Educational Pioneer, Deborah Kallen

 TL;DR -- After WWI brought the U.S. to the world's attention, organized activity spread from the U.S. to the world. This is one example. Deborah Kallen, great-aunt, ventured to Israel to found a school. We learn a little about her with some information coming via her brother, Horace Kallen. 

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The Jerusalem Post, in 2023, had an article: Which American Jews helped establish Israel? 

In 1920 Deborah Kallen, sister of famed Zionist thinker Professor Horace Kallen, moved to Palestine. Prof. Hillel Blondheim was brought to Eretz Yisrael by his mother in 1928 for eight months. She enrolled him in Miss Kallen’s School. He wrote about his experiences in his autobiography. He told me once when we met, “Every week we had a trip somewhere in Eretz Yisrael near Jerusalem. As I walk around Jerusalem today, I see streets bearing the names of our guides back then.” Blondheim made aliyah in 1951 and lived in Jerusalem until his 100th birthday. He became a noted scientist and won many prizes.

Kallen’s goal was to establish the Parents Educational Association School. Immediately, housed in old Arab building in Jerusalem, she made her educational theories come to life through the creation of classes in painting, carpentry, and athletics. Daily gardening, crafts were part of the regular curriculum, and nature walks. Yigael Yadin, the world-renowned archaeologist, was one of her students.

Deborah Kallen is the great-aunt of one of the founders of the TGS organization, namely Ann. This post is introductory as we will have more information on her and her brother, Horace Kallen, the philosopher. 

Deborah Kallen
courtesy of The Forward 
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.

For now, here is an article that provides information from several sources, including Horace talking about his sister. 

Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues

Deborah Kallen and the Palestinian Yishuv: The Personal Tragedy of an Educational Pioneer

DEBORAH KALLEN AND THE PALESTINIAN YISHUV: THE PERSONAL TRAGEDY OF AN EDUCATIONAL PIONEER Sarah Schmidt A Personal Note 

The first time I heard the name Deborah Kallen was in 1972, while interviewing her brother, the social philosopher Horace M. Kallen. Our subject was his contribution to the formulation of a specifically American concept of Zionism, and he began by telling me, with evident pride, of his most meaningful Zionist connection , his sister Deborah, who had moved to Palestine in 1920 and had contributed her American perspective to building the system of education there. A quarter of a century later I was teaching a course on "The Israeli Woman: From Myth to Reality" to North American students at Tel Aviv University and looking for material on American women who had contributed to building the yishuv, especially those American women who had tried to extend the American value system to the model society they assumed was then in the process of formation. 

Aside from works by and about Golda Meir and Henrietta Szold there was little to be found. And so I decided to look for Deborah Kallen.1 Nashim:A Journal ofJewish Women's Studies and Gender Issues, no. 4. © 2001197 Sarah Schmidt 

The Beginnings Deborah Kallen, born in Boston in 1888, was one of eight children in a large Orthodox Jewish family that had recently emigrated from Germany to the United States. She was educated in the public schools of Boston and, hoping to develop a career as a painter, as a young adult attended classes in drawing and painting at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. As a way of rounding out her education she also audited courses on art and design at Harvard College and on education at its then sister school, Radcliffe. Her studies there proved to be the decisive influence on her life, for early on she became an exponent of a new system of art education for children, one that emphasized her conception that the key to character building lay in teaching young children the principles ofgood design. As a result, she was appointed to the staff of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, responsible both for classes for children and for instructing other teachers in her methods of teaching design. 

In 1920 Deborah took a two-year leave of absence from the museum and accepted an invitation from the Va'ad hahinukh, the official supervisory body for education in Palestine, to help train students at the Zionist teachers' seminary in Jaffa and at the British government seminary for Arab teachers in Jerusalem. Since she had previously shown no particular interest in Zionism, what impelled her to take this step is not entirely clear. A contributory factor was surely the struggle she had waged in the United States to have art accepted as part of the elementary school curriculum. In order to prove the worth of art in the school curriculum as quickly as possible, many art teachers began by having their pupils copy pictures from textbooks, often without any consideration of the picture's intrinsic artistic value. Art instruction focused not on what the children saw but on what they saw in picture books, on exercises in copying without any aesthetic or creative contribution on the part of the student. 

Deborah Kallen developed her own system in direct opposition to this, stressing that children, rather than being required to copy, must be helped to develop their powers of observation. She considered this the most appropriate means to guide them in learning how to think critically and express an independent point of view. But she found herself waging a lonely fight, isolated in her perspective regarding what art education was about.  

