Irvin Corson Poley: Master Teacher
Nationally recognized, GFS is now on the cutting-edge of progressive education in the early 1930s with an array of Upper School electives to in-depth, year-long studies in the lower grades. Theater productions are found throughout the school, including a wooden, two-story, student-built Trojan Horse. When the Depression hits, the school struggles to keep tuition affordable, enacting multiple budget cuts and large faculty lay-offs.
Irvin Poley always credited his Quaker ancestors for his interest in the theater. There were two stories about them he loved to tell.
“My great-grandfather, a very plain Friend, was informed by a conscientious talebearer in the Meeting that a fellow member had been to the theater. She added, self-righteously, ‘I myself have never been within the doors of a playhouse.’ Alan Corson replied, ‘Neither have I, Hannah, but many better people have; so let’s say nothing about it.’
“His son, my grandfather [Elias Hicks Corson] didn’t let a lame horse prevent his hearing Dickens do his famous dramatic readings. He stopped his farm work a little early, walked the twelve miles to the city from Plymouth Meeting, heard Dickens and got home in early morning. He had no time to sleep, but he lingered over breakfast long enough to delight my mother and his other children with his imitations of how Dickens acted out his characters.”
Poley told these tales in a little memoir he titled The Play is Now the Thing, and in it he traced his love for the theater to his boyhood. “In my parents’ home, my mother always managed to find money for one good play a year for the family. I saw Joe Jefferson in ‘Rip Van Winkle’ when I was ten, Irving and Terry in ‘The Merchant of Venice’ when I was eleven, Richard Mansfield in ‘Julius Caesar’ when I was twelve. A life-long interest was set then and there… I still paste in scrap-books the programs and reviews and pictures of every play I see.” Poley’s theater books are in the collection of the Friends Free Library.¹ Irvin Poley was born in Philadelphia in 1891. His father, Warren H. Poley, owned a drugstore on Germantown Avenue near Walnut Lane where young Irvin worked, he remembered, for twenty cents a day. Warren Poley eventually made a fortune investing in pharmaceutical stocks, and, when his father died, Irvin and his brother and sister inherited a great deal of money. “They were millionaires,” is Henry Scattergood’s memory. But there was not much money in the early, formative years, and Irvin Poley never forgot. “Irvin told me,” Henry remembers, “he said, I am very fortunate now to have money I didn’t have when I was young…and I want the pleasure of giving it away while I am still living… He was a very generous man.”
Poley always gave anonymously. He was a benefactor of the Friends Free Library, and he gave a good deal of money for scholarships. Much of his philanthropy was individual. “He made his way into a lot of people’s hearts,” Scattergood says. Perhaps remembering a personal experience, Henry recounted that “A young faculty member, who was obviously struggling with a low salary, Irvin would present them enough money so they could go to dinner and the theater. He did a lot of little, kind things — what the poet called those ‘little unremembered acts of kindness.’ His life was full of that. He was really a lovely man.”²
After graduating from GFS, Poley went to Haverford intending a life in the theater, perhaps as an actor or a playwright. In the summer of his sophomore year, however, he got a job as a counselor at Flying Moose Lodge, a summer camp in Maine owned by Henry Domincovich. Mr. Domi persuaded Poley that his real gift was as a teacher.
He graduated from Haverford in 1912 and accepted a teaching position at the Cedarcroft School, a boarding school in Chester County. He hated it. The school was too conservative for him, and it was also too remote from the theater he loved. The workload was also incredible. As was usual with Poley, he later turned the painful first year experience into a good story.
“In my first year of teaching, an experienced colleague entered my room late in the evening and found me desperate for sleep; in the fumbling, exhausting, beginning-swimmer way of a green teacher in boarding school, I had less than fifteen minutes of relaxation since seven that morning, what with teaching six classes, coaching a football team, presiding over two study hours, three meals and a dormitory.
“But there were papers still to be done. Before I realized what was happening, the young man picked them up, tore them through, put them in the scrap-basket, and said, ‘You need sleep more than the boys need the papers.’ Like a baby, a teacher seems to learn more his first year than any time later. Another teacher that same winter — a woman — used to tell me with grim satisfaction how late her papers had kept her the night before. ‘And they never look at them,’ Mr. Poley! One glance at the grade, and they throw them in the scrap-basket!’ “‘Why do you stay up to one o’clock to finish, then? I asked. ‘Something in here, Mr. Poley,’ she answered with a dramatic tap on her bosom, ample enough, I am sure, to hold an inflated conscience. Her heart may not have been bigger than her head, but her conscience was. Whereupon I resolved that whatever time I spent reading papers — and I have spent a reasonable amount — would be profitable to my students.”³
Stanley Yarnall invited Poley to come to GFS in 1913; he jumped at the chance and loved it from the start. The Poleys kept a “family diary,” a slim journal in which each family member made periodic notations. Irvin’s entries in these years are consistently joyful. He admired Yarnall, he respected his new colleagues at the school, and he plunged into his work with zest. Within two months of his arrival at GFS, and with help from Helen White and Katherine Dobson, he produced a play by students in the Intermediate English class. It would be the first of countless productions. That first year he was even able to persuade Teacher Emma Roberts to accompany him to the theater — something she had never done. It became an annual event for them.
The Poley family diary shows young Irvin embracing a whirl of happy and innocent Quaker life before World War I. There were countless parties, picnics, ice cream socials, afternoon teas, family holidays, wedding receptions, and trips to New York and Broadway and to the Poconos.
