











































Title


55 

The Arts of Life and the Moraine Park School, 1916-1927 
 

Joseph Watras 
University of Dayton 

 
According to Diane Ravitch, the reforms brought 

about by educational progressivism contained strains of anti-
intellectualism that led school teachers to ignore academic 
subject matters and to pay attention to every perceived need 
except the obligation to organize human knowledge. She 
believed this harmed students because, without reasonable 
intellectual training, they could not understand the human 
experience.1  

Although Ravitch does not mention the first 
president of the Progressive Education Association, Arthur 
Ernest Morgan, his educational ideas suggest that Ravitch 
was overly critical of the movement for progressive 
education. Morgan was an engineer who had little formal 
education. Although he complained that traditional schools 
did not prepare children for the rough and tumble of life, he 
founded a school in Dayton, Ohio and he served as president 
of Antioch College from 1920 to 1936. Instead of 
condemning academics, he sought ways those subjects could 
be taught that helped children master what he called the arts 
of life.  

In 1916, Morgan came to Dayton, Ohio to serve as 
chief engineer of the Miami Conservancy District. Three 
years earlier, Dayton had been inundated with flood waters. 
Determined not to let another deluge harm business and 
manufacturing, city leaders formed the Conservancy to build 
a system to control the rivers that ran through the city.  
 When Morgan moved his family to Dayton, he 
joined a reading group with some of the business leaders who 
supported the work of the Conservancy such as Charles F. 
Kettering of General Motors Research; Edward A. Deeds, 
who had worked with Kettering and headed the Conservancy; 
Orville Wright, one of the inventors of the airplane; and Fred 
Rike, a department store owner. After reading and discussing 
books that criticized schools for being overly academic, these 
men decided to open a school for their boys that would 
prepare them for college while teaching them to succeed in 
the practical world. The men hoped that the children would 
learn academic skills while developing commercial habits 
and ways of thinking.2 

The plan these men formed was for the children to 
run their own small businesses, keep track of their expenses, 
fulfill the obligations they incurred, and reinvest the profits 
they made. To keep the business enterprises going, the 
children would have to master the academic skills of reading, 
writing, and arithmetic. The hope was that, in the process, the 
students would develop the personal qualities of 
responsibility, independence, and cooperation.3 

Such an idea made sense to men with little formal 
education who had made fortunes. For example, Kettering 
and Deeds had developed the starter motor while tinkering in 
a barn. Although Morgan gained prominence as an engineer 
capable of extensive dam construction, his education 
consisted of eleven years in what he called a frontier school. 

These men ran businesses and hired young people who had 
graduated from schools. 

Morgan complained that the graduates of liberal arts 
colleges had no vocational skills and the students from 
vocational schools lacked an appreciation of culture. He 
wanted to start a school where students could learn both 
aspects of life. For Morgan, this was the utilitarian dream that 
he pursued all his life. He held a vision of life in a democratic 
society composed of proprietors of small businesses. He 
wanted to prepare students for such a world by having them 
engage in business enterprises where they would acquire the 
personal and academic skills they needed. By participating in 
school governance, they would learn citizenship skills. From 
the companionship of careful teachers, they would come to 
appreciate the importance of social responsibility.4  
 Morgan wrote many of these ideas on a flyer that he 
sent through out the country soliciting applications for a 
headmaster to run the school. He wrote that the school would 
have six to twelve boys with normal intelligence and good 
bodily health as students and their ages would be from ten to 
twelve years. More than 2500 candidates applied in response. 
When Morgan traveled around the country for his 
engineering firm, he interviewed several of the applicants.  

In addition, Morgan sent his flyers to noted 
educators. Many of these prominent professionals sent letters 
lending support to Morgan’s plan for the school. Among 
these respondents was Charles W. Eliot, then former 
president of Harvard. In 1893, Eliot had chaired the 
Committee of Ten commissioned by the National 
Educational Association to determine how high school 
programs could facilitate students’ transitions to colleges. 
Although the Committee of Ten had recommended that all 
students pursue academic courses, Eliot was so enamored of 
Morgan’s idea to teach academics through practical business 
activities that he became a member of the board of trustees 
when Morgan took on the presidency of Antioch College. In 
1921, Morgan transplanted to the college in Yellow Springs, 
Ohio the idea from the Moraine Park School of education 
through practical activities.5  
 The search for a headmaster ended on 7 February 
1917 when Morgan hired Frank Durward Slutz, then 
superintendent of schools at Pueblo, Colorado to run the 
school. Like Morgan, Slutz disapproved of excessive 
academic study. For example, in answering a questionnaire 
that Morgan sent to the applicants, Slutz admitted he did not 
spend much time reading and studying. Since he was a busy 
man, he carried books with him so that he could read short 
passages when he had spare moments. Rather than write 
articles, he added that he devoted his time to public speaking.     