Deborah Kallen and the Palestinian Yishuv Deborah had also come to realize that her goal of becoming an artist in her own right was unlikely to be realized. Her talent was not distinct enough, and she lacked the requisite forcefulness to bring her work to the attention of the public. Possibly most discouraging was the evaluation of her art teacher and mentor at Harvard, Professor Denim Ross, who (as she recalled almost a half century later) told her that he...

Several themes motivate this post. Per usual, we have the 250th and 400th as motivation as we look at American History from the start to now, while celebrating an important event. On July 4th, with the commemoration finally coming about, we will have seven years to review all aspects of the U.S., New England, Massachusetts, and Essex County with its Cape Ann. People arrived here over the whole time. Some left to go back to the Old World. Others took off for the interior or for any of the locations accessible by water since New England was a nautical region. 

 Remarks: Modified: 05/14/2026

05/14/2026 -- 

Attainder grudge

TL;DR -- Gardner Family Trust has produced its research results and allows us an opportunity to vet this with regard to provenance and other criteria. It is a first, in a sense, as the computer algorithms (associated with AI) are to be scrutinized, as well. We are fortunate to be using historic data which has meaning beyond the normal. 

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As we saw with the recent visit of King Charles to the White House, the U.S. and the UK have a history which we all know from our American history. Some families have more stories than others. We recently pointed to a post in the blog Gardner Family Trust dealing with the western U.S. From the TGS view, we got reminded by the movie (The Revenant) that was of the mountain man era. 

There was a Gardner in the area and the new blog has some information about that part of the family. Another post was about Silvester Gardner and a namesake who owned the ship, Barque Bostonian (see the Gardiner that was), that sank and caused Gardiner, OR to come to be. 

With respect to provenance and other dutiful notions, we need to establish links to documents that are of value themselves with respect to what information that they provide. Of late, we see projects using GenAI/LLM, about which we have had many things to say, for research, analysis and presentation. In fact, when you look at coding (programming), some teams generate huge systems and only check via test. 

Note: A bit of progress to now has been proving programs so as to establish some notion of stability, maturity, and such, usually with respect to requirements that come from the world of humans. That side of things has gotten ignored; expect that it will come back into vogue. 

In the meantime, while we are verifying Gardner data on this side of the pond, let's look back. We will use this post: The Merchant-Coup Thesis: The Gardiner Syndicate and the Tudor Usurpation of 1485. The notion is that a grudge led to the involvment of the Gardner family with the conflict at Bosworth. But, of interest is additional history gathered from a new look at historical records. This conjecture will be looked at in detail. 

Accompanying the referenced thesis post is one with more clarification: The Fenland Grievances: Lancastrian Merchants' Reckoning and the Yorkist Toll, 1461–1485. The intriguing thing is that we know that history is written topdown. And, we know how personal insights or reports on occurrences do not survive the cuts that force everthing into some envelop of generalization. 

The computer can help us change that limitation. At the same time, we have to be careful so as to not introduce error through lack of proper knowledge which is the case due to those events being past any potential of redo as one would expect in the laboratory situation. 

Before going on, there is a third site that lays out a historic view of the London area while considering the existence of a middle class that persists across generations. And, "Gardner" as a name can represent such threads which is seen as plural as no one line exists across time that we know of. Even modern genetic processing has its issue with respect to using biological markers to bring such a feat to reality. 

See Merchant Coupe Thesis. This site provides an overview of the approach and the basic rationale for the choices that are being made in this retrospective. The scene is London for the culmination of a long series of events, but the overview covers many countries and generations. 

After two U.S. themed posts, we have our first one focused across the pond. So, let's now pull out our pencils and papers and make notes. Meanwhile, TGS will get deeper into the technical aspects with a balance of ensuring timely release of information that can show some type success after undergoing a bit of exercises related to vetting.

A last remark? We have many posts about the Magna Carta which was celebrated more by Americans than by the Brits in the past; that is, until the Americans made the effort. Queen Elizabeth II gave land to the widow of Pres. John F. Kennedy, after his assassination. That site was the focus of the 201 commemoration which was attended by a TGS representative.  

Remarks: Modified: 05/04/2026

05/04/2026 -- In commeration of Erik W. Gardner (1965-2025). His father and mother attended the Magna Carta event. 

What's of interest

TL;DR -- The Heads of State of the UK and US had dinner this week. English was remembered this month, as a language and culture. We update an image showing what is getting read of TGS posts. 

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April, as a month, has a long of list of remembrances. Earlier this month, we used the theme of "English" to look at the count of posts read by three categories. 