He fell in love with Frances Ross, and they were married in 1917. Tragically, she died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. Henry Scattergood remembers “that just about killed him. He said, ‘I had to force myself to laugh again.’” He was slow to recover, but eventually married Ruth Verlenden, a Hicksite Friend and graduate of Swarthmore, in 1922, and their marriage lasted over half a century.⁴
Poley’s influence in the school grew steadily throughout the 1920s. He had been hired to take charge of the Intermediate School because Yarnall wanted a disciplinarian. Poley could be one, although that is not how he is generally remembered. “He was not soft, he was not easy. I can remember him walking down the hall in the morning and he would greet a student, ‘good morning,’ and if the student didn’t answer he would grab him by the back of the neck and say ‘when I greet you, I expect you to have the courtesy to answer me back.’ People know he meant business.”⁵
Yarnall soon put him in charge of the scheduling, then asked him to oversee the revisions in the Primary curriculum. In 1927 he was appointed vice-principal, and, by 1930, he was the obvious choice to run the school during Yarnall’s sabbatical leave.
Irvin Poley was a great teacher and a great teacher of teachers. In the 1930s he also managed two important developments in the history of the school: He created the Malvern Festival, and he directed GFS’ participation in the Eight-Year Study.
“He knew a lot about teaching,” Scattergood says. “He knew the tricks of the trade — but he didn’t rely on just tricks. He was genuinely good.”
What really happened in a Poley classroom? What made Poley a “genuinely good teacher?”
The important history of Germantown Friends School, or of any other school, really takes place in a classroom where only a teacher and students are present. It is almost impossible for the historian to reconstruct in any depth that special chemistry or to recount in detail the particular dynamic that distinguishes good from mediocre teaching.
Poley himself realized that. In his first report to the School Committee, as acting principal in 1930, he said “The most important phase of school life, what actually goes on in the classroom, is hard to report,” and he didn’t try. Students, interviewed years later, remembered odd moments, bits of humor, evidence of teacher eccentricity, sometimes their own pleasures, and often their pains, in a class. But they almost never recall any details about the way the course developed, or the class discussions or the subtle details of presentation. They can, however, offer brief glimpses of personality and style. David Mallery ’41, was a Poley student in the 1930s, and a colleague later.
In what he called “mini-flashes,” Mallery described moments in a Poley classroom when he was a student.
“Ninth-grade English: Irvin has just played Brutus to my Cassius for three whole pages, and then another Cassius takes over. Why do I feel more interesting in his class than other classes?
“ — Public Speaking period: he has just finished reading sample school announcements in the heaviest possible Philadelphia accent. The classes crack up. None of us will ever say ‘dai-oan tai-oan’ and ‘poark the coar’ again without checking ourselves for a second just after — or even before….
“ — He is reading aloud from Act Three of “Our Town.” There is a fervor in his voice, caring and love. ‘Does anyone realize life while they live it? Every, every minute? ‘No, Saints and poets, mebbe.’”⁶
One of Poley’s “tricks” or techniques in teaching was always to have an assignment or questions written on the blackboard when students entered the room. “He meant business” and the whole period was to be used. Students should consider the blackboard as they settled down. They should write the questions down in their notebooks.
Here is part of a typical Poley week with students reading Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith. Poley described this in an essay titled “The Spiral Approach to Composition.”
When students enter the room on Monday, on the blackboard is written:
For Tuesday:
1. Read as much of Arrowsmith as you have time for.
2. Start thinking about what you’ll write about for Friday,
3. Study “The Value of the Specific” to see which version you like better and why.
“On a Monday, say four or five days before a theme is due, I mention to the class that I shall soon be expecting something good in written expression of their own ideas. I ask if an of them have trouble finding a subject to write about; nearly all do, of course. We then discuss ways of getting material — chance bits of conversation, items in a newspaper, a face in the hotel lobby. I may mention Eugene O’Neill’s building The Emperor Jones from the silver bullet and the continuous tom-tom….” Half of the class time on Monday is spend on items 1 and 2; the remainder of the period is spent introducing the novel. Poley raises questions: “What is meant by the scientific method?” “Does Arrowsmith seem to think research more important than reducing suffering? “Do you feel that Sinclair Lewis sympathizes with Arrowsmith in this opinion?”
Item 3 on the blackboard, The Value of the Specific, is an exercise devised by Poley and, in this instance, compares a passage written by Charles Dickens with a passage written by Poley. Its assignment to be read as homework and discussed the next day. Here is an abbreviated version:
Dickens: “Such a bustle ensued that you might have thought a goose the rarest of all birds… Mrs. Cratchit made the gravy (rather beforehand in a little saucepan) hissing hot…”
Poley: “Such a movement ensued that you might have thought the food were to have the rarest in the world. The mother busied herself finishing something to serve with the main dish…”
Most of Tuesday is spent on the exercise The Value of the Specific. “Needless to say,” Poley wrote, “there will be a universal preference for Dickens over Poley. Why? Because Dickens is more specific; that is easy. But, to learn from the exercise what there is to learn, most youngsters will need to hear corresponding phrases read aloud” and Poley introduces lessons in reading, interpretation, grammar, and punctuation based on the passages of the exercise.
What impresses the modern reader when following Poley’s lesson plans day after day is the thorough and thoughtful way he weaves language and literature together. Written on the blackboard on Wednesday, for example, are three sentences:
1. Something alive went up something green.
2. An insect climbed a grass-blade.
3. A brown-spotted ladybug climbed the dizzying height of a grass-blade.
Which is the best sentence? The class chooses the third, “because it is more specific.” Poley challenges their assumptions: The best for what purpose? Is “being specific” overdone? Is “specific” really the issue at all? He goes back to Dickens: Why were “bustling” and “hissing hot” more effective than the Poley paraphrases? Is it just a matter of specifics?
Then it was back to Arrowsmith. He wrote on the board “They pictured what poverty would mean — a small house on a side street, with the housework done by slatternly servants,” and invited discussions about class, luxury, conflicting values, and points of view.
