Ruth Emerson Cooke, Progressive Educator and a 19 year resident of the Crosslands Community passed away with her son by her side on Monday evening, June 4, 2012.  She was 101 years old.  Born in New York City, she was the daughter of the late Haven Emerson and the late Grace Parrish.

Burial will be private by the family.

A public memorial service at Crosslands is currently being planned and information will be forthcoming.

Photo by Henry Clark, 2010

by John Byrne Cooke

Ruth Emerson Cooke, a supporter of progressive education who was a teacher and administrator in New York City schools, and later established an educational counselling service to help parents place their children in the most appropriate educational environment, died on Monday, June 4, at Kennett Square, PA.

                Her son, John Byrne Cooke, said his mother’s health had been failing in recent weeks. The immediate cause of death was pneumonia.

                Mrs. Cooke held her first teaching job at the Dalton School, a private, coeducational progressive school, where she taught three-year-olds and served as assistant head of the nursery school in the 1940s. In 1950 she left Dalton to work for the Art Lending Service at the Museum of Modern Art, but she soon returned to the school, where she was appointed Director of Admissions in 1954.*

                In 1965, Mrs. Cooke and several other members of the faculty left Dalton to found a new school in Manhattan with the goal of creating a truly integrated, independent elementary school at a time when the average minority enrollment in the city’s forty-odd private schools was in the low single digits. Mrs. Cooke and her co-founders, led by Augustus Trowbridge, who became the school’s first director, named the new school the Manhattan Country School, to reflect the fact that students would spend part of the academic year at a 180-acre farm in upstate New York. The founders’ announced aim was to begin with 30% minority enrollment and eventually to create a student body in which no race would consitute a majority. "With the goal of equal relationships among the races, we decided that an integrated school would have to enroll students not ‘regardless of race, creed or color,’ but by deliberately seeking out these attributes," Mr. Trowbridge later wrote in his book about the school, "Begin with a Dream." In his inscription in the copy of the book he gave to Mrs. Cooke, Mr. Trowbridge wrote, "To Ruth, a fellow founder of MCS without whom the story of this book could never have been told. Thank you for your devotion to our school’s mission."

                Mrs. Cooke recruited eleven of thirty-three "sponsors" the founders hoped would attract attention and funding to the proposed school. Among those Mrs. Cooke enlisted was the artist Robert Motherwell, whose daughter she had accepted to the Dalton School when she was director of admissions there.

                The Manhattan Country School achieved its first goal when it opened in September, 1966, with sixty-six students, of whom twenty-two were black or Hispanic. The school’s location at 7 East 96th Street symbolized it’s commitment to the surrounding communities, both the affluent Upper East Side and the African-American and Hispanic residents of East Harlem.

                Mrs. Cooke was the school’s associate director until 1976, and served on the board of trustees during that period.

                After she left Manhattan Country School, Mrs. Cooke formed, in partnership with Estelle Meadoff, another of the former Dalton School faculty members who had established Manhattan Country School, the Cooke-Meadoff Educational Counselling Service. The service worked with parents to place their children in schools throughout New York, New England and the Northeast that would be particularly suited to the children’s limitations or abilities, including emotional problems and learning disabilities, as well as exceptional talents or intelligence.

                Mrs. Cooke was born Ruth Emerson in New York City on October 20, 1910, to Grace Parrish and Haven Emerson. She was the fourth of the couple’s five children. On her mother’s side, she was descended from the Philadelphia abolitionist Lucretia Mott. Her father was an epidemiologist and public health specialist who served as New York City’s commissioner of health from 1915-1917. Dr. Emerson was later Professor of Preventive Medicine at Cornell University, and Professor of Public Health at Columbia University from 1922-1940.

                In 1934, Ruth married the British journalist Alistair Cooke, who became a naturalized citizen in 1941. A son, John Byrne Cooke, was born in 1940. The couple divorced in 1946.

                Mrs. Cooke retired in 1993 and moved that year to Crosslands, a Quaker retirement community in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, where she lived until her death. In addition to her son, she leaves seven nieces and nephews and their children.

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