Principles of the Cornish School Under Nellie Cornish   An education in the arts is an education.   EXPAND The main purpose of education is the development of the individual, not imparting skills.   EXPAND The arts are best taught together.   EXPAND Departments and curricula should be interrelated.   EXPAND Systemization of education should be avoided, experiment should be encouraged.   EXPAND There should be no grades, no schedules .   EXPAND The school should be a home for the arts.   EXPAND Quality in everything, always strive to be the best.   EXPAND

 

5. Systemization of education should be avoided, experiment should be encouraged. 

 In her autobiography, Miss Aunt Nellie, Nellie Cornish relates a story that is emblematic of the struggle she faced everyday to communicate her ideas and bring them into play:

Our philosophy of education was based on the principle that we were not producing musicians, dancers, artists and actors but human beings. I’m sorry to say that philosophy brought us much administrative grief—for example, the time an accountant was assigned to check our expenditures and operations. He reported after his survey that it wasn’t being run like a school at all! He suggested a rigid system of classes in the traditional pattern, all running like clockwork.

Of course I rejected that. He was striking at the heart of a training method designed to develop individuals, none of whom could possibly be the same. I spent all of my time at the school. In fact, I lived there, too. It was most important to know the characters of Mary and John and Tom and prescribe different treatments for each. Their needs cannot be met by tossing them into general categories.

“Running like clockwork” is precisely the right image to explain what Nellie Cornish didn't want. A clock is in motion but its motion is circular, repetitive, mechanical; it is in motion without being dynamic. It may seem contradictory, but Cornish attempted to create a program that was not programatic, a system that was not systematic. Hers was a dynamic system designed to be responsive to the needs of the individual, and not for the needs of the institution. For Cornish, and certainly for Cady and John Dewey, what is systematic is a small step away from what is dogmatic. The best comment on maintaining a dynamic system versus a rigid one is found by stepping away from education entirely and looking at the schism between psychoanalitic pioneers C.G. Jung and Sigmund Freud:

“’Whatever you say make it clear that I have no dogma, I’m still open and haven’t got things fixed.’ [Jung] went on to talk of Freud’s insistence on dogma; to him it was absolutely necessary. C.G. said that Freud did great work … but his need to hold to his dogma led him to make everything fit his theories … if they did not fit in one way then they had to fit in another.”

She fought with the impulse to rest on her laurels. Nellie Cornish described her school as "experimentalist." She was well aware that many of the things the Cornish School was trying had rarely, if ever, been attempted. In its many financial difficulties, the solution, in the minds of most, was to run Cornish like any other school, with rigidly formed separations.

Members of the board were not reticent in the matter of suggestions as to how the School should be conducted. Some … recommended abandoning integration of subjects; they wanted the School divided into separate departments so that pupils could shop for subjects at their own choice—in other words, a series of private studios. I repeated that was only interested in a school for the purpose of educating its pupils. I made it ear that, if the board insisted upon the suggested changes, it should find another director. —MAN 255