Some Fruits of the Ethical Education Tree

Muriel Rukeyser Quotation*

It's nice to have colleagues.  

Kirk Ruebenson contacted me several months ago to discuss the NYSEC Archives and his interest in consulting those resources.  We met, we chatted, and we shared all sorts of information about Felix Adler (and his family) as well as Ethical Culture and Kirk's particular interest--the Ethical Culture Schools.  

Because May 15 is considered "Founder's Day," the anniversary of Adler's Founding Address given in 1876, I have looking at early materials related to that occasion.  I ran across--in resources that Ruebenson had shared with me a while back--an article entitled:  “Struggle for the Soul of Felix Adler."  This led me to Jared R. Stallones, a scholar of the history of education, who wrote that article and another, "Struggle for the Soul of John Dewey:  Religion and Progressive Education.”  I read the article about Adler (thank you for sharing, Kirk) with considerable fascination, since it makes the connection between Adler's Jewish upbringing and the reflection of that upbringing and his more progressive ideas about religion as they are occur in the Temple Address ("Judaism of the Future," address to Temple Emanu-El, October 1873), a key point in Adler's pivot away from Judaism to Free Religion and, eventually, to Ethical Culture.  I hope to be able to read the article about Dewey, if I can get access to it.  In the meantime, I will add those articles and several others to the Bibliography along with Stallones' book--Conflict and Resolution:  Progressive Educators and the Question of Religion (2010)--which I have ordered.  I look forward to reading it since (a) he includes chapters on both Adler and Dewey and (b) the issue of religion in education--whether through state-supported charter schools run by religious organizations or plastering commandments all over classrooms here in Texas--is also related to the long-running discussion of the "moral instruction" of children in Ethical Culture.

In the meantime, ResearchGate, Google Scholar, and ProQuest have all been helpful in tracking Stallones and, very interestingly, his citation in a dissertation by Laiti Mayk-Hai ("Towards a Poetics of I/Eye Witness:  Documentary Expression in Jewish-American Poetry of the 1930s" [Jewish Theological Seminary 2015]).  Mayk-Hai writes about the poetry of Muriel Rukeyser (among others) and links Rukeyser's writing to her years as a student in the Ethical Culture Fieldston School.  References to Adler also abound.

Ruebenson and I have shared some delightful conversations (part of the joy of collegiality) about "following rabbit trails" (part of the joy of research) as we move from one source to a reference to a whole new perspective on the issues that we are studying.  This day's work may provide yet another one of those conversations.  In the meantime, I must email him the link to Mayk-Hai's dissertation.

*Image credit:  Wikipedia contributors. “Muriel Rukeyser,” May 6, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muriel_Rukeyser#/media/File:Library_Walk_6.JPG.

International Journal of Ethics

"And miles to go before I sleep" . . . might aptly apply to the current task.  I was fortunate enough to run across an index to International Journal of Ethics for the first 24 or so volumes.  I am now working my way through the index to identify appropriate articles for inclusion in the Bibliography.  I am also fortunate that this journal is "important" enough to be digitized and available--in whole or in part--in several repositories.  The "miles to go" is the not-tedious-but-time-consuming effort to access each article, determine whether it is appropriate for the Bibliography, and then document it.  Of course, nothing is ever that simple.  It's one thing to see the Felix Adler's name (for an obvious example) shows 9 entries in the index.  It's another to determine whether the article is pertinent to Ethical Culture.  (In Adler's case, that's pretty much a no brainer.  He wrote it, so it's in.)  It's still another to determine how to include the article.  That's one point at which time can be consumed.  

In October, 1891, Adler published "The Problem of Unsectarian Instruction" (IJE, 2:1, pp. 11-19).  A couple of issues later (IJE, 2:3, pp. 374-75) there is his "Brief Rejoinder to J. Mavor (D)."  The "D" indicates that this is a discussion entry, so now I need to check J. Mavor's article to see what Adler is discussing.  As it happens, Mavor was discussing Adler's earlier article on unsectarian instruction.  Adler's rejoinder to Mavor provided the same information given by the footnote linked to the title of his original article:  

Introductory lecture of a course on Moral Instruction, given before the School of Applied Ethics, Plymouth, Mass., July 1891.  [The complete course of sixteen lectures will be published by D. Appleton & Co., New York.] 

And, sure enough, The Moral Education of Children (the complete course), was duly published as Volume 21 in Appleton's International Education Series in 1892.

The conundrum of which is primary, which secondary, and how to cite a discussion article has sent me thumbing through the Chicago Manual of Style (which is not a bad thing), but that adds to the consumption of time, because, well, I have to read some of these articles as well, don't I?

So, I've added one article by Jane Addams ("Ethical Survivals in Municipal Corruption") and will turn next to Bernard Bosanquet (British philosopher, active with the London Ethical Society).  But the time is taken with looking up biographical information, thumbing through--and pausing to read--the articles themselves, and considering the context both within and without Ethical Culture as these papers were written and sometimes delivered at various meetings.  It is rather like one of Felix Adler's favorite escapes, hiking in the Adirondack--an escape from the intense activity of life in the city, a chance to recoup a sense of peace and place, a rigorous bit of exercise that keeps one's faculties "in shape."

It will take a while to complete this "exercise."  The index for these earlier years of IJE (now published by the University of Chicago as Ethics) runs for 15 pages of abbreviated entries.  On a first pass, I have marked (on my copy) the names of authors that I recognize from previous work on the Bibliography.  Bosanquet already had one entry; ow we have the chance to learn more of his work in Ethical Culture.  Most of the names I have marked are, admittedly, past leaders of the early Societies.  After this first "pass" through the list, there will also need to be a further review of authors and topics.  Likely this will take months before I might consider that I have done all that I can, but there are two points that might bring an end to this somewhat wandering reflection on the IJE index:  (1) A structured plan to add entries to the Bibliography from this resource has now begun, and (2) after some time away from working on the Bibliography, it's good to be back, wandering through the hills and valleys of ideas and discussions, noting the milestones, looking with awe at the vistas of thought and knowledge that we can now add to our understanding of the history of Ethical Culture.