AIC was founded by John Robert Putnam French (1883-1953), one of the early leaders of the progressive education movement in Massachusetts. The photographs above are from the first (1904) and sixth (1929) reports of the Harvard College Class of 1904. Click these icons to read the text of his reports to his class, which summarize his career.

Curiously, French does not mention the camp in his 1929 autobiography -- suggesting that, contrary to legend, it was indeed founded (or at least had its first season) in 1930. Nor is it mentioned in his 1954 obituary. Whatever his role in running the camp, he does not seem to figure prominently in the Islanders -- although his wife, Eleanor (known in later days as "The Admiral") -- most certainly does.

When I raised with Johnny French (J.R.P. French III) the question of his grandfather's involvement with the camp, he assured me that he was very actively engaged. I am hoping to be able to document this, since the connection of the camp to his professional activities as an educator are of scholarly interest.

The impact of French's progressive educational views on AIC are suggested by the extent to which the camp departed from the norm of summer camps established in the first quarter of the twentieth century:

*it was coeducational (that is, it resisted the predominant anxiety common among the upper classes of the period with regard to "maniness" and the sissifying influence of women);

*it eschewed the military model -- derived from the Boy Scout movement -- embraced by more conventionally conservative camps. especially those concerned (as AIC was) with character education;

*it stressed cooperative over than competitive activities, avoiding ranking, prize-giving, and other forms of invidious distinction;

*it avoided any kind of explicit religiosity;

Perhaps the greatest testament to J.R.P. French's unconventional views as an educator is the career of his younger son, Nathaniel Sowers (Nat) French (1912-1983). Although he entered Harvard College with the Class of 1934, after a bout with polio at the beginning of his sophomore year, he decided to complete his education in the more salubrious climate of the South -- at Rollins College in Florida and Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

French was evidently one of the students and faculty who left Rollins in 1933, after an notorious academic freedom case had led to the firing of classic professor John Andrew Rice. Rice and his fellow dissidents headed for rural North Carolina with the intention of starting a college founded on entirely new principles.

Black Mountain College was to be an entirely self-governing community -- run by the students and faculty with no board of trustees (sound familiar?). The governing body of the college, an annually elected advisory board, included student representatives (Nat French served on this board). Decisions were to be made not by majority vote, but by "sense of the meeting." According to Martin Duberman's Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community (1972),

The one idea most commonly agreed upon was that "living" and "learning" should be intertwined. Education should proceed everywhere, not only in classroom settings -- which in fact, at least as usually structured, are among the worst learning environments imaginable. . . . Students and faculty ate together. . . .

A central aim was to keep the community small enough so that members could constantly interact in a wide variety of settings -- not only at meals, but on walks, in classes, at community meetings, work programs, dances, performances, whatever. Individual life styles, in all their peculiar detail, could thereby be observed, challenged, imitated, rejected -- which is, after all, how most learning proceeds, rather than through formal academic instruction. . . .

All aspects of community life were thought to have bearing on an individual's education -- that is, his growth, his becoming aware of who he was and wanted to be. The usual distinctions between curricular and extracurricular activities, between work done in a classroom and work done outside it, were broken down. Helping to fight a forest fire side by side with faculty members, participating in a community discussion on whether the dining hall should serve two or three meals on Sundays, discovering that a staff member was a homosexual or that married life included arguements as well as (and sometimes during) intercourse, taking part in an improvisational evening of acting out grudges against other community members -- all these and a hundred more experiences, mosst of them the more vivid for being unplanned, contributed at least as much to individual awareness as traditional academic exercises.

This didn't mean that disparities of age, interest, knowledge and experience between, say, a twenty-year-old and the fifty-year-old weren't recognized, or that it was tought either possible or desirable to merge all members of the community into some false concord of "boddyhood." But it did mean that many at Black Mountain believed the differences in age need not preclude communication, that interests could be shared, that the perspective of the young had value. It meant, too, that while information, analytical skills and reason were prized, they were considered aspects rather than equivalents of personal development; they were not confused, in other words -- as they are in most educational institutions -- with the whole of life, the only elements of self worthy development and praise.

It was hoped that a double sense of responsibility would emerge out of the varied contacts and opportunities Black Mountain provided: that which an individual owes to the group of which he is a member, and that which he owes to himself -- with neither submerging the other. From the beginning Black Mountain emphasized the social responsibilities that come from being part of a community, yet tried to see to it that personal freedom wouldn't be sacrificed to group needs. Rice, for one, [Nat French's mentor] liked to stress how different each person was from every other and how expectations of performance should vary accordingly. . . .

How much of the ethos of AIC came from J.R.P. French's earlier vision of progressive education and how much of the Black Mountain experience Nat French brought to the camp we can only guess. One thing, however, is clear: AIC was an "intentional community" in much the same way that Black Mountain College was. It had specific educational goals intended not only to enable campers (and counselors) to acquire specific skills of woodsiness and seasiness, but also more general capacities and values relating to civility, citizenship, and cooperation.

For some particulars on Nat French's life and times, click the icons below -- which are pages from his Harvard Class of 1934 twenty-fifth and fiftieth classbooks.

The third director of the camp was, of course, Steve Hinrichs. Steve has been coy in responses to queries about his educational philosophy. But anyone who ever had the privilege to have him as a teacher (whether in the classroom or at the camp) knows that he was an educator of extraordinary talent and deep conviction.

Here are Steve's biographies from his 1940 Yale classbook and the 1965 twenty-fifth reunion volume. (Click image to enlarge).