancing budgets, rewarding teachers, etc. It is no longer officially tied to the New York Ethical Culture Society. At the same time, it continues to reveal the mark of its founding and its tradition. Let me highlight three of them. First, the School from the earliest grades through the graduating year maintains an ethics teaching program, an ethics faculty, and includes regular ethics classes in the on- going schooling of every student. Second, in order to give reality to the ideas studied in the ethics classes and to the ideal of the School, every student in the middle and high school and every class in the elementary schools is expected to perform regular community service. Students work in health care and social work agencies, community organizations, child-service programs, etc. Third, the School maintains a scholarship program costing several millions of dollars a year (about 15% of the annual budget) and supporting in whole or part the attendance of about one in every four students.

In short, the ideals of the reformer, of the workingman’s school, and of the moral democrat live on in the School despite the pressures of a busy diverse society, the complexities of offering an inclusive modern curriculum that grows more complicated each year, the demands of the colleges, and the economics of a costly industrial society.

Howard B Radest was Co-Chair of IHEU from 1975 to 1986 and is a leader of the Ethical Culture movement.