Organizational History: One Man’s Fight Against Poverty

“My kids were poor, and if they didn’t learn, they were going to stay poor. I
wanted to put the responsibility of learning on them because until they wanted
to learn, I couldn’t teach them.”
                                                                        Dr. George H. Richmond, Founder

The Founders
The MicroSociety program was the dream child of George Richmond, a painter, teacher, author and acclaimed educator who was raised by a single mother in poverty in the tenements of Manhattan’s Lower East Side.  His first job, at a Brooklyn elementary school in 1967, was a rookie  teacher’s nightmare. “If spitballs could kill, we’d all be dead,” wrote Richmond. His fifth graders skipped class, scorned homework and slept through lectures, their apathy and cynicism surpassed only by their appetite for classroom warfare. In the end, the young idealist from Yale threw up his hands at a system in which teachers who pretended to teach and students who pretended to learn did very little of either. From that frustration was born his thesis: If discipline, willpower and the force of reason couldn’t hook students, maybe freedom and responsibility would.

Grades and testing were a basic dilemma. A grade on a paper or a score on a standardized test could not be saved, or invested, or traded for something of value. That was how a teacher with a deep belief in the value of learning for its own sake began paying his students – in fake money – for completed assignments, good marks and perfect attendance. Students then used their “cash” to play a game –  a sort of life-sized, walking version of Monopoly – in which they built, sold and mortgaged various cardboard “properties” placed on shelving around the classroom. Some used their profits to start up ventures: a postal service, a comic book company, a loan agency. Disputes eventually led to the creation of laws, peace officers, courts and a constitutional convention (democracy triumphed over a police state by a single vote). As they began to discover the relevance of reading and math through managing their society, Richmond’s students also discovered in themselves an enthusiasm for learning – and a hunger for more. Harvard invited this young innovator to come for his doctorate. His thesis, The MICROSOCIETY School: A Real World in Miniature, was published by Harper & Row in 1973. Although Richmond left education soon after graduating, his vision continued. 

In 1984, Richmond met his wife Carolynn, a Harvard trained educator with a law degree from Villanova University. Carolynn encouraged her husband to return to education, to refocus his creative energies on children and to revisit the program he developed during his teaching days at P. S. 41. Inspired by that work, Carolynn launched an investigation and to her amazement, found teachers and principals across the country, equally inspired by the idea of MicroSociety, running their own MicroSociety schools. 

Unlike most education programs that are mandated at the district level, Carolynn found that MicroSociety Schools were market driven, initiated at the grassroots level, one school at a time. The phenomenon so intrigued her that she pursued dialogues with these schools and eventually convinced her husband to return to the drawing board. Together they developed new curriculum for the program and pursued grant opportunities with foundations to fund the effort. Carolynn became convinced that MicroSociety schools would benefit equally from an association with one another and with their founder. It wasn’t long before she left her law practice to become the first Executive Director of the MicroSociety School Consortium. She organized and ran the consortium, and joined her husband, then ailing from Parkinson’s disease, in developing training programs for teachers and curriculum materials for schools. 

Together, the husband and wife partnership, with input from a few trusted practitioners, wrote and published the MicroSociety Handbook, a 500 page volume that remains the bible of the movement. In 1994, Carolynn designed the first MicroSociety Teachers’ Training Conference and continued to oversee curriculum and training design for the organization. 

As George’s thirty year battle with Parkinson’s progressed toward its final stage, Carolynn remained committed to the cause. She is responsible for securing an Endowment Challenge grant of $2,500,000, managing the organization’s growth, has become the visionary for its innovations and continues to seed MicroSociety innovations and best practices.