History

Fairhope, Alabama, was founded in 1894 as an experimental Utopian community based on Henry George's book Progress and Poverty, and a radical concept known as the "Single Tax Colony". The locale was chosen for of its natural beauty, its fertile land, temperate climate, and potential for growth. Situated on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, the town was easily accessible by boat as well as horseback and eventually automobiles. Fairhope soon grew into a thriving town populated by artists, idealists and non-conformists.

One of Fairhope's residents at the time was a Minnesota teacher named Marietta Johnson, who brought her unconventional ideas about education to the open-minded new town, and with financial aid from friends, founded The School of Organic Education in 1907.

A proponent of a unique philosophy of progressive education, and a contemporary of Rudolf Steiner and Maria Montessorri, Mrs. Johnson created a school that had no examinations, no homework, and no possibility that any child would ever fail.

The school was a laboratory for ideas in education that were considered radical at the time, but have become more valid with each passing decade. She was one of the first to advocate the prolongation of childhood - a period of intense, natural education - so that its attitude would extend to the whole of life.

Mrs. Johnson also believed that physical education should take the form of dancing and creative games, and often said, "the greatest minds are those able to use the spirit of play in their work".

America's most famous educational philosopher of the day, John Dewey, came to Fairhope in 1913 to review her revolutionary approach. He was extremely impressed by her work, and even wrote a chapter in his book Schools of Tomorrow about Mrs. Johnson and her unique school. Fairhope became quite well known in the 1920's largely because of Marietta Johnson.

During her life in Fairhope, she became respected on the world stage as a powerful speaker and lecturer. She went on numerous lecture tours to share her ideas on education, raising funds and donations from the likes of Mrs. Alexander Graham Bell, Mrs. Woodrow Wilson and Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford. As word spread about the Organic School, Fairhope's intellectual elite eagerly enrolled their children.

The school reached its zenith in the 1920s, in part because of John Dewey's book and its reference to Mrs. Johnson and her school. Through the great depression, two world wars and Mrs. Johnson's death in 1938, the Organic School has never closed its doors.

Its graduates have become doctors, lawyers, scientists, teachers, writers, artists, engineers, poets, university professors, dance teachers, potters, computer technicians and entrepreneurs in virtually every field of endeavor. Many of the schools graduates, after traveling and working around the world, have come back to Fairhope to settle. Some never left.

The school's original 10-acre campus was located where Faulkner State Community College now stands in downtown Fairhope. A museum dedicated to Marietta Johnson occupies one of the original buildings on that site.

In 1980, the school moved to a six-plus acre plot of land on Pecan Street just off Section Street, one of Fairhope's main arteries.

Who Was Marietta Johnson?...

 Like so many of the early residents of Fairhope, Mrs. Johnson was an idealist. She envisioned a new kind of educational system based on the fresh, new approaches to early childhood development that were becoming popular at the time.

She was a revolutionary thinker in the field of education, a pioneer, a progressive, and a leader. Although she died in 1938, her unique perspectives on education drive the school today.

Mrs. Johnson was a natural for Fairhope in its early days, possessing great personal charm and intelligence. A staunch supporter
















       of the theory of Single Tax, she was a friend of the town's founder E. B. Gaston and other influential thinkers in the community. In Fairhope, she laid the groundwork for a school system that would benefit all children by allowing them to learn at their own pace and by exposing youngsters to the arts, handcrafts, and folk dancing along with academic work.

Marietta Johnson's pioneering work influences the best of education today. Her book, Teaching Without Failure, is used as a textbook in the Education Departments of such institutions as Boston College and the University of South Alabama. Today's Organic School adheres as closely as possible to the philosophy and methods that she established.

         

