Friends of the Modern School

Official Records

The official records of the Modern School comprise minutes and reports of the Modern School Association of North America (1922-1950), the membership organization which supported the school; records of the Ferrer Modern School Association, which administered the property of the school; reports of the Board of Management, which administered the School itself; and correspondence received and copies of correspondence sent by the principal of the school. These items amount to one manuscript box of material.

Collected Materials--General

The donated materials include publications, photographs, newspaper clippings, correspondence, writings and miscellany. Most of the publications, comprising about half the collection, were produced at the Modern School printing press. They include journals, most notably The Modern School; Voice of the Children, the journal of poems and prints produced by the children; programs of the annual Modern School benefit dance; and various other publications.

In addition to publications produced at the Modern School, the collection contains various other publications which refer to the Modern School, such as a special issue of Everyman (1914) and a partial set of Emma Goldman's Mother Earth (1911-1917), which frequently included articles on the Modern School. The collection also contained a number of pamphlets which had no relation to the Modern School and part of Modern School founder Leonard Abbott's book collection; these items were transferred to the repository's Radical Literature Collection.

There are four boxes of black-and-white photographs (one 8 x 10 and three 5 x 7 boxes), spanning the period approximately 1880 to 1965, including portraits of the Ferms, and views of the Modern School children involved in various activities. Of special interest are three tintypes (circa 1880-1890), showing Alexis Ferm as a boy and as a young man.

Other series are newspaper clippings documenting the history of the school which have been photocopied on to acid-free paper; and memoirs written by figures associated with the Modern School including The Modern School editor and art curator Carl Zigrosser and anarchist leader Harry Kelly.

Collected Materials--Personal Papers

The Modern School Collection also includes papers of Alexis Ferm, which comprise just over one manuscript box of correspondence, writings, newspaper clippings and a sporadic diary kept by Ferm from 1893 to 1944. There is also a separately housed scrapbook (1929-1933) of clippings of articles on education by Ferm and others published in the anarchist journal The Road to Freedom. Because of the extremely brittle condition of the scrapbook, it was completely reformatted: its contents were copied onto acid-free paper and it was rebound. Ferm's collected correspondence is comprised primarily of letters he wrote to his former colleagues and students after he retired to Fairhope, Alabama, in 1948. The students kept his letters and donated them after his death. These letters are arranged alphabetically by correspondent. This series also includes correspondence about the Alexis Ferm Fund, which helped support him in his old age, and clippings from local Alabama newspapers, where Ferm wrote frequently about education and civil rights.

The papers of Alexis Ferm's wife Elizabeth Byrne Ferm fill parts of two manuscript boxes. These papers are entirely made up of her published and unpublished writings as well as a few book reviews and an obituary. Elizabeth Ferm published articles about progressive education in Mother Earth, The Modern School, and other journals. After her death, Alexis Ferm put together a number of her writings, both published and unpublished, and raised the money to publish them as a book, Freedom in Education, in 1948. This series contains a complete manuscript of the book as well as drafts of various chapters.

Of the many people who contributed material to the Modern School Collection, teacher and trustee Jo Ann Wheeler Burbank contributed enough diverse material to constitute a separate series. This series includes letters from Alexis Ferm, correspondence pertaining to the Alexis Ferm Fund, and a typescript memoir. Photographs and publications were transferred to the appropriate series based on format.

Documentation of other Schools and Communities

The collection also contains a small amount of material (5 folders) related to other Modern or progressive schools or anarchist communities, including publications from the Mohegan Modern School in Peekskill, New York, and photocopies of a hearing on the incorporation of the April Farms Colony in Quakertown, Pennsylvania (1925). A few photographs from other Modern Schools have been transferred to the photographs series.

Finally, the collection contains several items which were made at the Modern School by its students and teachers, including a toy, children's watercolors, textiles and a wooden block, dating from the 1930s to 1960. Most of these items are stored in a newspaper box.