LREI’s Mission Statement
A leader in progressive education since 1921, LREI teaches children to be independent thinkers who work together to solve complex problems. Students graduate from our diverse community as active participants in our democratic society, with the creativity, integrity, and courage to bring meaningful change to the world.
-Approved by LREI’s Board of Trustees, October 6, 2014
When we began our work on the school’s new mission statement we had a long conversation about whether or not to look back to LREI’s founding or to only look ahead to LREI’s future. We found our way to the decision that our founding and the school’s long-standing position as a leading progressive school, had to be a part of the new mission statement. We are proud of our heritage and continue to find Elisabeth Irwin’s ideals inspiring today.
LREI began as Elisabeth Irwin’s experiment in progressive education in the NYC public schools in 1921. Following the theories of her mentor, John Dewey, and along with a number of other powerful women, Miss Irwin saw the schools as a way to influence society. She argued that the ways in which children learned had to change along with the ways they were living their lives. She wrote, “”When children scream with pain, they receive immediate attention, but they have screamed with curiosity for generations… [it is] their way to find out about the world.” Such curiosity was the key to progressive education. “That is all this new method of education is, a response to children’s questions,” she wrote, “a legitimate mendicant for what has long been considered abnormal curiosity.” She felt that success in the world required that curiosity be seen as normal and desirable. This remains true today. Our progressive program honors children’s love of learning, their innate drive to understand the world. We recognize that mastery of the academic disciplines, while hugely important, is, in and of itself, not enough. Children must learn to make use of the content knowledge and skills they acquire. They must connect learning and life and see the purpose of their work in school to be greater than only preparing for the next test or project, the next day or year in school.
Of course we believe in students acquiring content knowledge and skills, and this happens throughout the school. As a college prep school we must ensure that our students progress through the 14 years of our program gaining the knowledge that allows them to succeed. We are proud of our students’ accomplishments on this front. Along with knowledge and skill acquisition, however, our students develop habits of mind that allow them to put this learning to use, to integrate them into their daily lives. We see this active involvement and application throughout the 14-year program. As the worlds of school, college, and work change, it is these skills, and the practice in applying them that will distinguish your children’s school experiences. Elisabeth Irwin, and her colleagues, created their schools around this idea and it remains central to our work at LREI today.
As high school history teacher and school historian Nick O’Han wrote at the end of his fascinating article recounting the school’s founding, The Little School That Could:
Words John Dewey wrote in 1941 offer a postscript to the story of the school’s near-death and rebirth:
“The Little Red School House provides a model for large-scale educational reform of the nation’s public schools. [Little Red’s] lively and vital story is evidence that the new movement is indeed coming of age.” Nothing, he concluded, should stand “in the way of the adoption of [its] purposes and methods by schools and classes operating under the conditions which affect public school work.
We think that Elisabeth Irwin and John Dewey would be proud of LREI today and would recognize it as their school thriving in the 21st Century.
A reminder that 7th and 8th graders and their families are encouraged to attend next week’s Speaker Series event:
November 18, 2014, 7 p.m.
Mass Incarceration: Incarcerating the Wrong People, for the Wrong Reasons, for the Wrong Amount of Time
A panel discussion organized by the Greenburger Center for Social and Criminal Justice
Featuring:
- Francis Greenburger, founder and president, Greenburger Center for Social and Criminal Justice
- Ann Jacobs, director, Prison Reentry Institute at John Jay College
- JoAnne Page, president and CEO, the Fortune Society
- Gabriel Sayegh, managing director of policy and campaigns, Drug Policy Alliance