Leading, listening and location: The MacJannets’ radical educational experiment

By George Halsey

Just what was it about Donald and Charlotte MacJannet that made them so special?

Alumni and friends of the MacJannets’ various programs, like me, have wrestled with this knotty philosophical question ever since Donald MacJannet died in 1986 at the age of 92, and even more so since Charlotte died in 1999 at the age of 98.

​To many, the MacJannets were primarily concerned about the cause of international good will—first between Americans and the French (beginning in the 1920s through their school outside Paris and their camp at Talloires), later between American and Europeans (through their international exchange programs) and ultimately among peoples throughout the globe (through international conferences at the Prieuré as well as today’s MacJannet Prize for Global Citizenship).

International relations was of course important to the MacJannets. But then, that subject is important to many other people as well. How were the MacJannets different?

In my own view of the MacJannet ideals, international goodwill was a by-product rather than the centerpiece of their vision. Above all, I believe, the MacJannets had unique ideas about the ingredients of a great education.

Today’s MacJannet Traveling Fellows programs— oriented around the Prieuré in Talloires— essentially continues the key elements of the MacJannet educational design: a welcoming atmosphere; a sense of nature’s enchantment; the opportunity to take risks in cultivating the individual’s potential; and the chance to become bi-lingual and cross-cultural.what Rousseau saw as his natural goodness while participating in an inevitably corrupt society.

The MacJannets chose spectacular environmental settings for great education— environments like Talloires, which provide a certain ambiance for learning, reflection and harmony at all levels. The Talloires area, which Donald first discovered in 1925, met their requirements. He disguised his summer program there as a “camp,” but it was like no other camp. Education there was continuous from morning to night.

In effect, the MacJannet Camps in Talloires as well as the MacJannet American School, which opened at St.-Cloud outside Paris in 1924, constituted Donald’s attempt to realize in practice the ideals expressed in Emile: or, On Education, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1762 treatise on the individual’s relationship to society, and in particular how the individual can retain 

Traumatic childhood

Mr. Mac’s ideals, of course, sprang from the traumas of his childhood in Massachusetts at the turn of the 20th Century. He was raised by idealists who practiced the vow of poverty in order to achieve pure virtue in love, compassion, humility, integrity, charity and virtually every other human endeavor. Donald, however, was unable to derive any sense of spiritual connection from the religious spiritualism of his parents’ fundamentalist religion.

​When Donald was 15, his father died and his mother suffered a total breakdown that caused her to be placed in a state institution. Donald was placed in the home of a devout practitioner of his parents’ religion— an impoverished widow— and her four year-old son. They expected Donald to support them while simultaneously adhering to the practice of devout poverty.

At age 15, Donald MacJannet became head-of-household for his family.

​Donald’s younger sister, Jean, was placed in a good foster home with Unitarians who believed in fair monetary compensation and boarded her in return for a stipend that Donald was also required to pay. Donald’s older brother and sister were already committed to obligations elsewhere— and, maintaining their own devout poverty, could be of no help to him.

Donald supported himself at Tufts by selling pots and pans.

“God was supposed to take care of us,” Donald recalled near the end of his life, “and He did, as He usually does, through human means.” Yet this philosophy placed a staggering burden on young Donald.

​​In addition, on weekends he sold aluminum kitchenware door-to-door. In this capacity, he developed a forerunner of the Tupperware party, the layaway plan (“Buy now, pay later”). Consequently, he was extremely successful at selling sets of pots and pans— so much so that he was able to meet the financial burdens placed on him, send his sister Jean to a prestigious boarding school (Northfield in Massachusetts) and attend Tufts himself without financial assistance.

​As an undergraduate, Donald held a job as janitor of the Unitarian church across the street from the Tufts campus.

Teaching by not teaching
Of course, many another poor Horatio Alger-style hero of that day also overcame similarly overwhelming adversity. But pluck and determination were not Donald’s sole assets. He was also a natural teacher who believed in teaching by not teaching. He told or led guided tours of historical sites (with plenty of jokes), but his objective was to have the students do the teaching. He created an environment of discovery learning.

At his school at St.-Cloud in the 1920s and ‘30s, for example, students were continually engaged in excursions and field trips. These were not the ordinary sort of field trips to the local science museum or government offices, but field trips to places like Africa, Scotland and Megève. Even on the short trips, it was always part of the MacJannet tradition that at the end of the day, the entire school or camp assembled, and someone from each group explained to everyone else what discoveries were made during the trip. By tradition, the accounts were embellished. The MacJannets listened with rapt attention.