On the board for Thursday was:
1. If your rough draft isn’t already written, write it.
2. Re-read aloud what you have written at least twice to the ear; make what revision becomes necessary.
3. Symposium on Arrowsmith a week from today. Better have book finished by Tuesday next.⁷
Poley had a favorite phrase to describe his method of teaching: “Teach obliquely, test directly.” He compared his teaching method to the Chekhov play. “In The Cherry Orchard, for example, the complexity of the characters and the multiplicity of minor plots — no ‘well-made play’ here — are stimulating, fascinating, yet a little confusing until the final curtain. The final tableau of the forgotten servant with the noise of the cherry trees offstage unifies the great play magnificently. We have a new understanding of people everywhere, especially of pre-Soviet Russian aristocrats; we see freshly why such people — lovable as they often were — foreshadow violent revolution. For Chekhov’s genius substitute the intelligent preparation, the hard work, his interest in technique characteristic of good English teachers. We shall have, then, I think day by day more variety — boys and girls thrive on variety, though they need routine, too — and more real interest, the kind that incites to self-motivated study. And at the end of the unit or of the semester we may have something of the same sense of enlarged understanding of the whole that Chekhov gives.”⁸
In a Poley classroom, there were no lists of vocabulary or spelling words, or grammar rules. They came up each day “obliquely.” To each proper use of commas, for example, he would take sentences from student themes. “Theodore Roosevelt because he filled out McKinley’s term was considered ineligible for re-election.” This sentence might lead to vocabulary. What is “ineligible”? What is eligible? What is an antonym?
Poley did have a lot of tricks. Henry Scattergood has never forgotten “Neither (or either) leisurely foreigner seized their weird heights,” which contains every important exception to the “i before e” spelling rule. He favored spelling bees where scores were kept for the right answers and no one sat down after a mistake. “Why should only the best spellers have the dizzy glory of repeated opportunities to spell?” He liked students to keep “inventories” of new things they learned, books read, words mastered. “It calls for a stock-taking of English learned in and out of class. It motivates note-taking, mental and physical, a difficult thing to do, especially with junior high youngsters.” He believed in asking questions first, and then calling on a student to answer. “If you reverse the procedure, most youngsters will relax and stop listening when they hear a name other than their own.”
Poley devoted a good deal of attention to oral reading and appreciation even in a regular English class. He described his oblique technique and a trick — “the one world location test” — in an article he wrote for an English teachers’ journal. “Let’s take for a moment a play that most of us have taught, Macbeth. Suppose you have introduced the tragedy by reading aloud about half the first act, trying to follow the happy mean of explaining enough and not too much, of explaining the essential word but always trying to let the lines speak for themselves. For homework I might ask students to re-read aloud with full expression what I had read to them and then to finish the act, rather daring them to see if they can get the main points of the first seven scenes. The next day I might begin class with a one-word test with ten questions.” Here is a sample:
My noble partner
You agree with present grace and great prediction That he seems rapt withal: to me you speak not: If you can look into the seeds of time,
And say which grain will grow and which will not Speak then to me…
1. Who says this?
2. Who is the noble partner referred to?
The test and correction — by other students — would take half the period, and the rest would be spent with Poley reading lines with one student after another. The night’s homework would be reading aloud the second act and writing a one-word test like the one Poley had constructed. “The third day the students would read aloud their passages and he class would spot them orally. This device gives three day switch an emphasis on oral reading that should bear fruit in appreciation.”
Near the end of his teaching career, Poley asked a student intern, Ada Hoell, to follow him around and take notes as he taught a six-week drama class to ninth graders. He wanted to leave a record of “what really happens in my classroom.” The class was studying Julius Caesar and Maxwell Anderson’s Elizabeth the Queen. Here are parts of Hoell’s notes:
1. Explanation of figurative language brought up in its relation to lying. The class saw it was possible to act a lie; Mr. Poley spoke of Arnold Bennett’s phrase, “looking with the steadiness of glance peculiar to liars who read novels.” The class saw the figurative language may help to vivify the truth and that lying (intended to deceive) may be done with literal language…
2. As an illustration of a paradox, Mr. Poley quoted Alfred Noyes’s lines,
They are jammed and crammed in buses But they’re each of them alone
In the land where the dead dreams go.
The possibilities of loneliness in a crowd were grasped by some. Mr. Poley asked if the rich and powerful were every lonely. Someone referred to Elizabeth’s saying, “I am encompassed by lies,” and, “If there were only the sound of one honest voice!” Someone else brought up Elizabeth’s remark to Essex,
But you’d have to say that, because you wouldn’t hurt me, And because I’m your queen.
The class discussed the reasons why people who are rich and powerful learn to distrust compliments.
3. The class came to this argument between Elizabeth and Essex:
Elizabeth:
…You believe yourself
Fitter to be king than to be queen! You believe you’d rule England better Because you’re a man!Essex:
…(I) see that why you fail
When you do is merely because a woman cannot Act and think like a manElizabeth:
…a woman’s thinking’s wiser.There came up the question of the differences in achievement between men and women. Supremacy in letters and in government was granted to man. Is it a difference in mental ability or in education? Mr. Poley mentioned George Eliot’s picture in The Mill and the Floss of a bright girl who was not allowed to study Greek and her slow-minded brother was forced to….
4. Was Elizabeth bad? Was Essex? Was Antony? Was Cassius? Was Brutus wholly good? The class contributed characteristics. Elizabeth was vain, capricious, deceitful, hot- tempered, brilliant, vigorous, sensible, and peace-loving. Essex was greedy for power, proud, generous, honest, a war-bringer and a trouble-maker for England. Antony was deceitful, but he really loved Caesar. Cassius faced facts in a realistic way. Brutus was a rationalizer when he wouldn’t take money from the peasants for his armies, but was angry at Cassius for not getting money for him by the same means. The class saw that these characters were human partly because they were neither white nor black, but gray.
