Book Review: Sounds of the New Deal: The Federal Music Project in the West, by Peter Gough. Foreword by Peggy Seeger. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015.

Abstract

creative project became a vehicle for teaching academic skills including grammar, punctuation, and handwriting, plus the social skills of working as a team. Martin discusses misconceptions about progressive education, quoting Dewey: “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself” (p. 62). Martin notes that there were many different educational reform movements in the 1930s, and historical educational accounts tend to combine these movements into one “progressive education,” ignoring the complexity of reform. There is a misconception that progressive schools were for elite children of the upper classes. But John Dewey, Francis W. Parker, and other members of the progressive movement wanted a sound education for as many children as possible, rejecting nineteenth-century methods of drill, tests, and memorization. Little Red, located in Greenwich Village, a neighborhood in New York City known as an artists’ haven, had children of all economic classes. A misconception of progressive education has been the assumption that the curriculum was all unstructured play, frills, and superficial anti-intellectual activities. Little Red classmates remember learning together, studying real anthills, creating murals, building a model of the Colosseum, and doing the necessary research connected with these projects. Play productions included research, writing, designing scenery, acting, and directing. Classes were large, with as many as 43 students in a class. The teachers changed each year, but the students stayed together, moving to each new grade as a group and developing a sense of identity. The philosophy at Little Red claimed education was not preparation for a specific work force, but preparation for life. School was our Life is not a chronological history of the Little Red School House or a summary of progressive education in the era. The book is a collective memory, a reflection by a group of schoolmates who experienced Little Red in the 1920s and the 1930s, and are now in their late eighties. Their memories may not be always accurate or consistent, but a composite memory produces a self-checking and detailed story, as individuals contributed their versions and confirmed or contradicted each other. Since the interviewees are not identified, the reader does not develop an understanding of the views of individual schoolmates, with the exception of the author. This composite is not a reproduction of events of the 1920s and the 1930s, but an adult viewpoint reflecting on the experiences of the schoolmates. While it is difficult to grasp the objective philosophy of the Little Red Schoolhouse from this book, the reader develops an understanding of the values and mission of this school and the place of the arts in education as former students remembered it.