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 housing and child labor as active response to the moral imperatives to recognize the inherent dignity of all people, mutual support, and social responsibility.

In The Moral Instruction of Children, Adler suggested a common fund of moral truth serves to unite and direct schools in the United States, and the effective teacher transmits this cultural ethic through moral training in a climate of intellectual exploration. Adler presented a model of educational reform based on the cultural epoch theory whereby the child grows into adulthood by replicating the past stages of Western civilization. Adler relied on habit formation and integration of moral lessons in the school environment, but also called for the exercise of moral reasoning. Adler divided human development into distinct stages, each with a predominant duty that moral instruction challenges to provoke maturity. In infancy, obedience to parents forms the central duty to be fashioned in the child. In early childhood, forming right habits is of primary importance. With regard to all dimensions of social living, from ages 6 to 14, duty shifts to acquiring knowledge of physical life, family, filial and fraternal obligations, and emotional control. The young child learns regularity, obedience, and a sense of self-responsibility, having parents or instructors impose their will on the activities of the child. Curriculum at this age consisted of moralistic fairy tales, fables, and bible stories. The final subject for study in early childhood is the Iliad and the Odyssey, consistent with the cultural epoch influence.

The uncomplicated reinforcement of moral conduct through story in childhood is replaced in adolescence with an exploration of moral principles. These lessons on duty follow an inductive method, stating a theorem and then adapting the theorem to incorporate exceptions. Children learn general principles of conduct by reflecting on their origins in human experience. Moral reasoning required direct moral instruction, but the standard curriculum of secondary education, Adler argued, also carries moral lessons. Science teaches truthfulness; history is the study of exemplars of moral conduct as well as being an investigation of the outcomes of immoral behavior. Literature, music, gymnastics, and even manual training teach standards of excellence. The greatest lesson, Adler reminds, is the example set by the instructor in his or her conduct.

Adler's sequenced approach to moral education through example, story, moral problem solving, and application formed the basis of the Sunday schools conducted at Ethical Culture Societies in New York and other major urban areas in the United States. The establishment of schools to advance ethical action in the society was a priority for Adler, with a free kindergarten and a Workingman's School established by 1880. The elements of moral education and personal development were joined with an emphasis on manual training, a humanist arts-focused curriculum, and teacher training. Consistent with the tenets of ethical culture, the school continued to evolve, accepting tuition paying students and was reorganized in 1895 as the Ethical Culture Schools. In response to the student population, Ethical Culture Schools adopted a liberal arts curriculum incorporating progressive instruction while retaining Adler's emphasis on moral reasoning. On the 50th anniversary of its founding, the Ethical Culture [Page 347]Schools moved to a larger campus in the Bronx with the Fieldston Building intended as an architectural realization of ethical culture education. The Fieldston School participated in the Eight Year Study and served as a research site and headquarters for the Commission on Secondary School Curriculum's Adolescent Study. This school continues to emphasize the principles of service, ethics, and academic rigor, but as a high-tuition private school.

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