Cora Lenore Williams (1865 – December 14, 1937)[1] was a writer and educator known for pioneering new approaches to small-group instruction for children.
[1] She founded the A-Zed School and the Institute for Creative Development, later renamed Williams College, in Berkeley, California.
[1][2] 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.
As with such earlier speculative works as Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Williams' primary purpose is to deliver a critique of her own world by allowing us to see it through the eyes of nonhumans.
As the novel opens, a telegraph operator named Clarence Barston has intercepted a series of letters between Diocles and his wife Agnesi.
In this correspondence, Diocles is reporting on Earth and its curious inhabitants, commenting, for example, on the strangeness of existence in three dimensions compared to their own ten-dimensional universe.
Mary is a schoolteacher, and the trapped Agnesi is horrified to find her classroom occupied by "a great beast of indefinite outline and motley color resembling a dragon" instead of children.