Nellie Ploschansky and the Anarchist Sunday School

Here you can find the (still rather rough) speaking notes from our session on the history of free schools in Britain! Most of what’s written here are just quotes from Matthew Thomas’s article about Nellie Ploschansky’s school (see the resources at the end) which served as the main source for historical information that we used to build our session.

At the very bottom, we’ve also included scans from the first two issues of Liberty, the newspaper published by students of the Ferrer Sunday School in 1914! We’d like to give a very big thanks to the Internationaal Instituutvoor Sociale Geschiedenis (International Institute for Social History) for giving us access to some of the original copies of Liberty!

NOTES

Context: Britain, Industrializing and empire-building.

1870: Parliament passes the Education Act, which sets up locally run “board schools”: 1) in order to make a class of educated workers who could compete internationally, and 2) to educate a group of people who were recently given the right to vote. Can’t have them deciding things for themselves, right?

1902: Another act of parliament tries to centralize control of education even further. Now, the board schools would be run directly by the local government councils, placing education under direct control of the state.

Working people responded by relying on privately run schools that were funded by local communities, completely independent of state schools.

March 1890: Louise Michel, a former Communard, starts the International School at 19 Fitzroy Square.
All about “integral education”

February 1892: Michel’s International school has 80 pupils.
1893, explosives are “found” in the basement and the school is shut down.

Nellie Ploschansky and the Jewish East End

Sometime in the early 1900s, a group of Jewish radicals started meeting as the Workers’ Circle and publishing the Yiddish Newspaper Arebeter Freint (Worker’s Friend)

In 1906, they rent a two storey building at 165 Jubilee St. in Whitechapel. Rudolf Rocker helped run the Club, Errico Malatesta occasionally came to give lectures there, and Peter Kropotkin was a common sight. 13 yo Nellie Ploschansky, a jewish immigrant girl from Ukraine, starts going to lectures at Jubilee St., just a short walk from her father’s house in Stepney Green East. She complains that there weren’t any children at the lectures, and that she wanted to start a school there “for working men’s children … I had heard about Ferrer’s school in Barcelona and that was what I wanted.”

Later in 1906, she establishes a libertarian Sunday School at the Jubilee Street Club

Word spread among the children, and the school quickly became so popular that local rabbis were warning parents against it! (It was one of the only secular schools for Jewish folks in the East End)

“Comrades sent their children along and we read poetry and sang songs. We used to sing a poem written by Morris . . . called ‘No Master High or Low’. Gradually the children got other children to come and the Rabbi would come out and stand in front of the door and when the children left he would follow them home and tell their parents they should not allow them to go there because it was a bad place. But the children made no mind. They liked it.” (Thomas 2004; 420)

June 23, 1912: Nellie moves the school to New Kings Hall, 135 Commercial Road East, Whitechapel (slightly west of the old school) and renames it the International Modern School (or “The Ferrer Sunday School”!)

“Although the school was known as a ‘Sunday school’, it often met up to three times a week. The school sought to develop a curriculum that was relevant to those who attended it and included science, languages, physical education, sewing, reading and recitations. The older pupils would be instructed in sewing, often bringing material with them and mending their clothes while readings took place. This training helped to prepare them for work in the tailoring trades of the East End.69 Controlled by its users, the emphasis was put on allowing the children to organize themselves and to discuss topics that they felt to be important. The school arranged trips to places like Epping Forest, where they could study out in the open. One pupil recalled: ‘I remember my father saying to my sister “Did you have a good time?” “Yes” she said, “wonderful, there were no parents, no-one telling us what to do”’. The school also began to develop an adult section with classes in sex education, literature, theatre, poetry and languages. Of the latter, Esperanto was especially popular since it was expected to foster anarchism by creating international unity and understanding. Nellie Ploschansky recalled that many children from the school used to go and join the adults, and the barriers between young and old were broken down as both learned together. The school also fostered links between the immigrant Jews and the local community, with a minority of the pupils being the children of local people. In January 1907 the school celebrated the new year. After tea, the children and their families held a concert of socialist songs. In March Wess reported that ‘the school has broken into three classes and is much more satisfactory . . . We have also combined physical exercise with intellectual practice . . . When the warm weather comes we are always eager to get them out into the fields’.” (Thomas 2004; 421)

By the end of 1912, there were over 100 children, aged 5-16, attending regularly.

March 1913: Nellie announces that the school is moving to 146 Stepney Green East.

May 1, 1913, Nellie meets Jim Dick, who had just left his own anarchist sunday school in Liverpool, at a May Day rally, while handing out anti-militarist pamphlets. He’s 30 years old, while she’s 19.

Tuesday evenings: Reading class
Thursday evenings: sports and dancing
Sunday afternoons: lectures (incl. Evolution, local miners federation talks about how the coal industry works, etc.)

“This spirit of selfempowerment was particularly evident in plans to publish a magazine entitled The Modern School, aimed at ‘promoting self-expression’ and reporting on the school’s activities. The first issue was published at the end of January 1914, the second issue in April and the third in July. They contained articles which were written by the children: issue three had an article entitled ‘What is anarchy?’ by Willie (aged eleven), two letters from children in Canada and ‘Bits by the bairns’ by Henry (aged seven). The magazine featured a frontispiece showing two children holding aloft the torch of liberty with a copy of Science and Truth under their arms, while in the background a priest could be seen retreating.” (Thomas 2004; 425)

December 1914: Part of the school moves to 24 Green Street, Cambridge Road.

