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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

 

6. There should be no grades, no schedules. 

This principle is new in the firmament of Cornish ideals (at least to me), and needs further research. It is currently a mystery how students were tracked at the school and how success was assessed for graduation. We have it on the testimony of none other than Merce Cunningham how things were, heard here speaking with David Vaughan.

Miss Cornish was the second of the extraordinary women who had a great influence on Cunningham in these early years. ‘She was like Mrs. Barrett, she had that kind of energy and interest in what you were doing—Miss Cornish had that on a big scale.’ He remembers Miss Cornish saying that there were no grades, no schedules, ‘and I thought, if there’s a school like this in Seattle, imagine what there must be in New York. But I quickly found there was nothing like it there—in fact, the only other school I have found that offered the same kind of open experience was Black Mountain.’”

 

—Vaughan, David. Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years. Melissa Harris, ed. Aperture, 1972? Page 15.

It is worth noting that Black Mountain College was founded on the principals of John Dewey, just as Cornish was. The shunning of grades and the deemphasis on schedules is consistent with Nellie Cornish's thought: “Individual development was at all times considered. We recognized that each child is born with an individual tempo of development—fast or slow—therefore, there could be no set time for the completion of any task.”