In April 1917, two months later, the supporters met 
with Morgan. In their discussions, they changed the nature of 
the school. The problem was that two of the supporters had 
young daughters. If the school remained a school for boys, 



56 

these men would support an institution that their children 
could not attend. This was true for Morgan because, at the 
time, he had a young daughter, Francis, as well as an older 
son, Ernest. After considerable discussion, the supporters 
decided that the school would open as a single sex school for 
boys. Girls could be admitted to a primary division that 
would begin later. They could work their ways through the 
grades until the school was coeducational.6 
 In June 1917, the Moraine Park School opened in 
Delco Dell Community. For classrooms, Charles Kettering 
donated a greenhouse 225 feet long and 50 feet wide that he 
had planned to use for experiments on photosynthesis. The 
school’s directors hired carpenters to lay flooring and build 
partitions to make the greenhouse suitable for a school.7  
 Named after the moraine, an accumulation of rocks 
deposited by a glacier, on which the school stood, Moraine 
Park School was four miles south of the city of Dayton fifty 
feet from a trolley, or electric traction, line. Despite the 
proximity of public transportation, the travel turned out to be 
a problem because the directors built a new house in the city 
for the young children. Further, when the students grew 
older, some of them organized a taxi service as one of the 
business projects they managed. 
 Although the school opened with 33 boys and two 
teachers, it quickly expanded. By September 1917, the school 
opened the primary division with 24 children spread 
unevenly through kindergarten to grade six and two more 
teachers.  
 According to some of the early public statements, 
the curriculum was to consist of a sort of project plan. Each 
student would select some business enterprise such as raising 
chickens or using wireless telegraphy. The hope was that 
these projects would hold the students’ interests to such an 
extent that they could serve as mediums of instruction. To 
keep the number and the type of full time teachers and the 
school’s equipment at a minimum, the directors hoped that 
local stores, factories, or airfields would offer assistance with 
the projects to the students.8  
 The idea of organizing the school curriculum around 
projects was popular in the years surrounding World War I. 
The idea had gained prominence when the Massachusetts 
Board of Education adopted the model for agricultural 
education in 1911. In 1918, William Heard Kilpatrick gained 
national fame by writing an article explaining the ways that 
the project method could be used to organize all types of 
schools.  

In his search for headmaster, Morgan visited 
Columbia University where he met Kilpatrick. During the 
visit, Morgan hired a student of Kilpatrick’s, Laura A. 
Gillmore, to be the director of the primary division of 
Moraine Park School. Kilpatrick told Morgan that, when he 
read the flyer advertising for a headmaster, he had found the 
outline of the Moraine Park School to be unusually 
interesting.9   
 With the growing popularity of the project method, 
people warmly received Morgan’s ideas. On receiving a copy 
of the flyer advertising the need of a headmaster, the editor of 
the Atlantic Monthly, Ellery Sedgwick, asked Morgan to 
write an article for his magazine entitled “Education: The 

Mastery of the Arts of Life.” Morgan accepted the offer and 
his article appeared in 1918.  

In his article, Morgan noted that social conditions 
had made it difficult for children to engage in real work 
where they learned important social skills. At the same time, 
he asserted that most schools forced children to pour over 
books and to close their eyes to the wonders of nature, 
literature, and art. To Morgan, the answer was for educators 
to relate academic skills to practical affairs. In this way, the 
schools could regain a balance that modern life made 
difficult.10 
 If Morgan wanted projects to help students become 
more attentive to nature, literature, and art, the activities at 
the Moraine Park School did not fulfill this hope. During the 
first year, the students in the senior division engaged in 
eighteen different projects that expressed a limited range of 
interests. These included forming a bank for student funds, 
setting up a store to sell school supplies, and establishing a 
print shop for school publications.11  