Marietta Louise Pierce Johnson (1864-1938), founder and 30-year teacher of an Alabama experimental school, made herself a pioneer in the progressive education movement. Marietta Louise Pierce Johnson was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, daughter of Clarence D. and Rhoda Matilda (Morton) Pierce. Her early education was in public schools in Minnesota, and even as a young girl in school she dreamed of becoming a teacher herself. On her graduation from the State Normal School (now St. Cloud State College) in 1885 she did become a teacher, and in time a distinguished one. Within a few years she had taught every grade in the elementary school and had also had some high school teaching experience. In 1890 she was appointed a supervisor of student teachers on the faculty first of the St. Paul Teachers' Training School (1890-1892), then at the State Teachers Colleges at Moorhead (1892-1895) and at Mankato (1896-1899). As a supervising "critic teacher" she observed students in practice teaching, gave special instruction in pedagogy, and on occasion would take over a class to demonstrate her ideas. She is remembered in these years as an inspiring and creative teacher, full of new ideas on schooling. In June 1897 she was married to John Franklin Johnson, and they became the parents of two children. The Johnsons spent the winter of 1903 at Fairhope, Alabama, a small community on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay that had been founded some years earlier by followers of Henry George's single-tax theory. In this somewhat utopian community Marietta Johnson was invited to open an experimental school to explore some of her educational ideas. Her new ideas on schooling owed much to the early writings of John Dewey and specifically to Nathan Oppenheim's book The Development of the Child. As an educational theorist she was in broad terms the heir of the child-centered romanticism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. She accepted the opportunity with enthusiasm and in 1907 moved permanently to Fairhope to found the School of Organic Education which she served as director until 1938. Beginning with six students the first day, the Organic School, as it came to be called, enrolled in time as many as 200 each year. With parent and community support and Johnson's tireless fundraising, the school received no public funds but was always tuition free to its students. It was called "organic" in that the central aim of the school was to "minister to the health of the body, develop the finest mental grasp, and preserve the sincerity and unself-consciousness of the emotional life." That is, the child was seen always as a "unit organism" in order for schooling to promote the growth of the whole child. In Johnson's view, education and growth were identical. The curriculum organization and the life of the Organic School were carefully informal. All grades, marks, promotions, and reports were thought to create only tensions of self-consciousness and were therefore omitted entirely. Students were judged only in terms of their individual abilities and hence extrinsic rewards were eliminated in favor of the intrinsic satisfactions of learning and growth. The measures of success of students, and indeed of the entire school, were to be based on creativity, spontaneity, interest, and sincerity in their lives. The school was divided into six divisions beginning with a kindergarten for children under age six and reaching through high school and college preparatory studies. Based on the Rousseauan (and later Deweyan) idea that formal studies should emerge from the child's awakening intrinsic interests, instruction in reading and writing were delayed as long as possible, certainly no sooner than age eight. Throughout the grades there was always strong emphasis on creative expression; on crafts, music, dance, and imaginative drama; and on trips and visits ranging over the countryside. In the later grades came the shift to more formal studies, from nature study to biological sciences, and so on. The high school was fully accredited; its graduates entered colleges on certificate, where they appeared to do well. Commenting on the possible influence of her experimental school on American education in general, Johnson late in her life wrote, "It is very thrilling to contemplate what society might be in a few years…. No examinations, no tests, no failures, no rewards, no self-consciousness; the development of sincerity, the freedom of children to live their lives straight out, no double motives, children never subjected to the temptation to cheat, even to appear to know when they do not know; the development of fundamental sincerity, which is the basis of all morality." The principles of the Organic School in Johnson's view could be the basis for the transformation of public education and of American society. Johnson's vision of a new education, based as it was on her Organic School experiment, took on national prominence with the publication in 1915 of the Deweys' Schools of Tomorrow. John Dewey and his daughter Evelyn after visiting and studying the school wrote extensively and glowingly about the experiment in this widely read survey of innovative schools in America. The Johnson school along with the others reviewed as Schools of Tomorrow helped form the base for the emerging theories of progressive education. Marietta Johnson herself was one of the leading spirits in the founding of the Progressive Education Association in the years following World War I and remained throughout her life an inspiration to that organization. In her later years she was honored by the association as a permanent honorary vice-president. Ever a crusader, Johnson established a second Organic School following the Fairhope model in Greenwich, Connecticut, and by the late 1920s she was dividing her time between Alabama and New England. She also was active over the years in conducting summer schools for parents, teachers, and children in Greenwich (1913-1916 and 1919-1921) and in Fairhope (1917 and 1918). Her best account of the Fairhope experiment and her statement of the principles of Organic Education are contained in her book Youth in a World of Men, published in 1929. At the time of her death in 1938 Marietta Johnson was honored as one of the founding forces of the progressive education movement and as particularly influential in the child-centered schools organized in following years by such theorists as Margaret Naumburg and A.S. Neill. Her child-centered vision of education continues to inspire and stimulate new ideas in schooling.