Germantown Friends School has had many teachers in its century and a half, but few have left records that allow the historian to enter their classrooms. With Irvin Poley, even if we can’t enter, we can peer through the window, and the scene is always lively. Catherine Hineline, who retired from GFS in 2007 after teaching in the Lower School for thirty-eight years, once had the opportunity as a young teacher at Sidwell Friends School to literally peer through a window to watch Poley. In 1968 Poley was invited to teach Shakespeare to a class of sixth graders at Sidwell Friends. “I know that class well, having taught them before,” Katie remembers, “and I know that it was just impossible to teach them Shakespeare.” Katy and other Sidwell teachers watched him through a one-way window. “He started by reading a bit from the play, I think it was Macbeth, and then distributed scenes and had the students read — act. From the moment he opened his mouth, he had them. He asked questions that drew the students into the play and helped them see parallels to their own lives. He was very old then, thin and hunched over, and the students loved him. It was magic.”
Poley was also a teacher of teachers. “He was marvelous, the best in the school, at helping young teachers,” Henry Scattergood, who was briefly a young teacher in the school in the 1930s, says. But Poley’s reputation was wider than GFS.
Starting in 1928, Poley taught a demonstration class for English teachers at Harvard every summer. For an hour, he would teach drama and literature to ninth graders who were enrolled in an “enrichment” course, while teachers who were working on advanced degrees observed the class. In a second hour, Poley would lead a seminar with the teachers on what he had done in class and why. He taught this demonstration class for more than twenty years and his name, and GFS, became widely known in progressive education circles.
In 1945 he was asked to write an article for The Clearing House, an education journal, about “What Every Young Teacher Ought to Know.” His advice is practical, humorous, wise, and explains a lot about why Poley was so well regarded by fellow teachers. Here is some of his advice:
1. Don’t expect the impossible of yourself. “You can’t be all things to all pupils…”
2. Expect the possible. “There is almost no skill or talent that can’t be put to use in a school…”
3. Keep as well as you can. “There is no profession whose members take such fanatical pride in being at their posts, no matter how unfit for duty. I don’t know why teachers tend to be stubborn about never giving into ills of the flesh; perhaps being a good example year after year breaks down a sense of proportion.” His advice: go to bed.
4. Your mental health is as important as your physical. “As an aid to good mental health, read samplings of drill exercises and discuss answers in class and stagger that part of your paper-load which has to be read carefully; don’t assign more than have time to do calmly, with a reasonable amount of interest.”
5. Be a person in our own right. “Have outside interest… The day is over when a teacher is expected to be of a third sex, uninterested in normal social life…”
6. Try to enjoy something in each student. “It does not really matter how much you are liked in return;…But it matters enormously to young people to be liked and respected”
7. Boys and girls really are different. “It is even more important with girls than boys to watch your manners, because girls care more about your good opinion”
8. Trust your pupils, but don’t tempt them. “Don’t make it easy for children to lie or to cheat. If you are testing your pupils’ memory of work assigned, assume that everyone will want to sit as far apart as possible. And don’t forget that honesty is not the only virtue worth being concerned about…we teachers are likely to be too much impressed by conformity, politeness, and truth-telling. Like Pitti Sing’s, our taste exact for flawless fact amounts to a disease. We may be too little impressed by such virtues as initiative, courage, independence of judgment, the higher forms of truthfulness. Dr. Ralph Sockman once said, ‘It is one thing to be moral enough to tell the truth as one sees it; it is a better thing to try and find the truth before one tells it.’ Let’s not overlook the bigger virtues.”
9. Include routine as well as variety in our plans. “Boys and girls need routine. Have routine jobs well routinized — the arrangement and the collecting of papers, for example, and preparation of blackboards. You may want to have homework written on the board several days ahead…[it] has a steadying effect… Routine, then, is important in our planning, but so is variety. Don’t always stand in the front of the room; don’t always wear the same necktie with the same suit. Change the youngsters’ position as well as your own; the younger they are the more they need legitimate excuse for physical activity — opening a window, closing a door, going to the blackboard.”
10. If you must punish, give yourself time to do it wisely. “Don’t scold; don’t be lead into a prolonged search for absolute justice.”
11. Don’t try to use influence until you have it. “Don’t take it as a compliment if told you seem just like one of the boys; you wouldn’t be getting a salary if you were.”
12. Don’t expect our advisees to jump directly from the usual self-absorption of youth to altruism; self-respect must come first. The rest of Poley’s advice to young teachers is about getting along with principals and colleagues, and it boils down to “if you can’t be happy… get out.”
It was advice that Poley himself would need to weigh in 1941.
Poley is best remembered for the “Malvern Festival.” These were a series of plays, or usually excerpts from plays, that were performed in assemblies during the spring. They were named after a famous English drama festival that every summer produced a series of six plays given “in chronological order, so that in one week of nightly theatre-going one could painlessly acquire a vivid sense of the historical development of English drama.”⁹ Poley’s version was quite different from the original.
The festival originated in the spring of 1933 when two junior boys, Harold Robinson and Maurice Webster, asked Poley to teach a course in public speaking for their senior year. With approval from Yarnall, Poley offered the course for the first time in 1934–35 and twelve students (six boys and six girls) signed up. For the first half of the year, they studied the rudiments of public speaking. “We began… with practicing simple announcements pleasantly audible in the rear of the assembly room [now the Poley auditorium]. We were interested… in private speech as well as public. We learned that we speak with our bodies (posture, gesture, pantomime) in addition to our vocal apparatus.” Every person interviewed for this history remembers Poley standing in the back of the Auditorium listening to every speaker, on every occasion, and often making suggestions. “He thought you should hear a person when they got up,” one student remembers. “He insisted on it.”
The second half of the year students performed plays. “Almost by accident we drifted into doing very simply a unified series of short or shortened plays in assembly — a series which we called the Malvern Festival.”
