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Nellie Cornish and Calvin Cady never wrote the principles they developed for the Cornish School down as a list, and maybe their suspicions about systemization discouraged it. But it's easier to absorb as a list. Following is a construction of what they might have produced had they been so inclined.

 

It is of necessity a work in progress.

Principles of the Cornish School Under Nellie Cornish

 

  1. An education in the arts is an education.   EXPAND
  2. The main purpose of education is the development of the individual, not imparting skills.   EXPAND
  3. The arts are best taught together.   EXPAND
  4. Departments and curricula should be interrelated.   EXPAND
  5. Systemization of education should be avoided, experiment should be encouraged.   EXPAND
  6. There should be no grades, no schedules .   EXPAND
  7. The school should be a home for the arts.   EXPAND
  8. Quality in everything, always strive to be the best.   EXPAND

 

1. An education in the arts is an education.

 There is an inclination in society in general, both now and in 1914, to view the arts as “play time,” possibly as ornments to an education, but not truly part of it. Calvin Cady had a very different view, and it closely matched Nellie's own inclinations: studying the arts was an edcation in and of itself. Cornish wrote: “In establishing the School my aim was to educate the individual through the medium of music and its allied arts.”

“The Cornish School was a pioneer in education through the arts, a pioneer in its education program. To consider the study of any art as ‘education’ was one of our most daring innovations.”

An education was, to Cornish and Cady, the process of a person organizing herself. This process could be accomplished through study of the arts just as it could through studying any accepted academic subject. As Cady wrote:

The study of music should be undertaken not only for cultural or artistic value, but should be a channel through which higher principles of life find expression and by which the student is awakened to conscious realization of the beautiful in all things, and to the message inherent in their beauty. The study of music should furnish the opportunity for the development of logic, discrimination, and critical judgement. The teacher should provide in the music lesson opportunity for spontaneity and for development through intuition and inspiration. What applies to music applies equally to the study of other arts and of science.

Along with this serious approach to the teaching of art, Nellie Cornish believed in involving her school in teaching subjects outiside the normal scope of an art school. It was, in fact, a matter of policy: “Always pursuing my policy of widening the educational scope of the School [my emphasis], in the spring of 1929 we introduced university extension classes.”[ MAN 201] Cornish would doubtless have approved of her school's being recast as a college in 1977.