Elisabeth Antoinette Irwin was educator, psychologist, reformer, the founder of the Little Red School House.
Background
Elisabeth was born on August 29, 1880 in Brooklyn, New York, United States, to Josephine Augusta (Easton) and William Henry Irwin. She was the youngest of four children, of whom only she and a brother survived childhood. Her father, a grain merchant, was a descendant of William Irwin, a Scotch-Irish immigrant who settled in Dutchess County, New York, about 1714; her mother's Puritan forebear, Joseph Easton, had come from England to Massachusetts about 1633.
Although Elisabeth was reared in comfortable material circumstances, she apparently had a rather bleak childhood. Of her father, she later wrote curtly that he "was a staunch Republican. His avocations were animals, horses and dogs, and reading. " Eventually she broke with her family completely.
Education
Elisabeth Irwin attended Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn (1890 - 99) and then entered Smith College. She received A. B. in 1903.
She kept abreast of the latest developments in the field of social work by taking courses in the New York School of Philanthropy and at Columbia University, from which she received an M. A. in 1923.
Career
After College, Elisabeth enlisted in the social settlement movement, becoming in 1904 a resident at the College Settlement on New York's Lower East Side, where she remained for a year. For several years (1905 - 09) she experimented with the carefree life, traveling with a friend about the East, peddling notions from a horse-drawn cart in the country around Danbury, Connecticut, and contributing free-lance articles on social issues to newspapers and to women's journals. She worked at the College Settlement again in 1909-10.
Miss Irwin then joined the staff of the Public Education Association of New York City in the capacity of "visiting teacher" (social worker) and psychologist. A citizen group founded in 1894 to work for the improvement of the public schools, the association was marshaling its considerable influence behind progressive education as an agency of social reform. In this movement Elisabeth Irwin was to take a leading part. For six years she worked with the Board of Education's department of ungraded classes, administering Binet intelligence tests to mentally defective schoolchildren.
In 1916, at Public School 64, she began a pioneer experiment in the identification and instruction of gifted children. This had led by 1921 to the classification of all the children in the school into homogeneous groups on the basis of "intelligence quotient" or I. Q. In 1922, still under the aegis of the Public Education Association, Irwin launched a new project, an experiment in revising the public school curriculum and teaching methods. The project, located initially in a public school on East 16th Street, was promptly christened "The Little Red School House. " With a hundred first-graders as the initial experimental group, she deemphasized conventional academic subjects and skills and reorganized the curriculum around occupations and the arts, introducing play and group activities in a permissive classroom atmosphere. At its peak size, in 1931, the program involved only 267 children, but it gained an international reputation as one of the country's foremost examples of a progressive public school.
Miss Irwin had hoped to develop a curriculum and methods suitable for use throughout the public schools, and her experimental program continued for ten years as part of the city school system. It met strong opposition, however, from many politicians, from some school officials, and from immigrant parents who wished their children to receive a standard American education. An investigation in 1930-31 found that Irwin's pupils were much less advanced than children in other public schools in such basic skills as arithmetic, reading, and spelling, and in 1932 the city withdrew its support. That fall, with the aid of a group of friends and Greenwich Village residents, Irwin organized another Little Red School House, at 196 Bleecker Street, as a private, progressive elementary school; in 1941 she added a high school department (after her death renamed the Elisabeth Irwin High School). She had never operated, however, under conventional public school conditions: as a public school experiment, her Little Red School House always received support from foundations and wealthy patrons; as a private school, its clientele had little in common with children in the ordinary public school.
She died of cancer at New York Hospital in New York City after a lengthy illness.
Achievements
Elisabeth Antoinette Irwin's achievement as a public school reformer, however, is debatable. Although, her Little Red School House, was founded in the midst of the depression and became one of the best-known and most respected progressive schools in the country, but the results of her educational experiments were not very high. Nevertheless, her school is sometimes regarded as a model of progressive methods suitable for general use in the public schools. Her work, more clearly than that of any other progressive educator, represents the efforts of progressives to transform the curricula and procedures of the public schools according to the principles of the contemporary mental hygiene movement.
Views
Elisabeth Antoinette Irwin assumed that the social and emotional adjustment of children must be the overriding concern of the educator, that their intellectual development could be taken for granted. Apparently she did not consider the possibility that a laissez-faire policy regarding intellectual development would limit the social mobility of pupils who lacked a favorable cultural background.
Membership
Irwin was a charter member of the Bureau of Educational Experiments and the Associated Experimental Schools, and a member of the Progressive Education Association, the Teachers Union, and the American Civil Liberties Union.
She was a member of the feminist intellectual club Heterodoxy.
Personality
Miss Irwin was a competent, determined, and resourceful administrator.
She was a short, stout, and capable-looking woman with a fair complexion, blue eyes, and short-cropped white hair. Her face was plain but expressive of strength of character and intelligence. Indifferent to dress, uninhibited in speech, she possessed a lively wit and a shrewd common sense. Most of the leaders in the field of progressive education in New York City were her personal friends.
At home, Irwin usually had a cat or two perched on her shoulders, a pair of Irish terriers at her feet.
Interests
Elisabeth enjoyed the theater and informal parties, but derived most of her pleasure from her work and her association with children.
Connections
A militant feminist (and pacifist), Elisabeth Antoinette Irwin disparaged marriage but experimented with domesticity by legally adopting one child, Elizabeth H. Westwood, and helping rear at least three others. Irwin lived for thirty years in Greenwich Village with the historian and biographer Katharine Anthony; the two also maintained a summer home in Gaylordsville, a section of New Milford, Connecticut.
