Little Red School House & Elisabeth Irwin High School
History of LREI
In the early 1900s, Elisabeth Irwin, John Dewey, and other progressive educators developed a new educational approach based on active learning, rather than the passive absorption of facts. “The complacent formalism of schools, its uncritical and therefore uncreative spirit, must be replaced by an honest hospitality to experimentation,” Irwin wrote. These pioneers recognized that as the world changes, the way we learn about it has to change as well.
Elisabeth Irwin founded the Little Red School in 1921 as an alternative public elementary school. Parents and students loved the new dynamic learning community. It was an exciting place to learn, with a palpable spirit of curiosity, creativity, and challenge. However, during the Depression, the Board of Education could not afford to keep the school open. Parents pledged their own resources, establishing Little Red School House as an independent elementary school. In 1941, the program expanded to include the High School at 40 Charlton Street. From that point on, we have been a pre-K-12 school: LREI.
LREI remains faithful to the spirit of its founder, providing the skills and knowledge necessary to understand the world, finding new variations on tried-and-true principles, and challenging our students to discuss what Elisabeth Irwin called “possible new truths.” Our students are active learners and thoughtful decision-makers. Our teachers are guides and coaches, and they are the inheritors of a proud and profound heritage that remains as meaningful today as it was in 1921.
Mission
A leader in progressive education since 1921, LREI teaches children to be independent thinkers who work together to solve complex problems. Students graduate from our diverse community as active participants in our democratic society, with the creativity, integrity, and courage to bring meaningful change to the world.
Guiding Principles
The theory and practice of teaching at LREI
An emerging intelligence is the product of the meaningful relationship between knowledge and experience. Dewey defines the work of intelligence as “the formation of purposes and the organization of means to execute them.” Plainly, intelligence exceeds knowledge of content acquired from external sources; it is the synthesis of knowledge and experience, and allows the learner to use what is known, to plan for what is not yet known.
This intelligence flickers at the very youngest age at LREI, when a 4-year-old makes an adjustment to their block structure, having observed the crash of blocks because of a lack of a sturdy base. And in Middle School more explicitly, when an eighth grader meaningfully connects their previous understanding of immigration to current U.S. policies on the southern border. And then, as an eleventh grader uses their skills of question-posing to guide them through sourcing and writing code that helps make sense of data from New York City water plants, and then propose potential implications and environmental impacts.
This is the purpose of progressive education, and the work we do at LREI every day.
