Felix and Maria: How Progressive Education Lost its Way

Students at the Workingman’s School, undated. Photo from Ethical Culture Fieldston School Archives, via the New York Historical Society.

In 1878, Felix Adler founded the Workingman’s school, the country’s first free kindergarten, in New York City. It was an experimental school meant exclusively for children growing up in the tenements, whose education was generally neglected. Moral education lay at the heart of the school’s mission, and students spent their days in light-filled, spacious classrooms, in stark contrast to the dank, crowded tenements where they lived. On nice days, they would take trips to Central Park or to the school’s second property, a small vacation colony in Pennsylvania. Not that escape felt especially necessary: according to an 1890 New York Times article on the school, “the school building is so spacious, well lighted, and cheerful, and the teaching is so intelligent, progressive, and interesting, that the children of the rich might envy the advantages offered to the offspring of the poor.”

Thankfully, the city’s rich did not need to suffer for long. Once the school had established a reputation for academic excellence and general loveliness, wealthy parents took note and began to find ways to enroll their own children. In 1890, the school expanded from thirty-three students to more than 300 and began charging tuition for a limited number of wealthier, “paid pupils” so that they might improve their facilities, hire more teachers, and maybe even make a slight profit. This may have been the beginning of the end for the Workingman’s School—the point at which the “workingman” himself began to disappear from view.

In 2017, when I began attending the Workingman’s School—renamed the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in 1895, and referred to colloquially as “Fieldston”—it was a member of the Ivy League of Preparatory Schools. Tuition hovered around the $60,000 mark, and only 22% of students received financial aid. “Like Felix Adler, our founder, who first named our School the Workingman’s School,” the school’s website reads, “we also embrace equity and inclusion.” 

Gone are the days of enlightened tenement children and a select few payers of tuition. In fact, the idea of a school that is progressive, academically rigorous, and affordable now seems almost laughable.

When Maria Montesorri, whose name now evokes beautiful, overpriced abacuses and serene private school children walking in perfect lines, opened her first school in the late nineteenth century, her pedagogy had few glamorous associations. She worked with children living in underfunded asylums or who had fallen behind in state schools, who she referred to affectionately as her “little idiots.” Students whose talents she believed in despite their marginalized status, who deserved empathy and faith because they were human—not because their parents could afford to pay for it. 

She opened her first schoolhouse (free, like Adler’s), called the Casa dei Bambini, or the Children’s House, in a tenement in a working-class neighborhood. Some of her students were so poor that they weren’t familiar with the utensils set out at mealtime. As Montessori schoolhouses spread around Europe, they came to cater to the many impoverished children who were still in shock from the traumas of World War One..  

Like Adler, Montessori’s target pupils disappeared at some point between 1897, when she first developed her program, and the mid-twentieth century, when a Montessori education became a mark of privilege. 

By the time the first Montessori school made its way to North America in 1911, it was situated in a Georgian mansion in Westchester and had only twelve students, all of whom were children of the Federal Reserve’s highest-ups. Helen Parkhurst, an educator who trained under Montessori, went on to found the Dalton School, whose tuition now approaches Fieldston’s at around $57,000 a year. 

Today, a half-day program for a toddler at The Montessori School in Soho or Flatiron costs $31,200 a year, and a full day costs $38,800. A good education, the philosophy seems to go, is worth paying a little extra for—or a lot extra. The more progressive an academic institution is, the more parents are willing to spend, lest their children be stuck in the authoritarian-leaning public school system, whose standardized tests and common-core curriculum might quash their creative instincts. 

On average, New York public schools spend $24,881 on each pupil over the course of thirteen years—far above the country’s average of $13,185 per pupil, but far below Fieldston’s $780,000, for example. And it may well be worth the money—every student’s education may be worth nearly $800,000. The issue is that when a high-quality, child-focused style of education is accessible only to the students whose parents can pay, all initial progressivism is lost. 

This is not to say that it is impossible for disadvantaged students to attend these sorts of schools–the 22% of Fieldston students that receive aid are not worth completely glossing over. Maybe some effort at equity is being made. One program, called Prep for Prep, acts as a feeder for disadvantaged students of color to elite private schools. Prep for Prep enrolls almost 700 students across 150 of the country’s top private schools with generous aid packages. The program, which prepares sixth and seventh-graders to apply for and succeed at private schools through a rigorous 14-month course of study, is an undeniably necessary catalyst for diversity of every sort in private schools.

While a program like Prep for Prep does ostensibly even the playing field, something about its necessity feels off. Schools like Fieldston purport not to offer merit scholarships, and yet many of its students who receive financial aid come from Prep for Prep. Poor students of color are forced into being exceptional in a way that their wealthy, white counterparts are not. And so, aid and education become things to be earned rather than given.

Felix Adler’s “workingman,” along with Maria Montessori’s shell-shocked “little idiots,” fell by the wayside somewhere between the formation of idealistic missions and a world of immense privilege. Why is it that only the rich are allowed to benefit from the work of educators who never intended to serve them in the first place?

Rebecca Kopelman (BC ‘25) is a staff writer with CPR studying English and Philosophy.