The first year (1935) the public speaking class presented “A Feast of English Comedy,” five assembly programs a week apart with ten- to thirty- minute bits from You Never Can Tell, The Importance of Being Earnest, W.S Gilbert’s Engaged, The School for Scandal, and A Comedy of Errors. For the next quarter century, the Malvern Festival flourished.
It was always done with few props and little costuming. Poley thought this was one of the great values of the Malvern approach. It focused attention on the text, the interpretation, and the actors. He believed that elaborate production hindered rather than helped the audience’s imagination.
He never apologized for cutting plays, sometimes quite ruthlessly, to fit the time constraints of an assembly. “For school purposes… many plays gain by the cutting… to my taste, The Comedy of Errors for a whole evening is a bore. It proved hilarious, cut to forty minutes… The Madwoman of Chaillot, full length, would, I suspect, be unbearable with youthful amateurs… but our school audience was enchanted with a half-hour from the last act…”
Poley wrote many articles for education journals about the Malvern Festival, and he always made the same points: It is the student experience that matters, not the production’s polish; broad exposure to all kinds of drama is preferable to the masterful presentation of one play; drama should be made to fit into the school schedule, and should be seen as a normal, natural part of education. He had taken advantage of special celebrations (like the Shakespeare Tercentenary) to promote drama, but he didn’t really approve of this. Drama, indeed all the arts, should be central to the curriculum, and woven into it. “Our ideal [is] taking performances in our stride, of rehearsing only in study periods or in regular public speaking periods, of students going to their regular classes up to a few moments before going on the stage. We believe in the Malvern Festival idea of a unified series of plays cut to a manageable size and all the emphasis on making the interpretation of character as honestly and effectively projected as possible.”
More students gained more positive experiences doing the Malvern approach, he argued, than any other. Perfect performances, by the very few, after many nights of rehearsal, with elaborate staging, lighting, and costuming missed the point. The theatre became separate from student lives when viewed that way, he thought. “They” performed for “us.” Poley’s approach was to try to eliminate the distinction between pronouns.
Poley also used the Malvern Festival to give students a chance for growth and attention. “He brought people out who had never been brought out before… students, girls for example, who had never much been noticed became bella donnas — they had a place they had never had before. They came into their own, and he worked very hard at that…”¹⁰
Poley had a soft spot for outsiders, misfits, and disaffected and lonely adolescents, and he saw the Malvern Festival as a way of drawing them into the mainstream. He knew that most educators in the 1930s regarded the arts as a refuge for weak students, and he resented that. But he came to realize that the arts represented a chance for those students to show their worth. “Good acting takes, fortunately, ability of a different sort from that measured by scholastic aptitude tests — a mixture, perhaps, of imaginative understanding of others and freedom from self-consciousness.”
The Malvern Festival continued from 1935 to Poley’s retirement in 1958. There were a few Malvern Festivals after that, but they really only retained the name. The beliefs and spirit that directed the Malvern Festival retired with Poley.
The Festivals were always organized around a theme, although the theme seems often to have been stretched and lightly regarded. History connected “It Began in Greece” (1939) to “History Takes the Stage” (1946), but it is hard to find any other connection between the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet (1939) and a reading from Benet’s The Devil and Daniel Webster (1946). The theme for 1938 illustrates the point. It was “They All Wrote English” and was a way to group Irish playwrights (J.M. Synge, Riders to the Sea) with American writers (Marc Connelly and George Kaufman, Dulcy). Poley always maintained that the Malvern Festival themes were serious, and discussed by students in class at great length, but it surely looks like Irvin selected plays he liked and thought would work with students — and figured a theme later.
Poley also took charge of the Eight-Year Study, the most important development in the Intermediate and High School during the 1930s. The Eight-Year Study was a joint project of the Progressive Education Association and the Carnegie Foundation and aimed at loosening up the high school curriculum.
The Carnegie Foundation for many years had worried that college admissions standards, and the natural desire of college preparatory schools to meet those standards, had produced a fixed curriculum that forced every student, whatever his or her individual talents and interests, into the same college preparatory mold. There was too much emphasis on language and literature, for example, and too little on science and history. The arts were neglected. The Foundation believed that high schools were teaching to test standards. Did Bryn Mawr require Horace on its entrance exam? Schools taught Horace. Would Haverford test on Burke’s Speech on Conciliation? Students looking to Haverford read it.
In a series of publications, Dr. W.S. Learned of the Carnegie Foundation attached this formula for college admissions. Students were being taught that education was the accumulation of course credits, he argued. They “passed off” examinations in every subject in order to gain college admission, but they never put it all together. Education was becoming mastery of “credits” and not mastery of material or integration of knowledge.
The Carnegie Foundation, with help from Progressive Education Association (P.E.A.) formed a committee to enlist “a limited number of strong, outstanding secondary schools of proved excellence” in an experiment to show that a broader curriculum, with more choices and electives, and with individualized programs for different students, could be as successful for college preparation as the usual approach. After several years of study, the experiment was launched in 1933, and thirty schools from around the country were selected to participate. GFS was one of them.
In the Eight-Year Study, participating colleges (and these included most that GFS students attended) suspended their usual examinations for applicants and accepted students from the thirty experimental schools on the basis on recommendations and a liberal reading of their school transcripts.
There were no hard and fast rules. The colleges were not obliged to accept every recommended student, but they were obliged to judge students on the basis of “well-defined serious interests and purpose” and “demonstrated ability to work successfully in one or more fields of study.” In practice this meant, for example, that a GFS graduate who excelled in math and science was admitted to Bryn Mawr in 1939 despite the fact she had not taken Latin.
GFS was selected as one of these thirty elite “progressive” schools in part because of Stanley Yarnall’s early participation in the Carnegie planning process. As early as 1928, Yarnall had joined a committee of private school heads to consider Leonard’s ideas. In succeeding years, he encouraged Harry Domincovich and Laurence Burgess to take part in the sub-committees working out parts of the proposed experiment.
