School District No. 5 in Dearborn, Mich, had a school board election last week. Expecting a close contest, voters turned out in unprecedented numbers. With 266 votes and a record majority, they re-elected an old board member, one Henry Ford.
Henry Ford attends board meetings four times a year. Dearborn’s schools are greatly influenced by his ideas. For not only do he and the Ford Motor Co. pay the major part ($1,075,499) of the city’s school taxes, but he has an intense interest in education. Today, Henry Ford has a hand in the schooling, according to his own theories, of some 20,000 U. S. children, about 12,000 of them in Dearborn and the rest in dozens of other schools which he owns or supports. Chief centre of his experiments is Greenfield Village, whose schools, opened in 1929, are a part of Dearborn’s city system. Some others: nearly a score of rural schools in Michigan; trade schools at the River Rouge plant; three schools in Sudbury, Mass.; seven rural schools and the famed Martha Berry Schools in Georgia; an agricultural institute at Boreham House near Chelmsford, England; a school for rubber workers’ children, Fordlandia, 600 miles up the Amazon in Brazil.
Mr. Ford’s educational ideas are a curious mixture of the old-fashioned and modern. He calls his schools “the McGuffey type,” and they reproduce as much as possible the old little red schoolhouse. No advocate of mass production in education, he likes small schools, small classes, individual instruction. But his schools have no more in common with the McGuffey type of education than the Ford has with a horse. Instead of learning from textbooks, Henry Ford’s pupils learn by doing, from trips, planting, harvesting, building. Instead of confining themselves to the three Rs, his schools teach youngsters to cook, to run modern machinery. Symbolic of the Ford educational program is his carting the old cabin of William Holmes McGuffey, author of the famed readers, log by log to Greenfield, restoring it as a schoolroom with McGuffey furniture, and then supplying the building with indirect lighting and air conditioning.
Henry Ford’s schools in Greenfield, with 244 pupils all told, go from kindergarten to the college level. At the top is the Edison Institute of Technology. Although he once said “history is bunk,” the Greenfield schools teach history. But they stress such subjects as typewriting, manual training, telegraphy, mathematics, spelling, agriculture. Machine shop work begins in the eighth grade. Prime aim of the Ford educational plan is to produce a nation of handy men, rather than poets or philosophers. His curriculum excludes all but “useful” subjects. Thus, his schools teach no foreign language, no art but the utilitarian, no literature for its own sake. Fond of moral precepts such as abound in the McGuffey Readers, Henry Ford values as literature Longfellow’s The Village Blacksmith, because of its message. He likes to read to children these McGuffey verses:
The lark is up to meet the sun, The bee is on the wing;
The ant its labor has begun, The woods with music ring.
Shall birds and bees and ants be wise,
While I my moments waste? O let me with the morning rise
And to my duty haste. “I hope,” says Henry Ford, “to interest industry in education. I don’t mean the technical school, I mean the training of our future market. We must give it some thought.”
More Must-Reads from TIME
- L.A. Fires Show Reality of 1.5°C of Warming
- How Canada Fell Out of Love With Trudeau
- Trump Is Treating the Globe Like a Monopoly Board
- Bad Bunny On Heartbreak and New Album
- 10 Boundaries Therapists Want You to Set in the New Year
- The Motivational Trick That Makes You Exercise Harder
- Nicole Kidman Is a Pure Pleasure to Watch in Babygirl
- Column: Jimmy Carter’s Global Legacy Was Moral Clarity
Contact us at letters@time.com