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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

 

4. Departments and curricula should be interrelated. 

“Nevertheless, the reputation of the school all over the country was growing apace,” Nellie Cornish wrote of the state of her school in the 1920s. “Many of our famous visitors were greatly impressed by the organic unity of its departments and their orientation toward a common aim.”

Departments and curricula performing together and towards a common aim are corallary to the concept that the arts are better taught together; coordination and collaboration were absolutely key. Nellie Cornish had a number of devices for encouraging what was a foreign concept to anyone who had been trained in the arts before that time, well worth an essay all its own at some point. She was adamant on the subject, and she recognized that her idea was endangered, that it “took many years of struggle against friends and foes alike, who felt that I was chasing butterflies.”

Author and Nellie Cornish confidante Nancy Wilson Ross summed it up. “What the Cornish School offered, then, in its heyday, was a comprehensive training in the arts, in all the arts, a training both specific and universal. … Although each department of the school was autonomous, all were bound together within the framework of a basic Cornish tenet: the essential interrelatedness of the arts.” Autonomous yet bound together, specific yet universal: seeming contradictions that help us understand why friends and foes alike felt Cornish was “chasing butterflies.”