Patri, Angelo

Angelo Patri (1876–1965) was the first Italian immigrant to become a New York City public school principal. His tenure in inner-city schools stretched from 1908 to 1944–5 years as principal at an elementary school in the Bronx and 31 years as principal at Bronx Junior High School.

At Teachers College, Columbia University, Patri was introduced to the ideas of John Dewey, specifically the essay Ethical Principles. From then on, his teaching and leadership reflected the ideals of American progressivism—that is, he fought to release schools from the grip of tradition, rules, records, and endless routine. He combined contemporary ideas on community-parent involvement with a desire to improve schools at the school site level.

In his day, principals and supervisors would inspect, and unless the class was taught in a specific way—according to “the method,” the teacher would be criticized. As a principal, Patri opposed the uniformity of instruction: student drawings were all alike, as were their compositions—all with the same topic and the same number of paragraphs. All the subjects—the three Rs—were aligned and sequenced, formalized and logical. The regular, fixed school curriculum never stayed with a beautiful idea long enough to have it become part of the children's lives. Patri sought to vitalize the curriculum by means of firsthand experiences or to push the classroom out into the world.

Patri was aware of the serious problems in the inner-city communities: horrific living conditions inside the tenement buildings, abject poverty of the families and children, lack of jobs, truancy, gang violence in the neighborhood, convoluted feeder patterns and school boundaries, and little parental involvement. He saw the need for both the school and the community to work together, for if only one addressed a problem, it could not be solved.

He created a parent-community association to give parents a stake in their children's school. Perhaps the most significant parent-teacher committee in the association was one that investigated cases of parental neglect, cases of need, and cases of truancy. It was called the Relief Committee, and its mandate ranged from providing parents with information on hygiene, clothes, medicine, groceries, and money (in the form of loans) to looking for jobs. The Relief Committee joined up with a local branch of the settlement house—the emerging social center for schools during the first two decades of the twentieth century.

To many parents throughout the country, Patri was a familiar figure during the first half of the twentieth century. He wrote magazine articles and newspaper advice columns. In his syndicated column, “Our Children,” he popularized John Dewey's progressive educational principles on teaching, discipline, and social life. Patri also authored a number of books on raising children and adolescents, including Your Children in Wartime (1943) and How to Help Your Child Grow Up: Suggestions for Guiding Children From Birth Through Adolescence (1948).