Willard Beatty and Progressive Indian Education

Willard W. Beatty (1891–1961) lived most of his early life in San Francisco. As a teenager there, Beatty experienced the first philosophic influence on his life—a profound influence that he would later incorporate into much of his educational philosophy. As a high school student, Beatty attended the California School of Mechanical Arts, or the James Lick School—a secondary trade school for high school students “drawn from the whole state of California.” His son, Walcott H. Beatty, in a letter to this author noted, “I believe that it was his experience [at the James Lick School] which greatly influenced his thinking with regard to education.”\nThe James Lick School offered an educational program that was vocational in nature and whose hallmark was a successful apprenticeship program. The founder of the school, James Lick, was a self-made millionaire and a piano maker by profession. A self-educated man, Lick never forgot his origin as a skilled mechanic. He continually sought to enhance his own education not as a means of escape for the laboring man but as a “means to enriched living.” Willard Beatty wrote in 1944 that “Lick thought of things of the spirit, not merely of material well-being. . . . In this he anticipated by a generation the philosophy of the British Labor Party.”