TYPED LETTER TO HAROLD RUGG OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY'S TEACHERS COLLEGE SIGNED BY HARRY A. BROWN, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, NEEDHAM, MASS.

Needham, MA: September 7, 1946., 1946.. Good. - Lengthy 3-page letter typed on an 11 inch high by 8-1/2 inch wide sheet of his personalized letterhead with his name & address printed in raised lettering in blind at top left and on 2 follow-up sheets. Signed "Harry A. Brown". There is a rusty paper-clip mark on each sheet at top left. On the first sheet this mark affects the printed address & is surrounded by some additional staining. There are a few tiny chips to the letter & the upper right edge of each sheet is creased. Folded twice for mailing. Good.

A friendly letter with excellent content to Harold Rugg, professor at Teachers College of Columbia University. Brown congratulates Rugg on the addition of Miss B. Marian Brooks to the faculty of Teachers College. He expresses his fears that able young people are not being appointed to the faculty and that "the few great minds" will all be retired in another ten years. "Miss Brooks represents to me just the kind of person who ought to be growing up with Teachers College to be a source of power for the Institution in another five or ten years. If I may speak in terms of Expressionism, I look upon people like Miss Brooks as an objectification of yourself, not in sound or in a painting or in a skyscraper; but in personality. Great teachers like yourself are great creative artist just as much as Sullivan, Whitman, and all the others that one could name. You create in just as real a sense as they have....When you produce, after three years of study, a person like Miss Brooks, it is self-portraiture of the most valuable kind...."

Harold Rugg [1886-1960] was an educational reformer associated with the Progressive education movement. Originally trained in civil engineering, he went on to study psychology, sociology and education at the University of Illinois. After teaching at the University of Chicago from 1915 to 1920, he took a job at the Teachers College where he stayed until he retired in 1951. He became a spokesman for the reconstructionist perspective which viewed formal education as an agent of social change.

Dr. Marian Brooks taught in a one-room schoolhouse in Milan, NH in the 1920s. She applied the lessons she learned there when she served as Chairwoman of the City College of New York Education Department. She was one of the founders of the "Open Corridors" program. She co-authored with Rugg "The Teacher in School and Society" [1950].