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.