GFS may also have been selected because of a well-publicized “progressive” pageant staged in 1931 to celebrate Virgil’s 2,000th birthday. The entire Intermediate and Upper School stopped all ordinary business on May 6 to participate in a three-hour celebration of classical culture in fourteen dramatic tableaux with song and dance. The pageant was given prominent coverage by every Philadelphia newspaper. The Inquirer, for example, headlined its story “Virgil Relives in School Pageant—450 Pupils Take Part.”
The inspiration for this pageant was, of course, the Shakespeare Tercentenary of 1916, which Harry Domincovich, the Virgil Pageant’s chief organizer and moving force, had also helped stage. But Virgil’s pageant was bigger and better than Shakespeare’s, and what would have most impressed the Progressive Education Association was that the text of the pageant was written by two senior girls, Elizabeth E. Simon and Lidie B. Saul.
GFS made the most of this pageant. The text was published in a very nice paper edition; Domi, Poley, and Yarnall mined it for articles in education journals; there was even a movie made of the pageant which was advertised in educational journals (a copy of this movie is in the GFS Archives). Years later Yarnall was still reporting to the School Committee letters of praise he had received about the Virgil Pageant.
The Pastorian printed a lengthy description of the pageant in the June 1931 issue which began “Wednesday May Sixth! One day in our lives we shall never forget… Promptly at two-thirty the bugle blew and people began moving onto the stage [at Wister Brown Field]. Joe Stokes, the emperor, appeared with his friends, lictors, and court ladies, and the School sang Horace’s ‘Carmen Saeculare.’ Then the crowd dispersed and left Augustus with his court and the Roman Provinces to celebrate the closing of the gates of the Temple of Janus as a symbol of peace throughout the empire. The fifth class [seventh grade] girls did a very interesting Italian Peasant dance as Roman provinces, saluted the emperor, and went out followed by Augustus and his party, who left Virgil [C. West Churchman] alone on the stage. In his solitary reflection, he felt the urge to write an epic which would remind the Romans of their past and bring back the old patriotism and religion. His thoughts of former times were portrayed by the ensuing scenes.” There was even a Trojan horse built by sophomore boys.
In his report to the School Committee, Irvin Poley (Yarnall was in the hospital with a bad knee and missed the pageant) described it as “one of the biggest weeks in the school’s life” and “a triumphant outcome of weeks of work.”
The importance of the Virgil Festival was not so much the event as its timing. Few schools were willing to devote so much time and energy to a singular event. Few schools were willing to let a talented teacher like Domincovich run with his enthusiasm, engage students in his dream, and recruit colleagues to lend their time and talent. Fewer schools would risk such a grand fantasy in the midst of the Depression. GFS was willing to do all that— and attracted attention from the Carnegie and PEA people when they looked for their thirty experimental schools.
Yarnall first proposed joining the Eight-Year Study in 1932. After gaining approval from the School Committee, he appointed a faculty committee, chaired by Domincovich, to draw up a proposal. The report (undated, but certainly 1933) concluded that “we are not satisfied with our present secondary curriculum.” Committee member D.L. Burgess was scathing. The High School, he said, “had a long way to go to catch up” with Marjorie Hardy’s Primary curriculum.
In general, the faculty agreed that there needed to be more history, science, art, and music in the upper grades. This would be achieved by reducing the required courses for tenth through twelfth grades to only four: English, history, Bible, and PE elective. Courses in math, historical geology, art, music, economics, public speaking, and drama would be offered initially with the possibility of more electives later. The language teachers opposed the change. In the language of the report (clearly written by Poley), “After stoutly arguing the indispensability of Latin (or French) for each class, the embattled linguists… whose ox was gored… accepted grudgingly.”
GFS was formally announced as a participant in the experiment in 1933. Most of the thirty schools were independent ones, but a few public schools participated as well. In the Philadelphia area, the other participating schools were Baldwin School, George School, and Tower Hill School in Wilmington, whose headmaster, Burton Fowler, became a frequent visitor to GFS.
Faculty from the schools in the Eight-Year Study met regularly in conferences and workshops to compare ideas and note what changes worked well. Some schools launched wholesale reforms, such as abandoning traditional academic departments in favor of interdisciplinary courses. GFS was comparatively moderate in its approach. Take music as an example. A new required course in singing was added to the intermediate grades in 1934 (but only two periods a week); choral music was offered as an elective in grades ten through twelve (but only three times a week—there was still no music or art major); in 1937 a minor elective in musical appreciation was started.
Yarnall was happy with this. He told the School Committee in 1933 that GFS “was decidedly on the conservative wing of the movement, and rather well satisfied, if the truth must be told, that such is the case… I do not believe that any of our Committee need fear that we are going off on wild tangents.”
The Eight-Year Study followed students after graduation through their college careers. Eric Johnson ’36, remembered being interviewed twice a year while at Harvard “and the study seemed to show that students from the experimental schools did a little better academically” than the other schools. “The changes we made were, indeed, not radical ones. The older boys and girls still know when they are studying English and when they are studying history. The intergradation we work for is that achieved by the individual for himself with the help of as much wise guidance as we can muster… Correlation between subjects we make when it seems wise, but never correlation for the sake of correlation…”
The specific changes Poley emphasized were (1) a three-year course in world history for grades ten through twelve; (2) greater opportunity for advanced study in science; (3) more art and music; and (4) greater individual choice. He gave as an example: “One boy, very able in science and mathematics but almost incapable of learning French or Latin, was allowed to spend most of his time—what was left after required English and social science—in the fields he was good in—astronomy, physical geography, chemistry, physics, biology, mathematics—and is now doing well in a college of excellent standing.” There were trade-offs. Fewer students took French and Latin, but those who did were more committed and enthusiastic. “We believe in at least one foreign language for all but the very few,” Poley assured the alumni, but in general “fewer people take fewer languages further,” and he thought that wise. The most important contribution of the Eight-Year Study, Poley thought, was that it helped students become self-determined. “Guidance interviews were once filled with such expressions as, ‘Oh, I don’t suppose I have much choice. I might want to go to Williams, so I’d better keep my Latin,’ and ‘I don’t care. Which will give me more credits?’ Much more frequently than not we hear now, ‘Couldn’t I possibly do more than five majors? I want both Math and Latin, and I must have some analytical chemistry.’ The boys and girls are now taking an active part in planning their own schooling. That doesn’t mean they can elect anything they want and drop it as soon as it’s hard. More than half of them want to attempt too much rather than too little. But we have been too to some extent successful in eliminating a faith in drudgery for the sake of drudgery; we don’t hold to the theory that, since life won’t be easy after school, boys and girls should necessarily pursue the subjects they like least for the sake of their character.”
