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Distance Learning Then & Now

By: Neil Mufson
I was recently thinking that our current Distance Learning initiative returns us in some fundamental ways to the very roots of The Country School experience. When the school was founded in 1934, and extending beyond its earliest years so that there were even remnants of it still in place when I arrived in 1990, it subscribed to a “school in a box” solution that was then offered by The Calvert School in Baltimore.
“The Calvert System” was created for families that were going to be posted somewhere remote in the foreign service or that were going to be sailing around the world for a year or the like. The founders of our school saw the opportunity to utilize a strong program that was essentially meant for distance learning.
 
The story goes that in those early years, Mrs. Startt went early every Monday morning to meet the ferry at Kent Island to bring back the boxes containing the materials for that week. She would drive the boxes back to school where she would meet the eager teachers who would then unpack the materials, quickly familiarize themselves with them, and get ready for the children to arrive at noon.  (Yes, in its early days the school had a late Monday starting time!). At the end of the week, school would dismiss on Fridays at 1:00 and teachers would pack up their boxes. Mrs. Startt would return to the ferry dock to send the materials back to Baltimore.
 
While the story seems likely to be apocryphal, many pieces of TCS’ roots can indeed be traced to its Calvert System roots… The Country School has the same initials as The Calvert School; TCS appropriated The Calvert School’s logo; and they also had black and gold teams and color scheme. Inexplicably we copied the onerous, laborious system of creating cumulative “books” containing every piece of teacher-corrected work the child had completed for a year (often stretching to several volumes).
 
Fast forward 86 years and we are living Distance Learning v 2.0, perfectly suited to the 21st century. Without v1.0 à la Calvert, it is unlikely the school would have gotten off the ground so successfully. Without v 2.0, with its heavy reliance on technology and parental participation, it is unlikely we could sustain our program under the current conditions. It’s likely that our founders could never have envisioned v 2.0. It’s just as likely we cannot imagine v 3.0 whenever in the future that becomes necessary.
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