Not so very long ago, playing music, exercising in gym class, and learning side-by-side with children from different racial backgrounds were revolutionary ideas in education. But at one trailblazing Newton school, those concepts were put into practice more than 160 years ago.
“We do now take a lot of these things for granted that they pioneered,” said filmmaker Joe Hunter of Remember Productions. His new, 40-minute documentary titled, An Uncommon Education: The Allen School, will tell the story of this remarkable institution when it premieres on October 21.
Historic Newton (a public/private partnership between the Newton Historical Society and the City of Newton) produced the movie and stated it “highlights the educators, students, and legacy of the West Newton English and Classical School, better known as the Allen School.”
The private school operated from 1854-1901, in a building at the corner of Highland and Washington streets that no longer exists. Founded by local educators and reformers Nathaniel T. Allen and Cyrus Peirce, the school was, in the words of Historic Newton, “a remarkable 50-year experiment in progressive education.”
While learning about its history, Hunter said he was struck by the fact that the founders felt it was essential for the school to have a “multiracial student body and that women … took the same courses as men.”
“At a time when slavery was still the law of the land and women’s suffrage yet a distant goal, the West Newton English and Classical School [Allen School] admitted Black students, foreign students, and women to a forward-looking program of study,” stated Historic Newton.
In fact, girls made up roughly a third of the more than 5,000 students who attended the school over its almost 50-year existence.
Allen also made the landmark decision to offer kindergarten – something unheard of at the time.
“The story is big enough that it could be a miniseries – there’s so much to it,” said Sara Goldberg, Historic Newton curator of manuscripts and photographs.
Hunter said the film will feature five speakers including Lynn Cadwallader, a historian who wrote her dissertation on Allen; Anping Shen, School Committee member; Robin Moore Jenkins, the great-granddaughter of Elizabeth Smalls, who was one of several Black students who went to the Allen School during Reconstruction; Karen Haywood, the historian for Newton’s Myrtle Baptist Church; and Adrienne Hartzell Knudsen, managing director of the Newton Cultural Alliance.
Funding for the documentary came from an Expand Mass Stories grant from Mass Humanities with the support of the Mass Cultural Council. Additional funding came from the Newton Cultural Alliance, according to Historic Newton.
An Uncommon Education: The Allen School will be shown at the Allen Center — located in Allen’s former home, the Nathanial Topliff Allen House — at 35 Webster Street, West Newton on Saturday, October 21. There will be a cocktail reception 7PM-8PM followed by the screening 8PM-9PM and a question-and-answer segment with the film’s creators 9PM-9:15PM. Tickets are available online.
For those unable to attend, Historic Newton will offer future programming around the film, show it on NewTV and at the Newton Free Library, and eventually make it available for sale.