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Alumni of anarchist school agitate for their legacy
Monday, January 07, 2008
BY SULEMAN DIN
Star-Ledger Staff
Martha Goldsmith Scara may be the last anarchist in Piscataway.
More than 80 years ago, her parents traveled Stelton Road to reach the
Modern School Ferrer Colony, a rural community inspired by the teachings
of Spanish anarchist Francisco Ferrer y Guardia.
Scara is the last student still living in the former colony, which
gained fame and infamy for its mélange of left-wing thought and the
Modern School's radical approach to education: putting children in
control of their own schooling.
Though the Modern School's history is well documented, its former
students now ponder their legacy. Less than two-thirds of the colony's
original houses remain, and the alumni reunions have thinned;
82-year-old Scara is among its 50 surviving students.
With time on the march, the school's alumni seek to preserve traces of
the community they loved, and some work to pass on their anti-statist
philosophy to a new generation of anarchists.
"People here don't realize before them, not everyone was a Republican or
a Democrat," said Scara. "When we go, the school will go with us."
The former students hope historical status can be bestowed to the most
unique home in the colony still standing, the egg-white plaster and wood
house of Sam Goldman, a Russian-born artist, said Modern School alumni
Jon Thoreau Scott.
Despite a timeworn appearance and the lack of a foundation, the Goldman
house on School Street draws the curious because of its peculiar
architecture: A porch column is a sculpture of gears and factory
machinery, and bas reliefs of workers, flora and fauna grace its exterior.
Scott, 75, said it has been difficult to preserve the colony's history
in the face of development.
The township defeated their efforts to turn the land where the Modern
School once stood into a playground, by approving its subdivision. A
mini-McMansion was promptly erected there instead. Only a marker stone
now notes where the school stood.
Some lots are for sale, and teardowns are in progress through the still
secluded neighborhood. Karl Marx Lane was renamed Arlington Lane, and
Stelton Road has become a clogged artery for traffic and strip malls.
"We all realized it was going to happen," Scott said. "It's a little bit
sad."
VIVID MEMORIES
Some of the school's students have turned to other ways to memorialize
the life that once was in the colony.
Poems have been the way David A. Heinlein has chosen to memorialize the
school at which his parents worked. Though Heinlein, 60, attended the
Modern School for just a year before its demise in 1953, the memories
are still strong, he said.
"Speakers on a soapbox, wild fruit trees, livestock, women laughing in
the darkness, it was all very, very earthy," Heinlein said. "Where do we
have that anymore?"
It was an atmosphere struck out of the anarchist idea of equality, that
decisions do not come from above, Scott said.
"That's freedom, true freedom, not what Americans call freedom, which is
really a license for big business to run the show," Scott said.
Scott is among the Modern School alumni involved in the movement to
continue its educational legacy, acting as a resource to alternative
schools in New Jersey and New York.
One such effort is The Factory School, a self-funded collective that
provides a student-driven creative education for underprivileged Queens
students, who learn to publish their works, just as students did at the
Modern School.
The students have been abandoned by the mainstream school system, said
Joel Kuszai, one of the school's co-founders, and the anarchist method
gives them new value, he said.
"What's really revolutionary is to take ownership and responsibility for
what you are doing," Kuszai said. "You live in the world, own it."
Yet there are differences of opinion among the alumni on promulgating
the Modern School's methods.
"It's nice to want to change the world, but it was a very restrictive
community," said Leonard Rico, 78, who left the school at 13 to join the
public system. "Some people still are bitter about not getting a formal
education."
Rico was among its alumni who went into academics. He earned a Ph.D. in
economics from MIT, and taught at the University of Pennsylvania's
Wharton School, but he admitted always feeling behind throughout his
studies.
Rico also questioned the revolutionary idealism of his classmates.
"Very few came out of the school to challenge the system," Rico said.
"Most of us tried to succeed in the system."
Ready to debate Rico was another Modern School alumnus, David M.
Freedman, a Highland Park entrepreneur who founded New Brunswick
Scientific, a laboratory equipment manufacturer.
Though a small company, it had a global business, Freedman said, and
encouraged work force diversity. His company was the first to ban
smoking in the workplace, and was among the first to use mediators
during union negotiations, avoiding the costly and punitive path of
arbitration.
"We did some innovative things," Freedman said.
After many years, Freedman, 86, drove through the colony one evening,
surprised at how much of it has disappeared.
But he remembered the long-gone summers, walking the same roads to get
chickens for his mother, or the dirt path to the brook where he splashed
with friends. He smiled as he spoke of the camaraderie that has kept
Modern School alumni in touch after all these years.
That warmth would be the school's true legacy, Freedman said.
"It was a jumping community, full of life and culture and kindness," he
said. "It was total, total, total freedom."
Suleman Din may be reached at or (732) 404-8084.
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/3akhhr
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"
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