FAIRHOPE, Ala. — It’s a small museum, but if you are interested in how education in this country developed, get on over to 10 S. School St. in Fairhope. There you’ll find the Marietta Johnson Museum tucked into one of the buildings on Faulkner State Community College’s campus.

So why a museum?

Simple. Marietta Johnson founded the Organic School in 1907. She put into practice the thoughts of some of the leading minds in education of that time.

In the Organic School, tests were not administered, and homework was not assigned until high school. As long as they did their best, students passed.

Students worked at their own pace, and often would work at a higher level in a subject in which they excelled, while working at a lower level in a subject that caused them difficulty.

Johnson required hand crafts and folk dancing be taught and practiced, along with the traditional academic curriculum.

“She was very hands-on, experiential,” said Maggie Mosteller-Timbes, the director of the museum. “She believed that learning by rote involved only the short-term memory. If the students experienced it, it would go into long-term.”

Johnson is quoted on the museum’s website as saying, “Children should be active in all their learning; in fact, learning is a consequence and accompaniment of activity. Not only do we learn to do by doing, but all learning is through experience.”

Notable people along the East Coast were interested in the school, and donated to it, and some even sent their own children there to attend. The school had room for boarders at that time.

“She was an important figure in the growth of Fairhope,” said Mosteller-Timbes. She added that Mrs. Henry Ford, Mrs. Alexander Graham Bell and Mr. and Mrs. William Howard Taft were sponsors. The Tafts even helped Johnson with a lecture tour.

The museum is on the school’s original campus, which Mosteller-Timbes says was sold to the city of Fairhope in 1987. She added that the buildings were leased to Faulkner with the proviso that the museum be allowed to continue. The museum in open Monday-Friday, 2-4 p.m., or by appointment.

The Organic School featured a lot of hands-on work, and making things often incorporated practical lessons in the student’s schoolwork.

But some things just had to be learned by doing.

Mosteller-Timbes says that one of the walls of the museum building was torn down and rebuilt by 1930s-era students so they could haul to the water a boat they built during class.

The Organic School continues in the same tradition on a campus in another Fairhope location.

Mosteller-Timbes was not an Organic School student. Her husband, Graham, attended the school from what would be kindergarten to the eighth grade. One of his pieces of artwork in the museum is a sculpture of his foot. There is a bandage around the toes because, Mosteller-Timbes says, “an accident almost took off the (statue’s) toes.”

Because children could attend the school barefoot, Timbes had ample opportunity to mold the foot from life. He did the statue while in “third life.”

Johnson did not believe in formal grades in elementary school, so youngsters were placed in various “lifes” as they progressed through the elementary years.

The museum has many artifacts of the students’ work, and there are thousands of paper documents that museum volunteers are now scanning so future historians will not have to handle them.

“People should come to the museum if they like history,” said Mosteller-Timbes. “She (Johnson) was critical to the growth of Fairhope. She brought people to the area.”