George Dennison
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George Dennison (1925-1987) was best known for his account of the First Street School, but he also wrote fiction, plays, and critical essays, most notably his novel Luisa Domic and a collection of shorter works, Pierrot and Other Stories. Having grown up in a suburb of Pittsburgh, he joined the Navy during World War II, attended the New School for Social Research on the CI Bill. and took graduate courses at New York University. Although he devoted himself primarily to his art, he also taught school for a number of years, at all levels from preschool to high school. He trained at the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy with Paul Goodman and later worked with severely disturbed children as a lay therapist and teacher. His plays were produced at the Hudson Church in New York and elsewhere, and his essays and fiction appeared in many periodicals. In the late Sixties George Dennison and his wife Mabel Chrystie, the founder of the First Street School, moved to rural Maine, where they raised three children.
Of all the books written on education in the sixties and seventies, The Lives of Children was one of the most significant. When it was first published, Herbert Kohl wrote, "There is no book I know of that shows so well what a free and humane education can be like, nor is there a more eloquent description of its philosophy." John Holt, reviewing the book for The New York Review of Books, wrote, "If anyone felt he had time to read only one book on education, The Lives of Children should be the one."
The Lives of Children is George Dennison's story of The First Street School and how he succeeded in helping kids no one had been able to help.
