Education Reform? It Started in Fairhope

President Obama is committed to a deep reform of the educational system. I hope while investigating options his experts will take a look at what they call in Fairhope the Organic School.

Founded in 1907 by visionary educator Marietta Johnson, the Organic School was based on the same kind of reform that Fairhope itself was, and it fit in the little village like a glove. It was to work hand-in-hand with the Single Tax Corporation for its first years of existence, and the two institutions shared many of the same benefactors and local support.

The principles of Organic education remain radical. The basic premise is that education is natural to life (Mrs. Johnson used to say that education is life), and that children's curiosity and love of learning is to be incorporated in the process of teaching. She wrote two books on the subject which are incorporated into a slim volume called Teaching Without Failure now for sale at the Marietta Johnson Museum.

That's a daunting title. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of her system was that Mrs. Johnson believed that no child should be allowed to "fail" at education. The concept of failure was turned on its head; if the student didn't grasp the subject, it was failure of the school rather than the child. She solved this dilemma by simply eliminating measurements from the equation.

How, then, said the education Establishment, are we to know what a child is learning? The answer is that "we" don't. Any child can cram facts and pass a test, but has he really learned? Only the student in question is capable of knowing how much he has learned. In today's obsession with test scores, this is the most difficult aspect of Organic education to sell to the public.

Today, many of Mrs. Johnson's tenets have been softened at the school. It was essential to her system that students begin at the earliest year possible and remain in the school through high school. If an unfortunate child had to transfer, he had a big adjustment to make to adapt to the atmosphere of adversity in a traditional school, but soon emerged victorious, having been imbued with a basic love of the learning process. Now it is seldom that a student remains in a school from kindergarten through high school. The Organic School itself goes only through the eighth grade at this point.

But there is much to be learned from the school, which Mrs. Johnson considered a demonstration of the direction for all education. When traveling in Progressive Education circles, she was often challenged about her idea of education. "It sounds lovely," she was told, "But it could never work."

"Come to Fairhope and see," was what she answered. Many did, and many took away ideas which have become part of the schools of today.

There is a lot written about this unique approach to education reform. Read my books about it, which are at Page and Palette Bookstore in Fairhope or at amazon.com or Barnes and Noble.com, or drop by the Marietta Johnson Museum on the Faulkner campus for information about Mrs. Johnson and the school, or go to the campus on Pecan Ave. east of Section Street.

Or look it all up on the Internet!

What Made Fairhope Fairhope?

September 15, 2007

Marietta Johnson in 1938

There is an ongoing parlor game in Fairhope about "what makes Fairhope Fairhope." I know I used the name a lot of times in that brief sentence, but I did it because I had to. Fairhope is nothing if not self-obsessed, particularly the new people who've moved in to what they consider a magical little town that seems to have appeared just to provide them with a sense of wonder.

But the elements that came together to create what may appear to be a thriving little Disneyland town are really quite different. Fairhope was once a reformist enclave which has now been all but swallowed up by a modernity gone very wrong. Its last shreds of idealism, the Single Tax Colony and the School of Organic Education, are hanging by slim threads indeed.

The importance of the Marietta Johnson School of Organic Education to the development of Fairhope as a colony of artists, intellectuals and reformers cannot be measured. In its early days, at least half the families of Fairhope had children in the school, which added to the village’s cachet of individuality and self-actualization.

Organic Education is education designed for the whole organism – body, mind, and spirit. Behind the theory is the knowledge that children love to learn and therefore school should be a pleasure to them. This is an extreme departure from traditional education; though begun as a demonstration school in Fairhope one hundred years ago, it is as extraodinary today as it was when the school was founded.

Marietta Johnson, a teacher in the normal school system in Minnesota, discovered Fairhope through fellow Minnesotans who were interested in Single Tax. She was newly married to a farmer and carpenter who was described as “a tall, handsome Swede” by those who remembered him some fifty years later.

Franklin and Marietta Johnson made their first trip to Fairhope in December of 1903, leaving St. Paul in the middle of a snowstorm and arriving in the kind of beautiful weather so often found in Fairhope in early winter. Ardent devotees of the Single Tax theory, they were enchanted with the town and hoped to buy and work a farm nearby. However, destiny had other plans for the couple.

The Fairhope of the early 1900’s was decidedly different from the city it is today. With a population hovering between 300 and 400, the town had been founded to demonstrate the validity of Henry George’s theory. Still a small enclave – only reached by boat – Fairhope had no paved roads, no automobiles yet, and a struggling but idealistic economy. In spite of its out-of-the-way location, little Fairhope was acquiring a reputation as an excellent resort area for intellectuals from the Northeast, the Midwest, and California.

Fairhope’s citizens were interested in new ideas from all quarters. At the dawn of the 20th Century, they believed great things were about to happen, and they also believed Fairhope to be the ideal location to demonstrate the efficacy of new ideas. Many of the Utopians who founded Fairhope, including E.B. Gaston himself, had children of school age and were interested in new ideas about education.

Marietta Johnson, trained as an elementary school teacher, had long been studying the new disciplines of Early Childhood Development and Child Psychology. She dreamed of a school that would be geared to the stages of development of the child rather than the old approach of forcing the child to fit the school system. In those days it was revolutionary to assume that children are radically different from adults – and it was even more unthinkable to imagine that their natural curiosity results in a natural joy in learning. The more she talked to people in Fairhope, the more inspired she became that she was on the right track in starting a school to benefit the revolutionary attitude of Fairhope.

She was obsessed with education, and her enthusiasm led her to believe that everyone who heard her theory would understand and agree. She was convinced that a demonstration school in Fairhope would reform the whole school system in America and the world.

Mrs. Johnson reinvented herself once she moved to Fairhope permanently – and she was 42 years old at the time. With zeal for her educational philosophy, she became a spellbinding lecturer, an accomplished fund-raiser, and a trainer of teachers who flocked to Fairhope to the school from all over the country. Mrs. Johnson and E.B. Gaston became friends and colleagues in proselytizing for both Fairhope and the school, and he and his wife enrolled all four of their children there.

Mrs. Johnson’s approach to education was as profound as it was simple. She knew that children learn as they play, and she felt that play was one of the most important ways a child could learn. While offering the traditional academic curriculum along with its program of activities in the fresh air, music, art, and handwork, the school did not hold one study as more important than another. The Organic School did not grade its children or have periodic tests or examinations. There were no dress codes. The artistic and crafts courses were required. Liberal use was made of Fairhope’s natural resources in the education of the children. Field trips to the gullies, the beach and activities outside on the beautiful 10-acre campus (now the home of Faulkner Community College) were part of the learning experience.

Children acted out the Greek myths on their hikes to the gullies. They came barefooted to school and climbed trees at recess. They sat outdoors for classes. In other words, they loved going to school. It was basic to Mrs. Johnson’s theory that this atmosphere offers an ideal situation for learning.

Today you meet many people from “old” Fairhope who will regale you with information they learned at the Organic School. The school – founded on the theory that hands-on projects are the best way to learn any skill – peopled Fairhope with generations who could build houses, throw pots, dance, paint pictures, write stories. Among their number are also doctors, lawyers, educators, military men, as well as entrepreneurs in the business world and practitioners of the arts.

In the 1920’s, the Marietta Johnson School was a magnet for the community. Its existence changed the history of Fairhope. In the process, one child at a time, the Marietta Johnson School has been at the heart of what makes Fairhope and its people unique. Those who supported the school, and the children who attended it, had (and still have) sincerity, innocence, and an eagerness for learning – their whole lives long. It’s the Fairhope attitude, and, more to the point, it’s the attitude of Organic Education.