This week, at a State Dinner, both King Charles of the UK and President Trump remarked upon the upcoming 250th on July 4th having to do with the Revolution that split us from the "mother" country in many ways. But, the relationship continued in many other veins, such as being ally nations. Topics associated with this will be regular over the next few years. 

The U.S. peaceful entry into the world as a Nation did not occur until 1783. 

When we honored "English", we made an image which has been updated to show the same report as of today, 30 Apr 2026. 

We will do these more often over the year to get some notion of interest. 

Remarks: Modified: 04/30/2026

04/30/2026 -- 

Gardner Family Trust

TL;DR -- This post announces the Gardner Family Trust site and provides notice of the first post which deals with Gardiner, MT which is a historic site near Yellowstone National Park which saw a lot of history that we can and will study. But, the choice of this example deals with the history of the Gardner family over more than a millenium and is a U.S. example which represents continuing work in the history the U.S. presented in a modern way through progressive means. 

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In an earlier post this month, we wrote of our joint efforts with David T. Gardner: On Gardners, redux. We here at the TGS, Inc. are fairly new to this work. David on the other hand as been at this since his youthful days. Prior to our contact with David, we had applied this adage to our work:

Americans need to focus on their side of the pond and get their several generations of genealogy documented to be correct. In other words, let the orginis be done by those over there. For one thng they have better access to records. 

Even though we had a late start, by that time the influence of the internet was growing as the industry kept the thing going while supporting work of millions of users. One large impact was that the ISPs were digitizing documents and records. Our results of our 2014 work on the marriage of Thomas and Margaret was a result. At the same time, we had posts on the subject of Origins and What we know (see FAQ). 

Recently, we looked at an organization started after the 2nd World War by members of the FASG (Society of American Genealogist). One of their members wrote the background whose first paragraph covers some of the historic dynamics as shown in this image (left - a page from the paper; right - transcription). 

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In that same spirit, we are supporting the efforts of David to publish his work with respect to history and the Gardners: Gardner Family Trust. As we have mentioned, we had looked at the battle of Bosworth and about the death of King Richard III. The news at the time was loaded with reports on a body being found and identified. At the time, we loosened our American focus to provide information that we thought was pertinent to our work. 

Last year, David was able to start to use one of the GenAI/LLM to assist in his work. For one thing, lots of that work is transcribing old documents into a workable shape while ensuring that the fidelity of the representation is sound which task includes fixing things as necessary and then doing OCR on the updated image of the document. 

Along that line, the TGS interest in technology comes into play. We published an overview in December of 2025: Research, using the internet and AI. David has collected a lot of material. Our focus will be to help him with his analysis of provenance and general truth of the newly digitized as well as documents from earlier work. 

There is a lot to do which we will raise the priority on. So, going back to the theme of over there and/or here, we will take the latter for a while. As David provides new posts, we will be doing a regular walkthrough and discuss the ins and outs to emphasize, for one thing, the 250th and its significance. 

This post is an introduction. We will follow with regular reporting and commentary on methods and ways to handle the new information going forward in order to leave a proper legacy for Gardners and their progeny everywhere. 

   

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For his 1st post, David writes of Gardiner, MT through which Gardner River flows. We have had many posts on rivers including Gardner River  and the area, Yellowstone, plus. It is a beautiful area with lots of history. We are grateful to have David's contributions. 

Gardner Family Trust

Gardiner, Montana: 

The Living River Machine

Still Operating in 2026

There were several reasons for chosing this site. We are dealing in endless history, in a sense, where technology will allow us new views to hopefully fill in missing information. But, the choice of this example deals in particular with the history of the Gardner family over more than a millenium and is a U.S. example which represents continuing work in the history of the U.S. presented in a modern way through progressive means where people rise to attention. 

Note: More detail will be forthcoming as we shadow David's work with the Gardner Family Trust with documentation of provenance, method, annd tradeoffs that might have been made. 

Remarks: Modified: 04/26/2026

04/26/2026 -- 

Illegitimates, Royal family

TL;DR -- We ran across the one heritage group in the U.S. that claims the most stringent application process which keeps their membership small. We will use RBs here. After a brief review of technology of late, we look at heritage societies as they exist in the U.S. Many of these go back to the colonial era. At the same time, there is a huge chunk that goes back before the moment of "origins" into the far reaches of the History of Britain and of Europe. The 250th has direct bearing on those studies, such as the interest of the ABA in the heritage of the Magna Carta. Our contribution to history will be via the Gardner Family Trust with its focus of 2,000 years. 

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We have seen so much sillyness the past few years that one might wonder if there is more or have we seen everything of that nature. There was a time when we took computation more seriously. 

