Guided by the principal of Pearl High School, J. A. Galloway, and precipitated by the Bachman Report, a highly critical analysis of education in Nashville from the 1930s, Pearl teachers had already been engaged in a careful examination of teaching practices before their entry into the Secondary School Study. (1) Participation in the General Education Board’s project only furthered their resolve “to ascertain necessary suggestive changes in school curriculum.” At other schools, such critique could easily have been viewed as threatening; however, Principal Galloway, who was often described as a father figure, set a tone of civility and fairness and brought a degree of thoughtfulness to the teachers’ self examination and programmatic experimentation.

Callisto F. Bell, who began teaching at Pearl High School in 1940, states:

“Time was set aside for the core program. In order to learn history, you must have a good understanding of English. Students and teachers started the day in home rooms—the rooms where we lived. Before lunch, I would focus on a class theme, for example ‘going my way.’ We taught whatever we thought was good for the students. I attended workshops where we would develop our own materials; we could not rely upon our [second-hand] books.”

A “correlated” core curriculum took many forms at the Pearl School during the General Education Board study and connected what could otherwise have been separated tracks of the academic and vocational courses of study. (6) Lillian Thomas, a Pearl High School home economics teacher during the 1940s and 1950s, described one typical correlated core curriculum project where course activities were coupled to the content in Miss Bass’s English class. Specifically, the two teachers coordinated the subject matter so that when the English class studied Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Thomas’ home economic class would study period related floral arrangements. Another example stemmed from the work of Secondary School Study staff member Hilda Taba who coordinated the efforts of English and history teachers to develop resource units on civil rights. As the United States entered WWII, most academic and vocational teachers at Pearl used students’ interests in the war effort as a general theme to correlate activities among courses.

“Pearl High School illustrated numerous methods of school and community cooperation. Because of World War II, service to the community war effort involved the school in planning discussions on the war, joining community parades, and providing help in rationing operations. Programs in health improvement, safety, culture, and influence and results of war on home and school life were instituted as a result of the need-based approach to Pearl High School’s curriculum development. An important aspect of the school’s participation in the Study was the evidence of change in faculty teaching procedures and also their total professional growth.” (7)

Attempting to ascertain the implementation of “progressive education ideology” from the 1940s from the 2007 descriptions of teachers is difficult if not somewhat impossible. Accounts do not necessarily incorporate the standard terms used today to identify progressive practices. This was not due to unfamiliarity, however, since some of the teachers interviewed for this exhibition had enrolled at the bastion of progressive education, Teachers College, Columbia University. Rather than using the term progressive education, one term continued to arise in conversation, “creative” education and the “creativity” of the teachers. At the time of the Secondary School Study, black teachers were being dismissed in the American South for their membership in the NAACP and, during the 1950s, all teachers and schools were being redbaited for any allegiance to John Dewey and progressive education. As noted by Alice Epperson who was present at all of the 2007 interviews as well as who attended Pearl High School in the late 1950s and early 1960s, teachers referred to their practices not within the vernacular of progressive education but, instead, as being creative, somewhat as an unacknowledged code.

“The teachers always said that we (as a group) would have to work longer and that we would have to be more creative to be seen and to be heard. They would say that we have to put this old textbook aside and be creative. This was their way to get around the standardized curriculum; they were bringing in their own materials and using their resource units. They never talked about progressive education; that spirit at Pearl High School was one that was called creative.”
Alice Epperson

“On Senior Night, everyone had some role to play. The entire school was participating in some way. Vocational courses made the props and helped with the production of the program. We were always part of the school, somewhat separate from the academic part, but always still part of the student body. Everyone was part of a big family, and we all helped along the way.”

Novella Bass

Endnotes:
1) F. P. Bachman, Public Schools of Nashville, TN, Nashville: George Peabody College for Teachers, 1931.
2) Secondary School Study, “Pearl High Notes Changes,” To and From Our Schools Newsletter 1:2, 1942, p. 3.
3) Cynthia Hardy, “A Historical Revision of the Secondary School Study of the Association of College and Secondary Schools for Negroes, 1940-1946,” Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1977, p. 74.
4) Charity M. Mance, et. al., “Evaluative Study of Pearl High School,” Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, 1953, p. 9.
5) W. Robert Wunsch & E. Albers (Eds.), Thicker Than Water, New York: D. Appleton-Century-Co., 1939. Louise M. Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration, New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1938.
6) Harold B. Alberty, Reorganizing the High-School Curriculum, New York: Macmillan, 1947.
7) Cynthia Hardy, “A Historical Revision of the Secondary School Study of the Association of College and Secondary Schools for Negroes, 1940-1946,” p. 103.

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