Alumni of anarchist school agitate for their legacy

Republication from the New Jersey Star Ledger.

Martha Goldsmith Scara may be the last anarchist in Piscataway.

More than 80 years ago, her parents traveled Stelton Road to reach the Modern School Ferrer Colony, a rural community inspired by the teachings of Spanish anarchist Francisco Ferrer y Guardia.

Scara is the last student still living in the former colony, which gained fame and infamy for its mélange of left-wing thought and the Modern School's radical approach to education: putting children in control of their own schooling.

Though the Modern School's history is well documented, its former students now ponder their legacy. Less than two-thirds of the colony's original houses remain, and the alumni reunions have thinned; 82-year-old Scara is among its 50 surviving students.

With time on the march, the school's alumni seek to preserve traces of the community they loved, and some work to pass on their anti-statist philosophy to a new generation of anarchists.

"People here don't realize before them, not everyone was a Republican or a Democrat," said Scara. "When we go, the school will go with us."

The former students hope historical status can be bestowed to the most unique home in the colony still standing, the egg-white plaster and wood house of Sam Goldman, a Russian-born artist, said Modern School alumni Jon Thoreau Scott.

Despite a timeworn appearance and the lack of a foundation, the Goldman house on School Street draws the curious because of its peculiar architecture: A porch column is a sculpture of gears and factory machinery, and bas reliefs of workers, flora and fauna grace its exterior.

Scott, 75, said it has been difficult to preserve the colony's history in the face of development.

The township defeated their efforts to turn the land where the Modern School once stood into a playground, by approving its subdivision. A mini-McMansion was promptly erected there instead. Only a marker stone now notes where the school stood.

Some lots are for sale, and teardowns are in progress through the still secluded neighborhood. Karl Marx Lane was renamed Arlington Lane, and Stelton Road has become a clogged artery for traffic and strip malls.

"We all realized it was going to happen," Scott said. "It's a little bit sad."

VIVID MEMORIES

Some of the school's students have turned to other ways to memorialize the life that once was in the colony.

Poems have been the way David A. Heinlein has chosen to memorialize the school at which his parents worked. Though Heinlein, 60, attended the Modern School for just a year before its demise in 1953, the memories are still strong, he said.

"Speakers on a soapbox, wild fruit trees, livestock, women laughing in the darkness, it was all very, very earthy," Heinlein said. "Where do we have that anymore?"

It was an atmosphere struck out of the anarchist idea of equality, that decisions do not come from above, Scott said.

"That's freedom, true freedom, not what Americans call freedom, which is really a license for big business to run the show," Scott said.

Scott is among the Modern School alumni involved in the movement to continue its educational legacy, acting as a resource to alternative schools in New Jersey and New York.

One such effort is The Factory School, a self-funded collective that provides a student-driven creative education for underprivileged Queens students, who learn to publish their works, just as students did at the Modern School.

The students have been abandoned by the mainstream school system, said Joel Kuszai, one of the school's co-founders, and the anarchist method gives them new value, he said.

"What's really revolutionary is to take ownership and responsibility for what you are doing," Kuszai said. "You live in the world, own it."

Yet there are differences of opinion among the alumni on promulgating the Modern School's methods.

"It's nice to want to change the world, but it was a very restrictive community," said Leonard Rico, 78, who left the school at 13 to join the public system. "Some people still are bitter about not getting a formal education."

Rico was among its alumni who went into academics. He earned a Ph.D. in economics from MIT, and taught at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, but he admitted always feeling behind throughout his studies.

Rico also questioned the revolutionary idealism of his classmates.

"Very few came out of the school to challenge the system," Rico said. "Most of us tried to succeed in the system."

Ready to debate Rico was another Modern School alumnus, David M. Freedman, a Highland Park entrepreneur who founded New Brunswick Scientific, a laboratory equipment manufacturer.

Though a small company, it had a global business, Freedman said, and encouraged work force diversity. His company was the first to ban smoking in the workplace, and was among the first to use mediators during union negotiations, avoiding the costly and punitive path of arbitration.

"We did some innovative things," Freedman said.

After many years, Freedman, 86, drove through the colony one evening, surprised at how much of it has disappeared.

But he remembered the long-gone summers, walking the same roads to get chickens for his mother, or the dirt path to the brook where he splashed with friends. He smiled as he spoke of the camaraderie that has kept Modern School alumni in touch after all these years.

That warmth would be the school's true legacy, Freedman said.

"It was a jumping community, full of life and culture and kindness," he said. "It was total, total, total freedom."

Suleman Din