CHAPTER XI

Evaluating the Past in Terms of the Future

 

\) HEN the Bryn Mawr Summer School was founded in 1921, few indi-
viduals or groups could visualize the results of the pioneer efforts of President
Thomas and Susan M. Kingsbury. Now that the Hudson Shore Labor
School is replacing it, the development of the Bryn Mawr School may
well be reviewed. Has the institution conformed to the larger pattern of
workers’ education? Have the hopes and intentions of its founders been
realized?

The Bryn Mawr School could not have continued to exist had its directors
and supporters not believed in the profound importance of workers’ education.
They have from the very first visualized instruction for workers as a means
of helping to build a constructive labor movement and maintaining our demo-
cratic government. Since general education has not achieved these aims, they
have contended that supplementary programs must exist. They have not main-
tained that they will necessarily favor separate education for adult workers if
continued expansion of standard educational facilities levels differences among
adults and if general adult education more readily reflects the social scene.
But workers must in the meanwhile continue to study their environment, even
though practical reasons demand that they form separate groups.

Moreover, the Bryn Mawr Summer School has continued its work because
it believes that resident schools are as important to workers’ education as are
community projects. The development of its program has justified its belief
and would seem to effectively answer those critics of the resident process who
have stated that extra-community projects accommodate too few students,
that many of the students do not represent workers in general, that the courses
are limited and not coordinated with the everyday life of workers, that
expenses are high, and that control is in the wrong hands.

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