But then, GenAI/LLM happened. It has been only a little over four years now, but the related work goes back one decade for the main focus and back to the 1950s altogether with interesting progress throughout the whole of those seven decades. 

One of those areas of work was Knowledge Based Engineering (KBE) the public awareness of which was never known or was lost in the shuffles of time. 

But, the lessons of KBE were not lost, as my survey over the past few years has shown. The phenomenal world contains lots of remnants from that period ('80s, '90s) in various shapes which include academic involvement and classes plus companies representing operational knowledge improvements of various types through their intellectual property and activity. 

Phenomenal? I use that a lot with a meaning related to things that we can sense in the world. That is, these are "real" and not our mental images. As if, their presence conveys that something is there in the world. Of late, there has been attention given to "twins" which are digital models of the "real" thing which is then represented in bits and heated moments by circuits processing such things. We call those circuit conglomerates computers. Much to discuss. 

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Now with respect to this organization, we see people as phenomenal. They are here, have a history in terms of their genetic lineage, can name some of their ancestors, and then leave us (some having then a phenomenal legacy for us to consider). We have mentioned the Hereditary Society Community which consists of groups with different historic and genealogic focus. Each of these Societies have an application process and an associated list of people. If one is a descendant of one of those people, then one can join if an application shows direct lineage from the applicant to the person of the past. 

Many groups have a U.S. or colonial theme. Examples of this are the Daughters of the American Revolution, The General Society of Mayflower Descendants, The Society of Cincinatti, and such. With regard to the group honoring Cincinnatus, there are two houses that are associated with Ann's family: see TGS post, Two Houses. 

Some groups use "Gateway" to represent the bearer of heritage information that continues on the other side, as in prior to their immigration to the colonies.  We recently wrote of that: see post, Gateway Ancestors, redux. Here, the Magna Carta groups stand out. 

The rest of this post is about one of those groups. 

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We recently were reminded of this group as they had their annual meeting in Washington, DC. We took a little time to look at their website (Illegitimates or RBs) and found an on-line tutorial about the application process involved which is one of the stringent. Many early members were associated with the Society of American Genealogists. So, it is no surprise that that they would start an effort to firm up the application process. 

Having done tons of applications over the years while helping people join societies, we are sensitive to the arguments which we will be looking at in more detail in later posts. Today we want to introduce the video that is quite interesting with its coverage of historical issues as well as the discussion of the research and documentation process as well as a look at how things are evaluated. 

The video --- Webinar: Finding Your Bastard and Your Line: Tuesday, November 18, 2025. 

Let's start with a discussion related to American History. In the video, go to 12:33 and find the first page of the "Background" overview. The story of Americans visiting England is quite instructive as those here were thought of as "rustics" mostly. Whereas, the list of Gateways shows that many families had a heritage worth looking into. Well, everyone's family has that quality. Rather, people here have the same genetic involvement with the history of England as do folks there.

But, the U.S. offered more which we expect will be more publicly discussed during the long run of the 250th celebration. Frankly, we are still over two months from the Declaration of Independence. After that, expect a continual review to be part of our days until after 2033. 

With technology and mature computing, the amount of new documention to be attained will be without limit, with quality material rising to the top of the heap of attention. 

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The Royals (all over Europe) are (have been) an interesting bunch. With respect to "Gardner" and command/control, we have stumbled around the "origins" aspect for a bit and will be more focused with the advent of David T. Gardner's new site: Gardner Family Trust. His theme is "2000 Year History". 

Remarks: Modified: 04/19/2026

04/19/2026 -- Changed links that did not copy corrrectly: Two houses, Society of Cincinnati.  

On Gardners, redux

TL;DR -- David T. Gardner has made progress in his work and now has a timeline that is interesting for several reasons. One is the scope, back to the BCE era. But, it brings up twists to Gardner history that are going to be fun to study. Say, one that ties Rome and London. 

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We have mentioned the work of David T. Gardner a few times: Welsh poems; Research, using the Internet and AI; Sir Christopher Gardner. These are from late 2025. There are earlier posts that will come into play, as well. 

After several false starts related to getting GenAI/LLM to act right, David has been working now bringing out the content of long-lost material that has been digitized. The tools from GenAI/LLM can be remarkable, from a distance. I say that since my computer career dealt with things requiring precision from the data side of things and from algorithms, especially routines supporting the form, fit, function requirements of engineering of critical parts for major systems. 

Then, loosy-goosy GenAI/LLM came along. The head of one prime company shrugged the other day when he was asked about his tool not being able to calculate time functions, not even to the extent of establishing the current time at a locale. That's one small issue; huge ones have been documented. 

