Intentional Communities and Children

Education in Historical Communities

Throughout history, utopian visionaries have understood the advantages of intentional communities creating [Page 677]and maintaining their own educational systems. However, despite the importance and utility of communal education, few intentional communities have actually had an educational program of any sort. According to historian Arthur Bestor, who compiled statistics on approximately 600 communal and utopian societies that existed in the United States between 1787 and 1919, less than 15 percent provided educational benefits.

This scarcity of educational programs was likely due not to a lack of interest in or need for the programs but to a lack of facilities, materials, and trained educators. Particularly in the early phases of a community, education often takes a back seat to more pressing needs of building residences and a viable social and economic order. Children often suffer academically and socially during these early years.

While educational programs within intentional communities are relatively rare, educators within these settings have consistently pioneered the most avant-garde educational models and methods of their day. The Shakers (1774–the present) furthered the theories and methods of British educator Joseph Lancaster; New Harmony (1814–1827) in Indiana developed the first kindergarten in the United States and was a renowned center of Pestalozzianism (the educational philosophy of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, which is based more on the study of objects than on words); the socialist community Llano del Rio (1914–1938) pioneered one of the [Page 678]first and largest Montessori programs in California; and the Ferrer Colony (1915–1946) in New Brunswick, New Jersey, created an educational program called The Modern School that drew heavily upon the philosophies of Friedrich Froebel and Leo Tolstoy. In addition, Hutterites in Moravia operated Kleinschuls (preschools) as early as the sixteenth century that have remained much the same, except for the addition of English schools, since their immigration to the United States in 1874.

These experiments typically occurred in isolation from one another, and no common school of thought emerged from within historical communities. If there is anything that tied these efforts together, it was their embracing of educational models and methods that reflected their community's ideology, their emphasis on using participation in the community itself as part of children's educational experience, and their devotion to and often dogmatic attitudes regarding their own educational programs.