While the idea of the projects as business enterprises 
was the unique aspect of Moraine Park School, this model 
seemed to prevent the students from following aesthetic 
orientations. For example, in the academic year 1923-1924, 
the school employed a full time faculty member to coordinate 
the projects in the senior division. According to this 
supervisor, students tended to engage in merchandising 
projects. The supervisor added that, although the students 
learned about businesses, they tended not to devote attention 
to art, literature, or music. Further, the supervisor noted that 
the projects tended to serve the school rather than the 
community.12 
 On the other hand, the primary division included 
more artistic and literary projects than did the senior division. 
The director of the primary division, Laura Gillmore, had 
worked in the Horace Mann School at Columbia University 
in New York City, before accepting Morgan’s offer to move 
to Dayton. In the annual bulletins of Moraine Park School, 
she used the words of her teacher, Kilpatrick, to describe the 
projects her young students. When Kilpatrick defined the 
project method, he included such things as consumer projects 
wherein students attended museums and concerts. 
Consequently, Gillmore had students in the primary division 
engaging in artistic endeavors that had far fewer practical 
applications than did the printing shop of the senior division.  

Shortly after the Moraine Park opened, the directors 
constructed a new building for Gillmore’s junior division in a 
fashionable residential section in the center of Dayton. 
Shaped like the letter V, each wing contained two 
classrooms. In the center were a library, a living room, a 
kitchen, and a shop. Attached to each wing were porches that 
the students could enter through sliding doors when they 
wanted to do quiet work. Such a setting encouraged the 
young children to read books, draw pictures, and engage in 
conversation. They made play houses and constructed 
furniture.13 

In 1920-1921, the older women students from the 
junior division moved to Moraine Park School to attend 
classes with the boys. For the girls, the trustees had built a 
separate cottage with a living room, a dining room, study, 



57 

nursery, and bath. According to the teachers, the separate 
facilities enabled the girls to study without being distracted 
by boys who gazed at them. Further, the girls learned home 
management skills in maintaining the cottage.14 

It is not clear how much value the students placed 
on home making. In one bulletin, a young girl in the 
elementary division wrote that the exercises in cooking had 
not done her much good. She explained that her family had a 
cook.15  

Although the work in Moraine Park School 
followed lines considered sexist today, the female students 
took part in school governance on an apparently equal 
footing. When the school began, the students adopted a form 
of government that mirrored the city manager form of 
administration then newly adopted in Dayton. In this style, 
the students elected three commissioners. The candidate with 
the most votes became the mayor. The commission appointed 
a manager who appointed the heads of such departments as 
the Department of Safety to enforce the rules, the Department 
of Finance to levy student fees that supported school 
activities, and the Department of Recreation that planned 
student excursions. During the first year that women students 
attended the senior division, a girl campaigned to become 
one of the commissioners. She won her office and, according 
to her teachers, served admirably.16    
 While the business enterprises were the mainstay of 
the curriculum, Moraine Park School offered some traditional 
studies and activities. Latin students read Caesar’s Gallic 
Wars, and the students formed athletic teams to play other 
schools. Although the students claimed their teams fared well 
in competition, they sought to approach sports 
democratically. Instead of recruiting the strongest or most 
agile students, every student had a chance to play. The aim in 
these athletic contests was to help students to gain physical 
strength. It was not to enhance school pride or team spirit. 
 Articles in national magazines made clear that the 
Moraine Park School focused on the development of skills 
necessary for owning and running a small business. Although 
preparation for college and the development of physical 
health were important aspects of life, they served the more 
practical orientation.  
 For example, in July 1921, Theodore Knappen 
wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly entitled, “Mastering 
the Arts of Life as exemplified in a New School.” Building 
on Morgan’s earlier article, Knappen claimed the arts of life 
were the ten occupations that he found in the report cards 
issued by Moraine Park School: body-building, spirit-
building, society-serving, man-conserving, opinion-forming, 
truth-discovering, thought-expressing, wealth-producing, and 
comrade-seeking. Although Knappen acknowledged that this 
list did not represent the ordinary way people thought about 
occupations, he thought they were departments of human 
activity that made up life. Most important to Knappen, he 
found that these categories on the report card told the story of 
Moraine Park School because teachers approached the 
academic subject matters in ways to enhance the students’ 
abilities in these areas, and the students undertook projects to 
gain practical skills.17 

