School Prospectus Quotes

Design came into being in 1919, when Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus at Weimar. Part of the prospectus of this school reads: 'The function of art has in the past been given a formal importance which has severed it from our daily life; but art is always present when a people lives sincerely and health. 'Thus our job is to invest a new system of education that may lead to a complete knowledge of human needs and a universal awareness of them.' [...] What Gropius wrote is still valid. Tis first school of design did tend to make a new kind of artist, an artist useful to society because he helps society to recover its balance, and not to lurch between a false world to live one's material life in and and ideal world to take moral revenge in.

Activity pouch on airplanes Buttons and pins Crayons and coloring place mats from restaurants Disposable sample cup from the grocery store Erasers and pencils with eraser tops Fireman hat from a visit to the fire station Goodie bags from county fairs and festivals Hair comb from picture day at school Infant goods from the maternity ward Junior ranger badge from the ranger station and Smokey the Bear Kids’ meal toys Lollipops and candy from various locations, such as the bank Medals and trophies for simply participating in (versus winning) a sporting activity Noisemakers to celebrate New Year’s Eve OTC samples from the doctor’s office Party favors and balloons from birthday parties Queen’s Jubilee freebies (for overseas travelers) Reusable plastic “souvenir” cup and straw from a diner Stickers from the doctor’s office Toothbrushes and floss from the dentist’s office United States flags on national holidays Viewing glasses for a 3-D movie (why not keep one pair and reuse them instead?) Water bottles at sporting events XYZ, etc.: The big foam hand at a football or baseball game or Band-Aids after a vaccination or various newspapers, prospectuses, and booklets from school, museums, national parks . . .

It was one of the supposed advantages of Groom Place that we did not wear a uniform. Our personalities were thus given full scope to express themselves through the medium of our clothes. At least that was what it said in the prospectus, and more or less what my mother had said when she sent me to the school. But, as far as I was concerned, it didn’t work out like that. My clothes expressed nothing but Miss Partridge’s distaste for shopping and our mutual antagonism to each other. I longed for the stuffy anonymous blue serge and black stockings of my High School. There, there had been no nonsense about personality. But there was nothing I could do about it except pretend that I wasn’t wearing an apple-green stockinette dress. I didn’t like green and I didn’t like stockinette. It was hard to have to endure them both in one garment.

For Rosseau, then, education would have to be a way not of instilling the ideals of civilization but rather of liberating the young from civilization and its evils. Much of the program he described in his didactic novel Emile is what he calls "negative education," an antidote and inoculation against the pervasive evils of civilization. It has come to be called "The Child's Charter"-a basis for modern child psychology. And it would be the prospectus and statement of principles for "progressive education" in the United States, led by John Dewey (1859-1952), who conceived it as a way of bringing democracy into the classroom (The School and Society, 1899; Democracy and Education, 1916). The movement attended tot he child's physical and emotional as well as his intellectual development, favored "learning by doing," and encouraged experimental and independent thinking. The teacher, then, aimed not at instilling a body of knowledge but at developing the pupil's own skill at learning from experience.

They ran academies for boys preparing for college, and for boys “preparing for mercantile professions who may want education superior to common schools,” as one school’s prospectus read. They offered special classes, mainly for boys, in drawing, music, languages, writing, and dancing. Women, by contrast, taught small classes of girls, or sometimes groups of young children of both sexes, in their homes or rented rooms. In 1822, there were more than fifty such “schoolmistresses” listing their services in the Boston directory, and probably just as many women teaching school without bothering to register their addresses. Girls in these “primary schools” learned little more than the basics of reading, writing, geography, arithmetic, and needlepoint.