Home Schooling

Calvert Homeschooling unites memories

By Ashley McClinton

Special To The Black Mountain News

Paul Crane remembers the special winter days in the 1930s when his yearly school materials would arrive in Sun Chon, in the Southern province of Chollanndo, Korea.

"We had a little river," he said. "And on the coldest day of the year, a little putt-putt steamer would come up the tiny stream. And on it there would be big cardboard boxes, with all of our notebooks, pencils, and books inside. It was a great occasion. Like Santa Claus."

As a child of missionaries, Crane's early education was through the Calvert "Private School in a Box" homeschooling method. As the Calvert school's 100 year anniversary approaches, many area residents are discovering that they were educated by the same system.

Anne Crane, age 82, can still recall her second grade Calvert school education, which was taught to her by her mother in the Congo. "It was very good, excellent material," she said. "Each day's lesson was outlined for the teacher, with all the teaching instructions." Crane and her husband later returned to the Congo as missionaries, and she taught her daughter by the same system.

The Calvert method was the first formalized homeschooling system in the United States. Founded in 1905, it was quickly adopted by missionaries as well as military and diplomatic families in tiny settlements all over the globe. Boxes of Calvert materials have been pulled by dog sled to Alaska and dropped by parachute into deepest Africa.

In the Black Mountain-Montreat area, home to many retired missionaries and children of missionaries, there are Calvert graduates who were educated in Africa, China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, and India.

Jean Halle, president of Calvert Education Services told the Black Mountain News about the school's history.

"Virgil Hillyer, Calvert's first headmaster, realized that there were families who, because of geography or because of economics, could not send their children to private school," she said. "So, back in 1905, he had the teachers from the day school transcribe their lessons week by week, and he sent them out. This made the teachers at the school more diligent about their work, because they knew it would be used all over the world."

The Calvert system matched far-flung students with a supervising teacher back in Baltimore, home of the Calvert Day School, who would read and grade student essays.

"We considered Baltimore, Maryland, to be the center of the universe back then," recalled Paul Crane, "because that's where our teachers were." Crane later went to Baltimore for medical school and eventually moved there.

But the Crane family would use the Calvert system again when they returned to Korea as missionaries themselves. Sophie Crane was able to join together with other missionary families in Chonju, Korea, to make a small school for their children. The school was taught by mothers, and it used Calvert school materials.

"Parents have a bigger interest in their child¹s education than teachers do," said Albert Bridgman, whose mother taught him and his five siblings in Yencheng, China in the 1930s. "We had a room in our home just set aside for teaching. The little ones learned from the older ones as they were being taught. It was hard to know where Calvert ended and our own teaching began."

Ella Banks Boyle, who taught her four sons in Tokushima, Japan, said that the Calvert system taught her sons to write essays as early as first grade.

"It taught them to think things through," she said. "It didn't handinformation to them on a silver platter."

In Toyohashi, Japan, a town that had been 90 percent destroyed by WWII firebombs, Peggy Cogswell educated her four children in the 1950s. The kids learned from Calvert system part-time at home, and participated in local culture in the later part of the day.

"All of their social life was with Japanese kids," she said. "They went to Japanese school for physical education and art, and Japanese kids would always come over in the afternoon to play." Cogswell reports that because of this system, her children quickly became fluent in Japanese, but were still ahead of classmates when they returned to American schools.

Similar linguistic and academic achievements were reported by most of the area Calvert graduates. Paul Crane, who learned to speak fluent Korean as a result of his time in Korea, would later become the Korean interpreter for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Several of the Black Mountain Calvert graduates are doctors; others became teachers to their own children.

Margaret Linton, whose mother taught her while she was living in Mokpo, South Korea, still has some of her old Calvert textbooks, and she uses them in the education of her seven homeschooled children.

"The nice thing about Calvert was that it concerned itself with teaching kids things like world history and art," she said. "A lot of that stuff gets lost now in the public schools, because there¹s not enough time."

Montreat and Black Mountain are longtime retreat spots for missionaries from all over the world. "So many people here think this area is parochial," said Sophie Crane. "When in fact there is an amazing culture of people from all around the world. Many of them come back to Montreat from serving overseas and retire here."

"You have to watch out if you¹re speaking a foreign language around here," added her husband, Paul, "because there¹s probably some guy around who knows it better than you."

Calvert Homeschooling now has 20,000 students, 2,000 of whom are international. The school will celebrate its centennial anniversary in 2006.

Calvert School graduates who would like to meet each other are invited to contact Sophie Crane.

Originally Published on July 1, 2004

Copyright 2004, Black Mountain News, Reprinted with Permission