"Everything is Education:" Formal & Informal Schooling

Photo of Gopher Elks Drum Corps, ca. 1960

Mr. Lester O. Myles with his ca. 1960 photo of the Gopher Elks Drum Corps

Dr. Mary Boyd’s powerful reclamation of the term ‘education’ as a process that can occur outside of the colonized American classroom, and that can be centered in performances of cultures deviant to that of the oppressor relates directly to Mr. Lester O. Myles’ ca. 1960 black and white still photograph of the Gopher Elks Drum Corps.  According to Mr. Myles, the practices of the Gopher Elks Drum Corps, in which he performed, attracted “everybody from Lexington to Virginia Street, from Selby to University,” and indeed, “even people from the bar would come out and listen.”(4)  Because the weekly practices of the Gopher Elks Drum Corps functioned as both a vehicle for community cohesion and an enriching experience for the neighborhood, the performances seem to have been in many ways a form of informal education, as explained by Dr. Boyd and the second OED definition.   

Photo of the Maxfield School's AM Kindergarten class, 1941

Ms. Jacque “Peaches” Polk’s 1941 photo of the AM Kindergarten class at the Maxfield School, on the other hand, seems to speak more to the first OED definition of education:  Students, many of whom appear to be dressed up--perhaps in their Sunday Best--are neatly organized into rows, and are posed on the steps of their school.  The number of children in the photograph who would be considered white by contemporary American standards, but not necessarily by those of 1941, echoes what Playwright Josh Wilder’s depiction of Frank Marzitelli relays in The Highwaymen.  The character of Frank Marzitelli, as performed by Twin Cities actor E.J. Subkoviak, conveys that in the early twentieth century, many European immigrants were not considered to be white, particularly prior to their mass assimilation into the culture of American society. Evelyn Fairbanks also speaks to this phenomenon indirectly in the sixteenth chapter of the Minnesota Historical Society’s 1990 publication The Days of Rondo, when she asserts that “my neighborhood also had Swedish Lutherans, Irish Catholics, and Russian Jewish people…[who] ‘liked’ each other, ignoring race.”(5)  However, even the slightest further examination of the photo seems to reveal a somewhat contradictory phenomenon:  The students appear to have been organized in accordance with traditional American race and gender standards.  White boys sit at the front, followed by standing rows of white girls, black boys, and black girls.  Schooling, in the case of this photo, seems to have functioned, in part, as a means through which to imbue upon developing minds traditional hegemonic agendas of 1940s public education.  

Commencement Program from St. Agnes Grade School, 1949

Ms. Polk’s second item from the 2016 History Harvest, a 1949 commencement program from St. Agnes Grade School, seems to speak directly to the community cohesion brought about by schooling institutions.  The careful construction of the program suggests that it was assembled by hand, perhaps by both school faculty and members of the community, which corresponds directly to what we learned about Old Rondo’s commitment to education as a community endeavor.  While Ms. Polk did not address these aspects of her artifact directly, she did relay that education was highly integral to the social bonds within her community.  In her own words, she stated that “you’d go to school, and your mother would know everything you’d done on the way home,” creatively illustrating the collaboration that existed between formal schooling institutions and the social networks of Old Rondo.(6)