Ethical Culture Schools

The Ethical Culture School is a historical curriculum model based on the work of its seminal influence, Felix Adler, and is an organic alternative for education in the United States as a Sunday school program of study, a private school option at Fieldston Ethical Culture School in New York, and as a charter school option in New Jersey.

Adler, graduate of Columbia College with a doctorate from the University of Heidelberg, merged Kantian idealism with elements of U.S. Transcendentalism to develop a theophilosophic statement that he promoted by founding the Society for Ethical Culture in 1876. Adler contended the differences that demarcate major religious traditions are not as significant as the common ethical foundation. Adler urged companions to attend to urban social problems such as tenement ...