Essex County Notables — Ella Frances Lynch

Ella Frances Lynch of Minerva traveled the world touting her philosophy that young children should be educated in the home and that school-age children should learn from nature and develop creativity, not just prepare for rigorous testing.

“Examinations are the most unjust and unfair exaction placed upon a public school pupil. They demand a knowledge of trivial detail that is unimportant in itself, and of little value, if any, in mental discipline,” she wrote. “If a test were needed, the test of what remained of the year’s instruction upon the return to school in September would be the most enlightening one.”

Lynch took her education reform message to prominent audiences such as Pope Pius XI, President Hoover’s crime commission and the International Congress.

Lynch, who founded the National League of Teacher Mothers, said the home was the most productive place to educate children through age seven.

“If we can set right a child for the first seven years of life, we can do away with the crime wave,” she proposed.

Education in the home should include a combination of activity, play and learning.

Lessons of about five minutes a day at age three should be gradually expanded to an hour per day.

The degree of nurturing between the ages of three and seven determines whether a child becomes a “problem citizen,” she maintained.

Nature, she said, was not a factor.

“Parents cannot escape responsibility by blaming a child’s naughtiness on some ancestor, unless that ancestor has lived recently enough to corrupt the child by living example,” she wrote.

Her philosophy was based in part on her own childhood experience learning from her mother, Margaret, and Father, Daniel.

“Miss Lynch was brought up in the back woods, beyond even the call of the locomotive. Her home was of necessity the early school,” The Elizabethtown Post wrote of Ella, who was born in Minerva in November 1878.

Daniel Lynch, her father, was a surveyor, Adirondack guide, mineralogist, lumberman, philosopher, poet, literary critic and lay preacher.

For the masses that Ella could not address in person she wrote books, magazine articles and letters to the editors of newspapers.

Her books included “Bookless Lessons for the Teacher Mother,” published in 1923 by Macmillan Co., and “Educating the Child At Home,” published in 1915.

She also wrote books about non-traditional education methods for schools, including “The Plague of the Text Book,” and “The New Kind of Public School,” both published in 1914.

Lynch practiced her teaching methods at a school she established in Atlantic City.

Counting, for example, was taught using items collected from nature.

“At my school in Atlantic City we find beach pebbles invaluable for this purpose, much more so than an abacus, as the child can keep his own store and use them at any time,” she wrote. “Some times we all go to the beach and use them there.”

She said students should be challenged, not coddled.

“’Easy’ lessons make laggards,” she wrote. “We hear a great deal of the evils of child labor, but all too little attention is paid to the destruction of mental, moral and physical power through the evils of child idleness.”

Lynch advocated against the federal Child Labor Amendment in 1925, saying it could have the unintended consequence of prohibiting children from household chores such as splitting wood or washing dishes.

“The greatest menace confronting the country today is that of the super-educated loafer,” she said.

At home in Minerva, in Essex County, where Lynch returned often, some years for extended stays, she was passionate about public policy and government transparency.

For a few years she was an Essex County representative on the state Republican Committee.

“It is a good thing when a department of government calls into conference the taxpayer before making a radical decision involving public affairs,” she wrote in a letter to the editor of The Adirondack-Elizabethtown Post published on Feb. 22, 1934.

Letters to the editor are a great, low-cost means to get opinions out, whether it be education philosophy or government reform, she advised.

“Albany is the great gathering place of get-rich-quick schemes, quack reformers, press agents and pious profiteers, she wrote in a letter to the editor The Adirondack Record-Elizabethtown Post published on Jan. 11, 1923. “It is your business and mine to start action against them by bringing our assemblymen and senators into line to fight for us.”

At Minerva in her adult years, Ella led a fund-raising campaign to restore the historic Roman Catholic Church at Irishtown.

Sources: Essex County Republican, April 8, 1932; The Elizabethtown Post, March 26, July 30, 1914; Aug. 23, 1919; Jan. 11, Aug. 2, 1923; July 17, 1924; The Adirondack-Elizabethtown Post, Jan. 9, 1925; Dec. 11, 1930; Feb. 22, 1934; Ticonderoga Sentinel, May 4, 1916; Feb. 7, 1918; The Indianapolis Times, July 4, 1923; The Lyndon Tribune, Lyndon, Wash., Jan. 18, 1917; The Oakley Herald, Oakley, Idaho, Dec. 22, 1916; The Evening Star, Washington, D.C., Feb. 16, 1930; The True Democrat, Bayou Sara, Louisiana, June 20, 1904.