 As Moraine Park School gained national attention, 
Morgan became an important educational leader. In 1921, 
Morgan won the presidency of the Progressive Education 
Association. The association had been formed in 1919 with 
Charles W. Eliot as the honorary president. The organization 
dedicated itself to use science to free students from external 
constraints and to foster their growth as much as possible. 
Until the 1930s, the members of this organization tended to 
come from small private schools. During the Great 
Depression, though, the Progressive Education Association 
grew into one of the most important mainstream educational 
organizations maintaining this position until the 1950s when 
fell into public disfavor and ended. As president, Morgan 
arranged for the annual meeting to be held in Dayton so that 
members could visit the Moraine Park School.  
 At the dinner meeting of the convention, Mrs. Milan 
V. Ayers, secretary of the organization complimented 
Moraine Park School by observing that, if the Progressive 
Education Association had not started in the eastern states, it 
would have begun in Dayton. Although Ayers noted the 
reforms were similar, she pointed out an important 
difference. The new schools in the East were headed by 
women, such as Marietta Johnson, who worked with men, 
such as Eugene R. Smith. In Dayton, all of the trustees of the 
Moraine Park School were men. Although she acknowledged 
that the men in Dayton were intelligent, she added that 
women had different forms of intelligence. Since she 
believed these two types of intelligence should cooperate, she 
concluded that the masculine aspects of Moraine Park School 
could augment the feminine side of school reform found in 
the East.18 
 Although the teachers and the trustees contended 
that academic achievement and college success were not the 
primary aims of secondary education, Moraine Park School 
bulletins expressed pride is the accomplishments of its 
graduates. From 1917 to 1921, the school graduated ten 
students who went on to college. Claiming these students 
passed 89 percent of the college courses they took, the 
Moraine Park teachers boasted that this showed the practical 
curriculum could help students succeed in college and in life. 
 Despite the successes, the school depended on 
donations. In 1918, after one year of operation, the student 
body totaled 63 and the deficit was about $2,700. In 1922, 
the enrollment reached a high of 206 students with a deficit 
of about $8,400. In 1923, the enrollment dropped to 172 and 
the deficit climbed to $20,000. Nonetheless, in that year, 
three trustees, John Patterson, Kettering, and Deeds, built a 
new gymnasium and a new shop for Moraine Park School.  

On 16 February 1927, the Dayton Journal carried a 
story describing the unwillingness of two important 
benefactors, Charles Kettering and Edward Deeds, to 
continue supporting the Moraine Park School unless the 
citizens of Dayton showed an interest in maintaining the 
school by raising an endowment of $50,000. The newspaper 
added that the committee of forty influential citizens had 
formed about three weeks earlier when Kettering and Deeds 
complained that citizens in Dayton had no interest in the 
school.  



58 

                                                

Slutz issued a prospectus for contributors to buy. He 
urged Dayton citizens to buy stock in Moraine Park School to 
show that they had faith in the school as an educational 
laboratory dedicated to the discovery of better educational 
methods. He sought assistance to turn Moraine Park School 
into a junior college and eventually into a city college. 
Listing accomplishments including the shop building 
completed in 1925, Slutz described the school as a training 
place for leaders who came from rich homes and from poor 
families. Slutz promised the school would continue to 
provide an education that made intellectual and spiritual 
interests paramount. Dayton newspapers carried full page 
stories about the wonders of Moraine Park School. 
Newspaper editorials praised Slutz as a local resource whose 
campaign for the growth of Moraine Park School deserved 
attention. Newspaper editors urged local citizens to attend to 
Slutz’s pleas for the continued growth of his school. 19 

The campaign failed. The Moraine Park School 
student paper, The Quadrant, reported that two principal 
benefactors of the school had withdrawn support. In June 
1927, Slutz sent a form letter to the parents stating that the 
school would close permanently at the end of the year.20 
 Although the Moraine Park School was short lived, 
its story suggests that Ravitch overstated the differences 
between the progressive view of education and an intellectual 
approach. Reformers such as Morgan, Slutz, and Gillmore 
faced the problem of inculcating within the students an 
appreciation of the practical values of academic learning. 
Although Ravitch concluded that schools should emphasize 
the transmission of knowledge rather than the children’s 
immediate experiences, she gave practical reasons for such 
an orientation. She claimed that public school teachers had to 
improve such academic abilities as the science and 
mathematics skills of their students for practical reasons. 
Without such knowledge, the children could not compete for 
the available opportunities. Morgan had similar practical 
orientations. He wanted schools to teach the students to 
manifest the personal qualities of resourcefulness, 
dependability, and social consciousness that he deemed 
necessary for success in business.21  
 In short, the claims that Ravitch made for academic 
studies were the qualities that Morgan wanted children to 
master as the arts of life. While Ravitch asserted that studies 
of history prevented children from repeating the mistakes of 
the past, Morgan wanted children to transfer information 
from history books to an understanding of civic 
administration. In Moraine Park School, the children learned 
citizenship skills by forming their own student government 
patterned on the city commission. In traditional academic 
circles, this might be considered an enrichment activity rather 
than an over emphasis on present experience. 
 