Charlotte’s cultural perspective
When Charlotte arrived on the scene as Donald’s bride in 1932, she brought her perspective of German culture, at a higher level of understanding the arts than most Americans possessed. Consequently, she discovered voids in Donald’s approach. (At the same time, she was something of a rebel against certain aspects of high German culture.)

​Charlotte rejected the idea that the performance of music and the arts are reserved to those especially gifted. Her New Age ideas on Gerda Alexander’s Eutony method of body awareness and physical therapy operated on a different trajectory from Donald and his students and campers. But even so, her influence was significant. She thought some of Donald’s exuberance was too raucus and un-ladylike and demanded that it be toned down.

She believed that in some other ways the camp was too militaristic—that it had taken on too much of the style of a military organization. She gasped at the sight of marching and singing to military songs and demanded that these rituals be toned down.

‘I can’t sing’
Also, she refused to accept defeatist attitudes such as “I can’t sing,” or “I can’t dance.” In this respect her approach differed sharply from that of my own grammar school music teacher, who declared, “George can’t sing,” and asked me to just lip-synch, along with four of my compatriots who were also wrongfully accused of mocking the music program.

Gary Friedman, a MacJannet camper in 1954, was also branded a “non-singer” in my music class, and then granted musical salvation by Charlotte MacJannet. She thought we could sing just fine.

The same can be said of the MacJannets’ approach to learning the crafts, or the performing arts. No one can actually remember the MacJannets doing any “teaching” in the sense of a lecturer holding forth. Whenever Mr. or Mrs. Mac appears in my mind, they are listening. They are so genuinely fascinated by what someone else is saying or doing.

A wonderful photograph of Mr. Mac, taken in the Prieuré garden during a reception about 1980, captures the process better than any words. At such occasions, inevitably, someone brings along a child for lack of a baby sitter and the child has nothing to do. But in the picture, Mr. Mac and this six-year-old are carrying on what appears to be a deep conversation.

Teaching by listening: At the Prieuré, c. 1980

​As you study the picture, you see that Mr. Mac is responding to the child with genuine interest and great pleasure. When young people asked questions, he would seem to delight in a sense of shared discovery— not answering the question but instead expressing joy in the importance of the question.

To be sure, this approach isn’t unique; it’s what great teachers do. Teachers’ colleges have fostered this idea for the past half-century. What was special about the MacJannets’ implementation was the idea of leading people to places where the environment prompts the questions— that, and the extent to which they were able to use stimulating environments.

George Halsey at the summit of Mon Charbon in 1956

 You can find much of this philosophy in Rousseau’s Emile. It’s an educational philosophy that’s truly unconventional even today. In the 1930s it was already 170 years old but way out there on the fringe of the educational mainstream. The Victorians during the MacJannets’ heyday were sexist, while the MacJannets’ camp and the school were gender-equal in everything; only the sleeping quarters were separate.
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Stealth radicals

But the Macs cloaked their experiment with proper trappings of Victorian manners and avoided discussion of the underlying controversial philosophy as much as possible. If you asked them about their philosophy, they might say something like: “Each person must feel safe and welcome. That way, a person can develop his/her own potential and become aware of the beauty and joy in the world around them. A person does not see these discoveries from a perspective of fear and intimidation.”

Most parents would probably pay lip service to such an idea, but the MacJannets practiced this idea in a way that was truly remarkable. Their philosophy of using empathy as both a social setting and an educational objective is 180 degrees removed from the educational philosophy of other prep schools of that time— such as St. Alban’s in Washington, D.C., where Donald taught after graduating from Tufts, and my own secondary school in the 1960s, Salisbury, in Connecticut. These traditional prep schools believed in hardening young people so they would be able to thrive in a dog-eat-dog world.

​Spectacular locations

Talloires was one of many locations where the MacJannets pursued their educational design. Belle Isle, Cannes, St.-Cloud and Sun Valley (during World War II) were among the others. At one time— after the U.S. Navy took over their school facilities at Sun Valley— they thought of opening their school in Venezuela, at yet another spectacular location.

Talloires has proven to be a suitable place in which the MacJannet educational experience works. As the Tufts European Center has demonstrated at the Prieuré since 1978, it still does.

But the MacJannets were never about Talloires per se. What the MacJannets were about was an educational design. That design is still there— and it can still be carried on, even now when the MacJannets are gone, precisely because it was never about listening to the MacJannets. It was about listening to the environment to which they led people.