One happy result not mentioned by Poley was that the old system of naming classes (Fifth Class for seventh grade, Fourth Class for eighth grade, and so on) was replaced in 1933 by the more usual K through twelve nomenclature.
Stanley Yarnall more and more turned over educational questions to Poley and Hardy during the 1930s. He still kept the school reins firmly in his hands, but he let them run their divisions week to week and encouraged them to initiate and battle for changes in curriculum and scheduling. Master Stanley had enough to do keeping the school afloat during the Depression.
Marjorie Hardy was busy making the GFS Primary a model for progressive schools around the county. In her first report to the School Committee in 1930, she “found the school strong in many respects and weak in others…” The weakness included a lack of student order and discipline, faculty professionalism, and lack of play space. She worked hard at correcting all three.
Even though a renowned “progressive educator,” Marjorie Hardy fit right in to Yarnall’s “conservative progressive” philosophy. She was liberal about curriculum, but strict about good order. She announced right away some new rules: Students would walk in the halls on the right side; there would be no yelling; students in class would listen attentively and never interrupt; students would speak “in no voice louder than the natural speaking voice.” She told the governing board, “I am interested in providing conditions to develop good emotional balance, character, clear thinking, and good study habits along with intellectual achievement. Many factors contribute to such development, and better order is one necessary factor.”
Teachers who did not go along with her program were fired. Esther Arnold, for example, had taught penmanship in the Primary since 1918. Hardy disliked Arnold’s “drill-oriented approach” and thought penmanship was outdated. Arnold refused to change and so Hardy fired her. In her place, Hardy introduced “the typewriter experiment.” All GFS students would learn how to use the new machine. The Smith-Corona company, eager to expand its market, lent the school enough typewriters so that every Primary student could use one. The experiment was supposed to produce neater work, better spelling, and more clearly ordered written work. It had mixed results, but it is a good illustration of Hardy’s eagerness to embrace new technology and new ideas. When the experiment ended, in 1932, the school purchased sixty-two typewriters for student use.
Central to Hardy’s ideas of progressive change was making social studies the core of the curriculum. She despised the “old idea of memorization of isolated facts in history, geography, and civics” and wanted to develop a “unified” curriculum revolving around a central theme. In 1932, Hardy announced the result of a year-long curriculum study. The Kindergarten would introduce the theme of community and look at how the local community interacted with the family. First graders looked at the intersections of different kinds of regional communities, rural and urban, with particular attention to issues of transportation and communication. Second graders focused on pre- industrial communities, specifically North American Indians. The third grade looked at navigation, boats, and world exploration as local, regional, industrial and pre-industrial communities merged into a global economy. It is a stunningly modern social studies curriculum, and it is far in advance of most educational thought in the 1930s. Hardy made it the core of the Primary.
She also pioneered other changes that have become permanent parts of the school. Graded report cards were dropped in favor of written teacher reports; there were parent-teacher conferences twice each year; every Primary grade had a parent committee to plan activities, supervise special events, and host parties. The Parents’ Auxiliary, later the Parents’ Association, grew out of Hardy’s efforts.
Inspired by the Eight-Year Study, Hardy enlarged the science curriculum in the Primary. For years, the only special science class in the Primary grades had been School Committee member Margaret Cary’s “Nature Studies.” According to her daughter-in-law, Betty Cary, Margaret Cary’s course, at least for the higher Primary, was really sex education. In 1933, at Hardy’s urging, the school bolstered the Primary science curriculum by hiring Joseph Cadbury part-time to teach science to all Lower School classes. Cadbury would eventually become a full-time teacher, and over the years, a legend. He was really a naturalist, not a scientist, but he stirred student interest in the natural world for two generations.
Hardy also fought for full-time teachers for the Primary in PE and music, and won both battles. She was even able to gain play space for the Primary when she convinced the School Committee to give the Primary one of the three girls’ tennis courts on Greene Street for a playground. Her victory was short- term, however. In 1935 part of that play space was used to build the four-year Kindergarten building.
Stanley Yarnall’s last decade was not a happy one. “He stayed too long,” Henry Scattergood says, and the written records bear that out. The Depression weighed on him heavily. While Germantown Friends School seems to have managed the Depression better than most institutions, there was sacrifice— and the burden was laid on the faculty, to Yarnall’s sorrow.
The GFS “family” in the thirties was overwhelmingly middle to upper middle class. The parents who sent their children to the school were professionals, managers, and civil servants. Many of these families could look back to generations of wealth, which had been conservatively invested with the intention that it would see them through hard times. The great Depression, which destroyed the lives of great numbers of working Americans, did not touch this central core of GFS families and directors.
The students reflected their parents’ values, of course, and were conservative on the great political and social issues of the time. In mock elections, Republicans swept the GFS field. In 1932, for example, Hoover defeated Roosevelt in a student poll by a landslide, and students voted Republican all through the Depression years.
