Any perusal of Beaver Country Day School’s archives clearly reveals that certain core values have remained intact since the moment of the school’s founding. BCDS students and families have always been passionate about the arts, and extensive and active arts programs are a hallmark of the school. Similarly, BCDS has maintained its reputation for the quality and passion of its faculty. The intellectual achievements of the men and women who have taught and continue to teach at BCDS are only surpassed by their overriding concern for the development of the individual student.
Beaver Country Day School was incorporated in 1920 by a group of Boston-area parents who wished to have a “progressive” school based on the notion that education should focus on the individual needs, experiences, and developing capacities of its students. Students were taught through creativity and play as well as through hard work, and teachers were hired for their own creativity as well as for their commitment to the well-being of children. In its earliest days, the school included a coeducational primary program, but from the seventh grade on, the school was for girls only.
The first Head of School, Eugene Randolph Smith, is regarded today by some scholars as a major unsung hero of the progressive education movement. By the early 1930s, Smith’s assiduous recruiting of faculty committed to progressive ideals and his energy as a leader had helped to establish BCDS as one of the nation’s leading progressive schools. At the end of World War II, Eugene Smith had retired, and BCDS was in the hands of managers who saw the school’s future in more traditional terms. While the student demographic of primarily affluent Boston-area women remained unchanged, the curricular emphasis was now on training young women in traditional areas using traditional means. Certain aspects of the school’s progressive heritage remained, however, including a continuing strength in the performing and visual arts and a sense of connection to the world at large; Eleanor Roosevelt once addressed a student convocation on America’s place in the world.
Through the 1950s and early 1960s BCDS maintained itself as a successful girls’ school in Boston, sending an increasing number of its graduates to two- and four-year college programs and expanding its facilities on campus. During the late 1960s and through the 1970s, student and community interest in diversifying the student body began to have visible impact in terms of the racial and religious mix of students and faculty. The decision to admit boys in the early 1970s served to further change the makeup of the student body. The old “progressive” values started to resurface in the school’s culture and curriculum.
By the early 1980s, BCDS was in philosophical transition. The meaning of "progressive education" became elusive, and the school drifted toward a kind of easy-going traditionalism. This identity shift prompted a serious process of curriculum, program, and mission review in 1992. Dramatic advances in educational thinking had led to the development of a new strain of progressivism, still based on the needs of the individual student and on making learning an active experience. At the same time, progressive social values in such areas as multiculturalism, political awareness, and community service played well with the traditional emphasis of BCDS on the development of the intellectual, creative, and moral capacity of the individual.
Within the past several years, BCDS has aspired to define itself by its innovative and challenging curriculum, its multicultural community, its program of professional development for faculty, the resources of its campus, and the support of its constituencies. With the school’s adoption of a new Strategic Plan in 2004, BCDS looks towards the future with the goal of having its people, policies and practices become models of the very best possibilities of contemporary progressive education. The school has moved dramatically forward—toward its roots.
