Little Red School House
and Elisabeth Irwin High School

A Pre-K-12 Progressive Education

Copy of Why Progressive?

We pride ourselves on being a progressive pre-K through twelfth grade school. But what do we mean by progressive education? And why is it so important?

At LREI, progressive education is...

Active & Interdisciplinary

LREI’s students are active participants in each class, each day — making connections between disciplines, using the arts to find creative solutions and struggling together towards new truths.
Inquiry-Based

Learning focuses on finding collaborative solutions to real-world problems. We believe that there is much to learn on the journey to the solution. Our students take their learning out into the community in order to understand the world as it is, not as it’s written about.
Interested in the Whole Child

We care about what kids know, who they are and who they will become. We provide young people with the capacity not only for intellectual achievement, but also for "the art of happy and productive living."
Committed to Social Justice

Our diverse community values equity in race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic means and family structure.

1 / 4

Simply put, progressive education works with a child’s natural inquisitiveness and desire to do, to experiment and to be involved. Progressive education asks students to truly understand a topic and to demonstrate and to defend their understanding. It asks them to think beyond the page, beyond the “right answer.”

There has never been a more critical time for critical thinkers. When answers can be Googled in the tap of a finger or click of a mouse, asking the right questions is what counts. Living by core values is what counts. Our progressive program equips students with the confidence to discern fact from slant, and to contribute to society in a meaningful way.

Nearly 100 years ago, Elisabeth Irwin, a student of one of America’s great philosophers, social worker, travel writer, and adventurer, offered a bold proposal. She suggested that she would create a classroom within a public school. Using her “new methods,” her progressive methods, her students would, she posited, outperform those students in more traditional classrooms. What happened in her progressive classroom? Maybe more importantly, how do we express Miss Irwin’s progressive principles today in the school that grew out of what Elisabeth Irwin always referred to as her experiment?

We are always in conversation about our mission, about our underlying principles, and the benefits of our progressive program. These ideas guide our learner's experiences each day in school and, we hope, in their lives outside of school as this is truly the goal — educating for school and for “life.” Two key questions guide us in this work: What continues to make the progressive difference, nearly 100 years after our school's founding? And what are the essential experiences and skills to develop on the journey towards a fruitful and successful future?

Within each school year and across the span of a 14-year LREI experience, four key elements frame this work. It is important to emphasize that while there are times when these four elements are seen as individual efforts, more often than not they are intertwined, adding their individual relevance to that of others, adding strength and flexibility, like a rope made of a number of sturdy fibers, the whole being stronger than the sum of its parts.

One practice that is grounded in our progressive principles is the field trip, an approach to learning that was pioneered at LREI. Through the trip, we seek to take learning out into the world and to then bring the world into the classroom to deepen and enrich the learning experience. As Agnes De Lima explains in The Little Red School House:

[Our] curriculum is built around the children’s explorations of the world and the intellectual and emotional stimulation that comes from contact with the living book of everyday life. . . . We have attempted to tear down the walls of the classroom and bring the child into direct contact with the community. . . . Their trips not only cause them to have an understanding of people but give them the stimulus to do something about it.

List of 1 items.

More thoughts on trips from Director Phil Kassen

And off they go! Four of our youngest students and their teacher are heading into the world in search of answers to questions they don’t yet know they have. Heading off equipped with a child’s birthright - the love and joy found in learning about the world, brought to fruition with their developing academic skills, with their teacher as a guide, and their colleagues to provide four-year-old collegiality and to help carry the load.

The Fours’ home visits are the earliest incarnation of LREI’s commitment to merging learning and life, the schoolhouse and the world, and to using these moments of synchrony as opportunities to develop and hone essential academic and intellectual skills. These moments of being part of a larger world are an essential component of LREI’s legacy and of our current program. Connecting learning to the world, whether done in or out of the school house, has been at the core of what we do for nearly 100 years. The field trip was invented at the turn of the last century at the Little Red School House and schools like it. Trips help to answer the questions, “How can we get as close as possible to the experiences of others; how can we truly understand and empathize? What are the most authentic and effective ways in which to practice and test our learning?”

During their time at LREI students will take dozens of day-long field trips and at least nine overnight trips. Many of these experiences relate to specific classroom foci while others are more general in nature, relating to the year’s curriculum writ large, offering an overarching view of how work in school connects to work in the world. These finely tuned experiences, planned with the utmost skill and care, create opportunities to put students’ skills and content area knowledge to the test. We see this when students count leaves gathered in Washington Square Park, when first graders survey safety signs and traffic, when fourth graders paint moments from their farm trip, through the 7th grade museum research, the eighth grade social justice field work, and, of course, the last overnight trip, our eleventh grade long-trip experience, researching national issues around the country.

Connecting the classroom to the world happens within the walls of the school house, as well. The very essence of our classroom-based program in the lower school and our departmentalized curriculum in the middle and high school challenges students to gain the skills and understanding to navigate their increasingly complex world. They are asked to hear, learn from, listen to, and challenge ideas and voices and experiences that are different from their own, to begin to develop a level of cultural competency. Through the books they read, the activities in which they participate, through arts and math and science, through their participation in extracurricular activities in the older grades, and led by example by our skilled faculty who inspire this school/world connection each day, our students minimize the distance between learning and living; practicing, growing, and developing a better sense of their place in the larger society and the power that their education provides.

As lawyer, author, and advocate for justice Bryan Stevenson said, "I believe our power, our instruments, our wisdom, our capacity to change the world is waiting for us if we get proximate to the poor and excluded.” Our students develop this power over the course of their 14-year LREI experience. Progressive education relies on students getting proximate to life, theirs and that of others, and at LREI they do, every day.

Warmly,
Phil