Student essays in The Pastorian, which became essentially a literary magazine in the thirties, were distinctly conservative. Insofar as student essays dealt with contemporary affairs, and they seldom did, they deplored the failures of ordinary people to take advantage of opportunities or deplored the ordinary person’s lack of faith in free enterprise. The Pastorian usually featured high-minded calls for “a better world” short on analysis or detail. The closest a student publication came to dealing with the Depression was a Pastorian interview in 1932 with Morris Leeds, clerk of the School Committee and president of Leeds and Northrup. “Is there really a Depression, Mr. Leeds?,” was the Pastorian question. “Yes,” Leeds answered, “but these ups and downs should be expected.”
While students, parents, and School Committee members found the Depression a distant problem, GFS faculty had their salaries cut. In October 1932, without prior warning, the teachers were told that their salaries for the rest of the year would be cut by ten percent. The 1933-34 budget cut their salaries an additional ten percent.
Other independent schools were also cutting faculty salaries, as the school was quick to report. GFS was right in the middle-range of salary reductions, and, moreover, GFS had not yet fired faculty to reduce costs—a statement the School Committee made official in its 1933 report. But later in 1933, GFS started firing full-time employees.
Tuition remained constant from 1927 to 1937 at $350 per year maximum. The School Committee took pride in that fact. They meant for GFS to be more affordable than other Independent Schools, and $350 put it in the lower third among Philadelphia private schools. To maintain that low tuition meant lowering teachers’ wages, and the School Committee decided to do that.
Enrollment dropped from 637 in 1930 (near capacity) to 575 in 1935. That would be a serious drop for any school, but for one without much endowment it was very serious. In the financial reports for the 1930s, tuition amounted to over 90% of operating costs, and so the enrollment decline was more important for GFS than for other schools.
Yarnall and the School Committee cut costs where they could. Maintenance costs were deferred. The School stopped its contributions to the faculty retirement fund, and salaries were cut again by 10% in 1935, although a quarter of that cut was restored at the end of the year.
Yarnall fought hard for his faculty. By 1938 the enrollment decline had been slowed and turned around. Yarnall reported 590 students that year and announced that there would be no more salary cuts.
Finances continued to be a worry, however. In May 1939, Thomas Shipley, clerk of the Finance Committee, warned that “the situation was still critical” and wondered if the school was operating “in a business like way.” Yarnall could not have been pleased by that remark nor by Shipley’s subsequent claim that the school was overstaffed.
The struggle was hard on Yarnall. He walked more slowly now, often with a cane. He had turned sixty-five in 1935 and had warned the School Committee that he could not go on forever. He suggested that the Committee begin to look for his successor, but the Committee took no action.
He was becoming more irascible. Henry Scattergood ’29, who was hired in 1933 (after teaching at Sidwell Friends for two years following his graduation from Haverford; he would leave GFS in 1937 to study for his Masters degree at Harvard) remembers Yarnall losing his temper with faculty members.
The surviving records of the Parents’ Auxiliary and the Alumni Association both hint at difficulties with Yarnall. The Alumni, for example, twice sent special emissaries to Yarnall in 1939 to work out differences about issues never specified exactly in their minutes. The school was becoming uneasy with Yarnall’s leadership and he, understandably after almost a half-century, was impatient with criticism.
Late in 1938 Yarnall made it clear to the School Committee that he meant to retire as soon as they could find a new principal. This time they responded. On January 5, 1939, the Committee appointed a Search Committee from its members to find a new principal. This was a first in GFS history.
Irvin Poley desperately wanted to be principal. He felt he deserved it. He had served the school long and well, had brought it distinction, was acclaimed far and wide as the symbol of GFS teaching excellence.
He had just taken on a new administrative responsibility. In 1939 GFS abolished the Intermediate School, absorbing the fifth and sixth grades into Marjorie Hardy’s Lower School and moving the seventh into an Upper School. This new arrangement would last more than fifty years, and Poley was its architect. He was named the new head of the Upper School.
Poley was experienced, dedicated, and committed to a progressive course of education, and he had administrative experience at every level in the school. He was especially encouraged when, as he later recounted to friends, one (and sometimes he said more than one) of the members of the Search Committee assured him he was their choice. “Of course we want thee to be principal, Irvin; there can be no other choice,” is how he remembered the words of one Committee person.
It was not to be, and it was the greatest disappointment of his life.
Thomas Shipley had become clerk of the School Committee and Shipley wanted a principal with business principles. Poley was a visionary, just a teacher, impractical. He was also — although this is never stated in the record — not “manly” enough for the businessmen who dominated the governing board. Could Poley balance a budget? Was he hard enough to fire faculty? The businessmen who dominated the Committee knew that times were still tough, and they judged Irvin Poley, who had demonstrated his determination in other, less recognizable ways, not tough enough for the job.
Next: The Future Is Yours Rather Than Mine
Previously: A Vision Realized
Notes
1 “The Play is Now the Thing” was published in the Alumni Record, February 1957, and as Chapter 21 of Speaking of Teaching.
2 Henry Scattergood, interview with Bill Koons, July 1990.
3 From “What Every Young Teacher Ought to Know,” The Clearing House, Vol. 19, №5, January, 1945.
4 Henry Scattergood, interview with Bill Koons, July 1990.
5 Henry Scattergood, interview with Bill Koons, July 1990.
6 David Mallery, “Irvin C. Poley and GFS: An Unforgettable Legacy,” Alumni Record, Fall 1974.
7 “The Spiral Approach to Composition,” from which these excerpts come, in Chapter 5 of Speaking of Teaching.
8 “Teaching Obliquely and Testing Directly,” Chapter 7 in Speaking of Teaching.
9 “The Play is Now the Thing,” Alumni Record, February 1957.
10 Henry Scattergood, interview with Bill Koons, July 1990.