“A new ‘education group’ was established to run the school which remained at Whitechapel and consisted mostly of younger children. At Green Street the older children set about developing their school on their own, with help from Jim Dick. At Whitechapel Road, Rudolf Rocker’s son, also called Rudolf, ran the school until he was interned. His half-brother, Fermin, remembers how it was free from all forms of coercion: ‘Rudolf would have no rewards or punishments. Children learned as they wanted to learn’ ” (Thomas 2004; 425)

At the new school:
Tuesday evenings French lessons.
Thursday evenings discussion and reading class.
Sunday afternoons our usual meetings’.

“The breakaway school at 24, Green Street, Cambridge Road did not stay there too long. By March 1915 it had moved to Ashburton House in Hertford Place.97 Lectures still took place on Sunday, but the school was also open on most evenings during the week.

The school began to publish another magazine entitled Liberty. Issue one was published in February 1915 and contained articles on the war. There was also a piece about Futurist art by ‘Barney’. The most interesting was an article written by ‘Ruben’ entitled ‘State schools and the workers’. It stressed that ‘the duty of the workers is to take more interest in the education of the children in state schools. They should protest against the teaching of religion and patriotism’. Ruben’s article is remarkable in that it suggests that some children at least resisted the state’s attempt to create a set of unique national identities for boys and girls through the ‘numerous patriotic symbols and national narratives that found expression in school reading books and class room practices’. In issue two of the magazine there were features about evolution, conscription and a review of Zola’s Germinal. There was also a report from children in Ledbury who had been engaged in a school strike:

The children had gone on strike in support of the Herefordshire teaching union’s demand for salary increases. The children’s resistance began at the start of February 1914, when, in response to the union’s strategy of mass resignations, the local education authority appointed new teachers, many of them unqualified, to replace those involved in the dispute. Pupils throughout the county expressed sympathy for their former teachers, who were among the lowest paid in the country, by refusing to be taught by the new members of staff, and seventy schools were forced to close.” (Thomas 2004; 425-426)

“Sometimes children used the discussion groups within the schools to organize their own activity. Ploschansky recalled that the boys at the
Stepney Green school held a meeting and decided that they would
organize protection for the suffragettes: ‘Our boys would go out and
make a circle around them and defend them from the police and the
people who would try and disturb the campaigning’.122 Similarly, Dick
reported that a discussion had taken place at one of these meetings to
strike against the saluting of the flag in state school on Empire Day. The
children went to school and openly refused to salute the flag, thus making
‘their protest against this fostering of hatred of other countries’. Prior to
this, on Empire Day in May 1909, the children from the Liverpool school
had distributed leaflets ‘as an antidote to the patriotic bombast that the
day schools were giving’.123 This anti-nationalist sentiment was to develop
further after the passing of the Military Service Act in 1916. Many of the boys at the Green Street school became involved in distributing anti-
conscription leaflets. Nellie Ploschansky remembered that

our boys were sometimes yanked up to the tribunal because they were tall and they looked older. And once one of the boys was called up and he said that he belonged to this Sunday School, and he didn’t think he had any fighting to do with the workers in Germany. And they said to him ‘How old are the children who attend that school? How young do you take them?’ He says, ‘As soon as they are able to think’. It was very tough on those youngsters because mothers whose sons were going to war, would pin white feathers on them. They didn’t know how old they were.

Political activity such as this helped to train the next generation of militants.” (Thomas 2004; 431-432)

In late 1915 the Cambridge Road school moved to Marsh House, an anarchist commune in Meckleburgh Street. On 13 October this was the location for a meeting commemorating Ferrer’s death. Among the speakers were Millie Witcop, Bessie Ward, Bonar Thompson and Jim Dick.102 However, the school was virtually at an end. During the winter of 1915–16 it had its share of trouble with the authorities. Nellie Ploschansky recalled:

Once we had a party which was raided by the police – there was a spy in our group – who arrested everybody without a registration card. Also a Conservative paper, John Bull I believe, had an article about our school which said Jim was related to Lenin and I to Trotsky and that we were teaching the children to make revolution and manufacture bombs.103 In 1916 Jim Dick and Nellie Ploschansky were legally married so that Jim could avoid conscription, and when married men became eligible for the draft they decided to go to the U.S.A. With their departure the East London Modern School ended.” (Thomas 2004; 426-427)

“Pedagogy was also an area in which anarchists differed. An extreme Tolstoyan definition of freedom with respect to teaching, as embraced by Louise Michel, implied absolutely no compulsion in the teaching pattern. Other anarchist pedagogues, however, seem to have forgotten that the dynamics of hierarchy and power existed in the class room as they did in society at large. Although Jim Dick strongly argued for the capacity
and ability of young people to organize their own lives, his approach to pedagogy was more conventional. He believed that content was what mattered most in learning, and viewed lectures as the most effective medium of instruction. This view was hardly compatible with Ferrer’s principles and places Dick more in the traditions of socialist Sunday school teaching than within the libertarian approach. Indeed, when he was invited by the Socialist Sunday School Union of Liverpool to attend
a conference in July 1911 he expressed his full support for that
movement. His only criticism of socialist education was of its ‘Sunday School morality’ and ‘quasi-religious’ content, not of the fact that it was more structured and formal in nature than libertarian education.
In contrast, Louise Michel or Tolstoy would have insisted on the child’s absolute freedom to decide upon what was learnt, to determine the pattern of his or her day. There was thus a debate as to the degree to which self-motivation was essential to the learning act.113″

Nellie and Jim then worked at the modern school in New Jersey, then becoming co-principals of their own Modern School in 1933 that was the last of the modern schools to close in 1958.