Endnotes 
 

                                                                                   

1 Diane Ravitch, Left Back: A Century of Battles over School 
Reform (New York: Touchstone Book, 2001), 16-18. 

2 Morgan to Lloyd Marcus, 29 September 1947, Arthur E. 
Morgan Papers, Moraine Park School Series, 
Antiochiana, Antioch College Library. 

 
3 Arthur E. Morgan, An Outline of  a Proposed Boy’s School 

for which a Headmaster or Teacher is Being Sought, 
{1916?], Morgan Papers. 

4 Morgan, An Outline of  a Proposed Boy’s School; Roy 
Talbert, Jr., Beyond Pragmatism: The Story of Arthur 
Morgan, Masters Thesis, Vanderbilt University 
[1971?] Antiochiana Archives.   

5 Charles W. Eliot to Morgan, 9 September 1916, Morgan 
papers; Morgan to Eliot 27 September 1916, Morgan 
Papers. 

6 Notes on Meeting at Dayton Club, Boy’s School, 13 April 
1917, Morgan Papers. 

7 Norma Bixler, “This Business of Education,” Kettering 
Digest: A Collection of Articles Commemorating 
Charles F. Kettering’s 80th Birthday, August 1956, 
Dayton collection Pamphlets, Dayton Metro Library, 
Dayton, Ohio. 

8 “Statement of Progress,” Moraine Park School, 3 May 
1917, Morgan Papers. 

9 William Heard Kilpatrick to Morgan, 4 June 1917, Morgan 
Papers; Morgan to Frank D. Slutz, 31 May 1917, 
Morgan Papers. 

10 Arthur E. Morgan, “Education: The Mastery of the Arts of 
Life,” The Atlantic Monthly 121 (March 1918): 337-
339. 

11 Pupils of the School, The Arts of Life, Moraine Park 
School, Dayton, Ohio, 1918-1919, Morgan Papers. 

12 The Projects: Moraine Park School, 1923-1924, Moraine 
Park School Collection, Montgomery County 
Historical Society, Dayton, Ohio. 

13 Frank D. Slutz and Laura A. Gillmore, Moraine Park 
School, An Educational Laboratory, Bulletin No. 5 
(Washington, D.C. Progressive Education Association, 
April 1921). 

14 Teachers of the School, Self Measurements, Moraine Park 
School, 1920-1921, Morgan Papers. 

15 Pupils of the School, The Arts of Life, Moraine Park 
School, 1918-1919, Morgan Papers.  

16 Frank Slutz, “An Experiment in Eductional Engineering, 
handwritten [1917?], Morgan papers; Teachers of the 
School, Slef Measurements, 1920-1921, Morgan 
Papers. 

17 Theodore M. Knappen, “Mastering the Arts of Life as 
Exemplified in a New School,” Atlantic Monthly 128 
(July 1921): 87-96. 

18 Mrs. Milan V. Ayers, “Record of the Morning Session of 
the Progressive Education Association Meeting,” 
Engineers Club, Dayton, Ohio, 9 April 1921, 
Typescript, Morgan Papers.  

 
Continued on page 53 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 



59 

                                                                                    
19 Moraine Park School, A Prospectus, [1925?], Moraine 

Park School Collection; “Engineering Science Plays 
Important Part in Child Training at Moraine Park 
School,” The Dayton Journal, n.d., Moraine Park 
School Collection; “Dayton’s Great Teacher,” The 
Dayton Journal, n.d. Moraine Park School Collection. 

20 Virginia and Bruce Ronald, School days: An Informal 
History of Education in Montgomery County, Ohio 
from 1926 to 1990 (Dayton, OH: Landfall Press, 
1991), 25-26; Lutz to Alumnus, 3 June 1927, Dayton 
Collection Pamphlets.  

21 Ravitch, Left Back, 465-467. 


