Larry Aaronson, 86, an educator retired from the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, died peacefully in his sleep at 7:11 a.m. Saturday, according to friends posting through Aaronson’s own social media account.
For more than four decades he taught history and social sciences with a specialty in alternative progressive education and issues of social justice. “Larry prides himself on the fact that literally hundreds of CRLS graduates are now working in the public sector on issues of social justice, thus replicating the progressive education they received in Cambridge,” said a 2008 statement of the executive committee of The Aaronson Fund, formed to continue that work after his retirement. Aaronson was also known for his promotion of the dramatic arts.
Born in 1940 in Washington, D.C., Aaronson grew up the children of a social worker mother and and an economist father who worked for the U.S. Commerce Department. He graduated from the Sidwell Friends private school, Earlham College in Indiana, the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and finally the Columbia Journalism School, graduating in 1965. Through that program he reported on civil rights and social worker volunteers in Stinking Creek, Kentucky, “my first introduction to the poorest Appalachia white culture,” he told an oral history project at George Washington University in 2018. “There was some black culture there, right?”
He got his first job teaching at the urging of his mother, who wanted him to avoid battle in the Vietnam War, Aaronson said, and as a teacher kept encountering grim reminders of race and class divides in America. “The idea that there were these kids of color, as we would say then, for which there was nothing … there weren’t even books, there was no textbooks, there was nothing, and I’m going like, what is going on here? Why is this happening?”
That brought him to the “freedom schools” of the activist Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, where he met the future politician and mayor of the District of Columbia, Marion Barry, whom Aaronson described as a mentor. “It all started to come together to me that there was this whole other world,” he said.
He went on to get a doctorate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education – writing in his application letter, “I am a Marxist” – with the intention of teaching other teachers at the college level. Instead, “what what I came to was the critically important role of public education,” he said.
He worked with Howard Zinn and taught his “A People’s History of the United States” first at an alternative institution called The Group School and, starting in 1977, at CRLS until he retired in 2007 and began writing his memoirs.
He told the oral history project what he brought to education and what he took from it:
Public education, the liberating power of personal narrative, the importance of multiple narratives … it was the critical role of public schooling for our democracy in consciousness raising, and in activism. Not being rhetorical and ideological and indoctrinating, but to try to do all that in a way that gets students to become independent, lifelong thinkers and activists … the importance of connecting to the lives and the lived experience of the people you’re teaching, and the fact that I was in a place where I was able to do this, because in both Washington and in Cambridge, I was pushing and pushing and pushing the envelope in some reckless ways and some profoundly important ways … I don’t think I ever lost my conviction that public [schools] are the cathedrals, if you will, the citadels of our democracy. The classroom, especially in history, is the crucible, and that is where liberation pedagogy is going to happen.
Friends and acquaintances remembered him fondly online as the news spread, with some calling him a “Cambridge legend” and “a blessing to many.”
“What a bright light Larry was! Full of energy, spirit, love and compassion. It’s hard to believe he’s not still shining on us all,” Lisa Guisbond said.
Richard Martin Damas said Aaronson “embodied everything that is special about Cambridge and this world.”
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