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
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7. The school should be a home for the arts.
Nellie Cornish
didn't write reams on this concept, it is clear
from everything she did that this concept was alive
for her. She closed her autobiography with this:
“As dear faces kept arising in memory, I loved
living again among the young people who for twenty-five
years shared my life and to whom the school became
a spiritual home.” Her faculty were
often friends for life. Nellie was close to her
students, nurtured them, housed some of them, even.
She threw parties and teas for any troupe of artists
that happened through Seattle
on a tour. Cornish was literally her home, and
that home was open to artists and the arts.
And she tried to keep her ex-students
around on the faculty:
“I could often fill the ranks of our faculty with teachers well-known to me personal who considered the School their spiritual home.”
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.