Chapter 6 - Tom Kuhn's School Days

 Chapter 6  - Tom Kuhn’s School Days 

Thomas Samuel Kuhn was born lucky, and born to make a name for himself, in 1922.

Long before “progressives” were as commonplace as they are today, young Thomas got the perfect start for paradigm-challenging reformer. 

His mother Minette Strook Kuhn was a left-wing activist, a writer of articles for progressive publications, a patron of the Arts. Whether her ideas of internationalist revolution had any basis in practical reality was immaterial, because their material life was cossetted by:

 

Tom's father Samuel L. Kuhn, a wealthy industrial engineer and investment consultant. Having plenty of money means freedom to pursue feel-good ideas to one’s heart’s content, and having the resources to fall onto if one’s feel-good ideas turn foul.

 

One feel-good idea the Kuhns played with was progressive education.

 

From kindergarten through to fifth grade young Tom attended Lincoln School in Manhattan – a private progressive school that is said to have stressed independent thinking rather than rote learning. 

 

Founded only eleven years earlier, in 1917, Lincoln School had attracted the children of New York’s elite and moneyed, including the children of billionaire John D Rockefeller. Classes are said to have been structured yet experimental.  Focusing on math and science study for the betterment of humanity, it controversially declined to teach Latin and Greek despite the general popularity of those subjects at the best schools at that time. 

 

And perhaps instruction in reading and writing at Lincoln School was not great either.  

 

Despite attending this expensive progressive school, by age seven Thomas could neither read nor write. At this scholastic deficiency Tom’s father grew impatient and coached Tom himself, soon achieving the literacy outcome the elite “progressive” school had not achieved. 

Then, for all its high-minded philosophy, financial mismanagement (aka “reality”) led to the Lincoln School to being subsumed by another progressive school in 1940. So, paralleling educational fashions today, it appears Tom’s parents espoused an idealized but unrealistic belief that children will learn adequately what they need to know without any direct instruction – and, paralleling the experience of many today, lo and behold Tom didn’t learn literacy until *actually taught it* by his father. 

The family then moved from New York City 40miles north to Croton-on-Hudson where Kuhn attended for three years another private progressive school: Hessian Hills School, where he learned to love mathematics.

 

Influenced by radical teachers there, he also hoped to join the far-left American Student Union, but as the American Student Union required members to swear an oath that they would never fight for America, Tom decided he could not make such an oath and so did not join this radical organization. 

 

Tom attended sixth through ninth grade and left in 1937. 

 

The school existed from 1925 until just 1952 … a mere 27 years. One academic described the parents there as “an eclectic group of socialists, Quakers, radical Jews, prominent intellectuals and liberal business-people”.

 

 But one might ask: why would a group of students who had clearly benefited so greatly from being raised in the USA want to swear an oath to never fight for the nation that had given them so much? 

And despite Kuhn’s refusal to join the ASU as such, what influence must such an environment have had on young Thomas, aged 11-14? 

 

Next, Tom studied the tenth grade at a private boarding school Solebury School in Pennsylvania, approximately halfway between Philadelphia and New York. 

Another progressive school founded in the 1920s, this school survives today. 

Did I say “survives”? 

The Solebury School *thrives*, with its mere 240 students (grades 9 through 12) enjoying 140 acres of rolling hills conveniently located just 84 miles from Manhattan. Who knew being “progressive” came with such opulence? 

 

 

(By the way, it is unclear as to why Kuhn seemed to change schools so often, from one extremely well-endowed “progressive” school to the next. Granted that when a student changes schools *once* there has often been some particular personality clash or some adverse event that has precipitated the change. But when a student changes schools *frequently*, as Kuhn did, one more often finds some personality or psychological issue in the child or the parent. As a general observation).

 

 

Kuhn was at the Solebury School for just one year, then went on to graduate in 1940 from The Taft School, yet another private boarding school in Watertown Connecticut. Founded by the brother of President William Taft in 1890, The Taft School today boasts 226 acres of space for its roughly 600 students, including two ice-hockey rinks (one Olympic-sized and one NHL-sized, naturally) and their own 18-hole golf course, and is a handy 95 miles from Manhattan.

 

 

Thus was completed Thomas Kuhn’s school experience. 

 

We note he attended a string of different schools, despite the family not moving much, and we note each school was “progressive” and experimental, which seems to mean left-wing. 

 

And despite being left wing, each school was extremely expensive. 

 

And despite being expensive, at least two schools were forced to close or change ownership soon after Kuhn’s time within them. 

 

Evidently, these “progressive” pedagogic experiments failed in these instances (as “progressive” experiments often do).