Joel's humanistic blog

It's been a while. In the past two years, I've been away from this humble BlogSpot(TM) blog, experimenting with a move towards a WordPress(TM) platform.  But I just couldn't get the hang of it.  I had used WordPress for more disciplined writing on other sites (but that just made personal blogging feel more like a chore than self-expression), but I could never figure out how to set up the plugins that gave it all the bells and whistles on my own.  And worst of all, my readership was not just the intermittent trickle it is here (hello, all 4 followers I've retained over the years!) but nonexistent.  For better or worse, my claim to Internet fame remains  on this blog . I began to need a change from my change of pace.  Something without the customizable fussiness of WordPress, something more like the "type in a box and press Publish" simplicity of the interface that got me posting online in the first place. Something that plenty of the bloggers I enjoy ...

This Saturday, the Friends of the Modern School is having its 40th annual reunion  at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey to commemorate a unique anarchist educational experiment and utopian community.  This event may be of interest to those in the New Jersey/New York State area interested in alternative education, anarchist history, utopian intentional communities, and/or freethought. I've written more on the general background of the Modern School here and all of the coverage of the Modern School on this blog is here .

The announcement for the 38th annual reunion of Friends of the Modern School , coming up this Saturday at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, has been posted . The Friends is an alumni association for people associated with an anarchist school and colony which was at Stelton, New Jersey (near current-day Piscataway), and the reunions are open to interested members of the general public.

I'm too busy right now to do a real post (and I will eventually put up a post about the 2009 reunion, which was highly successful), but wanted to mark the occasion; I've posted previously about the subject here , here , and here .

In only a few weeks, October 13, 2009 will mark the 100th anniversary of the death of educator Francisco Ferrer, an important figure in the history of freethought, education reform, and anarchism, whose execution for attempting to found secular schools in Spain sparked a long-lived movement in the United States to preserve his ideas and introduce freedom in education. I've already written blog posts on the 2006 and 2008 anniversaries, that give the background as well as I can. (I'm not going to organize a full-scale blog-a-thon like my Carl Sagan one, but feel free to post something appropriate on the anniversary, and I'll link to it.) Also, this Saturday brings the 2009 reunion of the Friends of the Modern School alumni association, held at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, near the site of the modern school and colony which was at Stelton, New Jersey; this is not just a way for people associated with the school to keep in touch, but a way of preserv...

Today is the 99th anniversary of the death of anarchist, freethinker, and education pioneer Francisco Ferrer y Guardia, which sparked the international movement which was founded to carry on his ideas. Since I covered the basic background in my original Modern School post two years ago, I will link to that rather than repeating myself. Instead, I will concentrate on the 36th annual reunion of the Friends of the Modern School, held on September 20 at its usual location at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. As usual, it functioned as a social reunion for alumni (mostly of the Stelton school and colony which was near New Brunswick), but this time, the proceedings were enlivened by an unusually large group of interested outsiders. Author Perdita Buchan spoke about her book Utopia, New Jersey: Travels in the Nearest Eden (which has appeared previously on this blog ) which allots a chapter to eight utopian colonies in the Garden State, including one for Stelton. The Emma G...

Today's issue of the Newark Star-Ledger has a news story about various utopian communities that have been in the state of New Jersey, including the anarchist Stelton Ferrer colony, Upton Sinclair's Helicon Hall, and the single-tax colony Free Acres: "Utopia, N.J.: Trying to create a better world in the Garden State" by Vicki Hyman. (Hyman contacted me due to my post on Stelton .) The article is based on a new book of the same name which examines the above and several other utopias, Utopia, New Jersey: Travels in the Nearest Eden by Perdita Buchan, published by Rutgers University Press . The article touches on the range of leftist ideologies behind the colonies, and about what remains of them (Free Acres is the only one that still exists, with "a lush, wooded feel and cooperative air"; remnants of some of the others survive, for example here is some information about the buildings that still remain from Stelton). UPDATE: I found an online article by B...

Today is the first anniversary of the passing of the historian of anarchism Paul Avrich. He wrote numerous books about the history of anarchism in Russia and the United States, and combined careful scholarship with a personal emphasis on the people involved. I met Avrich twice: at Bluestockings in summer 2003, and at the 2004 Modern School Reunion. In the former, he did a presentation about anarchist women, to match the bookstore's feminist theme -- but to make it more specific, he narrowed it down to those he had personally known , which turned out to be quite a lot! Also, I had on me a handwritten list of books about alternative education that were mentioned in Ron Miller's Free Schools, Free People , when I realized that Avrich's modern school book was included on the list! Both organizations paid tribute to Avrich in 2006 (the former memorial including Stanley Aronowitz as speaker).

Today is the 97th anniversary of the death of Francisco Ferrer, an anarchist and freethought educational pioneer whose persecution by both church and state and execution on trumped-up charges led to outrage and an international movement to emulate his ideas. Ferrer and other European educators wanted a "modern" approach to education based on freedom and reason, in place of the traditional one based on coercion, rote and indoctrination. Emma Goldman, who visited Sebastien Faure's French modern school La Ruche, conveys the atmosphere of the school in her description from her autobiography : He [Faure] had taken twenty-four orphan children and those of parents too poor to pay and was housing, feeding, and clothing them at his own expense. He had created an atmosphere at La Ruche that released the life of the child from discipline and coercion of any sort. He had discarded the old methods of education and in their place he established understanding for the needs of the child...