On the other hand, David is pulling out materal, using OCR to get it digitized, and various analysis methods to determine the content, significance, and possible ramifications of the data. 

I have been watching loosely as the work progressed. David is keeping the necessary requirements in mind, such as establishing provenance. Anyone who works knows that it takes energy and is tiring. Even brainy work. And, long hours in surgery? (I know, having been introduced by working in the surgical side of an Army hospital in my late teens - in the operating room. But, I can talk about digging ditches and doing concrete - in the old days of manual labor.). 

David has produced a timeline: Guardians of Liberty: Kingslayers of the Counting House. Guardians? With a millenial view? Yes, consider the Latin phrasing and a new view of Gardner comes to fore. One of particular interest ties Rome to London in the early days of legionairre prominence. We will be looking more closely at this. 

Right now, I want to mention a couple of entries in David's timeline that we looked at earlier; when I saw the new material being brought out, it caught my attention. 

• Sir Christopher Gardner -- 1625. 1630 on the timeline. Let's just say that the story from John Winthrop does not match up with some of the newer material. Pending further research on David's material. 
  
• Johnson Gardner -- 1820s, 1830s on the timeline. Naturally, the movie Revenant got our attention. With all events and places in the interior of the U.S. over the 1800s, we look for potential New England or Gardner links. 
• ... 

There are more events from the time of "origins" which are actively under study and from even before. We appreciate the breadth of David's scope in this regard. 

Remarks: Modified: 04/11/2026

04/11/2026 --  

Some notes on AI/ML

TL;DR -- GenAI/LLM has been on the scene for over three years. Lots has happened which we have participated in and watched. Things are getting interesting on all of the sides to the story. This post stops and posts a few links related to using Spinoza's thoughts to ponder this modern puzzle. 

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AI/ML (known too as GenAI/LLM) has been on the scene now for over three years. In terms of the total picture, the history and data are there for us to study. What's happened in 2026 is a type of acceleration. The split of 'yeah' and 'nay' is still there. But, other dynamics came into play that changed the game this year. 

We're still using "AIn't" to depict this wannabe attempt. I quit using any of these systems in early 2025 when the "agentic" came prominent. Why? We prototyped lots of the ideas of that approach four decades ago (in the "knowledge" era) and did good stuff within the constraints of the time. So, I will get to documenting that from my experience and according to what I observed. What we learned there is apropos. 

For instance, the NNN is known as a general function approximator. And, functions are a focus, say from the work related to the functional software approach (Haskell, et al - but, Lisp early, okay?); functions are mappings as we see with category theory; automated processes (basis for the web and SAAS) are from the knowledg era and encapsulated the behavorial/active aspects of objects/classes within the computational sphere; ...

What follows is a list of links related to technical and philosophical themes. These are not disjoint concepts. For each, there is a little comment. 

• DeepAI -- this is their GitHub site which collects some of the offerings behind some of the work that we will be refrencing. GitHub is an on-line system for managing information that is continually be updated and managed, such as code (but some have used its facilities for a collection of technical, topical essays. 
• What Kant and Spinoza can teach us about AI -- Two of Demis Hassabis’s favourite philosophers, Spinoza and Kant, help illuminate the conundrum: can AI turn chaotic data into intelligible, structured reality? ... I have mentioned these two philosophers quite a lot in posts on Linkedin of late. And, my use of AIn't comes directly from agruments by these guys. And so, there are discussions still pending.  
• One view of many on Spinoza by an artist -- interesting take on things; lifting us out of the technical for its own sake.  
• ..., will be splitting this list --- Spinoza (Wikipedia) ; Spinoza (SEP) ; Gutenberg (text) ; Gutenberg (Ethics) ; 
• Mapping Spinoza's Ethics -- offers mean to visualize the "argumentative structure". 
• DeepAI on Spinoza -- they have several philosophers covered which we will get to. 
  
• Chat Spinoza -- when we first saw this, we thought that it was cute; but, we also like how things are interconnected so as to allow analysis. 
• ... 

Uriel de Costa

This post will be a reference for us, too, as we go forward with the 400th, 250th, and the history of the U.S. and technology (say remembering Gibbs, the American, who cntributed to thermodynamics and caught the eye of the illustrious James Clerk Maxwell of Scotland. But, taking things into the 20th Century, we will have to bring up Planck. Why? His early thermodynamics work that quoted Gibbs and also explained the basics from a chemical sense.  

Remarks: Modified: 04/11/2026

04/10/2026 -- Added words and links.