Cora Lenore Williams

Cora Lenore Williams (1865 - Dec. 14, 1937) was a writer and educator known for pioneering new approaches to small-group instruction for children. She founded the A-Zed School and the Institute for Creative Development, later renamed Williams College, in Berkeley, California.

Williams graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1891. She taught high school in Oakland and was said to be the first woman instructor in mathematics at the University of California. In the process, she became critical of the way children are taught, writing:

Williams founded two secondary schools in which the focus was on small classes, cooperation rather than individual competition, and developing a love for learning rather than inculcating a specific curriculum. The first of these, the A-Zed School in Berkeley, was founded in 1907. Ormeida Curtis Harrison, wife of the naturalist Charles Keeler, was her assistant principal. Williams remained the school's principal for a decade, before moving on to found another school.

In 1917 Williams bought the John Hopkins Spring Estate in the Berkeley hills to house a new institution, the Cora L. Williams Institute for Creative Development, an elementary and secondary school focused on music, poetry, literature, and languages and on creative methods of instruction. It eventually transformed into a cluster of educational institutions under the supertitle Williams College, including a four-year private liberal arts college, a preparatory school, and schools of research, poetry, arts, and metaphysics. Notable lecturers at the school included the psychologist Alfred Adler, and notable students included Helen Bacon Hooper, who danced with Martha Graham, and author Irving Wallace. Founded in 1918, the school was housed on the estate for five decades; it closed in 1966.

Williams' educational experiments drew international interest, and Williams College has been called "the first New Age institute". Its site, the John Hopkins Spring Estate, was designated a City of Berkeley Landmark in 2000.

Williams had a strong interest in mathematics and philosophy, especially metaphysics, and she published several books centered on metaphysical rumination. Creative Involution (1916) is a response to Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution, which had appeared five years earlier. Starting from Bergson's insistence on the fact that "the evolution of life [is] in the double direction of individuality and association", Williams emphasizes the necessity for greater attention to the principle of cohesion or association which Berson termed involution, as a means of moving human society forwards. Reviewers found the book by turns stimulating and puzzling, and more aphoristic than analytical.

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