“Whether we are teaching, conducting workshops, or organizing,

we are guided by beliefs about society, politics, language, and

effective social change”

Patrick Joseph Finn, a member of the faculty of the SUNY Buffalo, Graduate School of Education from 1973 to 1999, died in Buffalo, New York on February 17, 2025. He was 89 years old.

Patrick was an educator, best-selling author, community organizer for social change, Quaker, hilarious storyteller and dedicated partner to his wife of 62 years.

He was born in 1935 and raised in an Irish Catholic neighborhood on the Southside of Chicago. In 2024 he published a memoir, The Taste of an Olive: a Southside Chicago Memoir, about his childhood, family and the demographic upheavals that took place in the 1940-50s.

He graduated from Chicago Teachers College in 1959 and taught Language Arts at Chicago area elementary schools and a newly opened progressive high school where he met his wife Mary who was also a teacher there.

At the time, Patrick had quite traditional views about education and found the progressive school’s reforms unfeasible. He reveled in telling the story about repeatedly getting “caught” standing at the blackboard drilling his students instead of following the progressive pedagogy.

In 1972 Patrick earned a PhD from the University of Chicago; his dissertation topic was Linguistics. Over 25 years at the SUNY Buffalo he taught classroom teachers and his approach to education evolved from drilling at the blackboard to listening to and engaging with his students.  He studied Bernstein and Freire, learned from his students’ experience, and participated within the wider academic community focused on the field of literacy and society.

In 1999, the same year he retired from the University, he published Literacy with an Attitude: Educating working-class children in their own self-interest.  The book told the story through his own experience of how working-class children could be better educated and how powerful literacy could affect social change. A second edition was published in 2009.

Literacy with an Attitude had a profound impact on many schoolteachers and was known and used nationally by progressive educators striving to make equal educational opportunity a reality—not just a slogan. The success of the book launched him into a decade of speaking and consulting engagements across the U.S. In 2007 he co-edited a book with Mary, Teacher Education with an Attitude: Preparing teachers to educate working class students in their collective self-interest, and continued to publish in professional journals, actively developing his powerful literacy thesis.

Patrick received many accolades including awards from The Center for Working Class Studies at Georgetown University, and the Working-Class Studies Department at Youngstown, University in Ohio.  He organized parents in Buffalo with a grant from the Buffalo Mayor’s Education Fund to conduct workshops on Empowering Education for parents and teachers in a Buffalo Public School. He was a founding member of the Education and Labor Committee that provided forums on progressive education for teachers in urban schools in NYC and Los Angeles, with support from teachers’ unions and organized labor. He represented the Buffalo Friends Meeting as a member of VOICE Buffalo, a Saul Alinsky initiative, for which he prepared by taking the same organizing training in Chicago that a former U.S. President had taken. Above all, he knew the power of collective action.

He was a well-loved member of the Buffalo Friends (Quaker) Meeting for 40+ years.  He became a practicing Quaker while living in Edinburgh, Scotland.  His travels and sabbaticals gave him the opportunity to attend Quaker meetings in Santa Monica, CA; NYC; Haverford, PA; Pasadena, CA; Bethesda, MD; Chicago, IL; Glasgow and Edinburgh, Scotland; Dublin, Ireland; and Congénies, France.

Patrick left Chicago in 1973, the first to leave the fold of eight brothers and sisters and an ever-expanding brood of nieces and nephews.  In 1985 he and Mary purchased an old Victorian house with 12 bedrooms on Lake Chautauqua.  “Finn’s Inn” became the site of Finn Family retreats for 30-40 Chicagoans, every summer for 35 years.  Finn’s Inn also hosted 35 annual Quaker retreats, several Alternatives to Violence workshops, and youth groups from Buffalo and NYC. He and Mary curated film weekends and always enjoyed being with dear friends and family on the front porch, which was the center of activity.

He is survived by his wife Mary (Groshong) Finn, their two daughters Molly Finn and Amy (Stephen) Finn, and four grandsons, Harry (Alex), Lewis (Cassie), Maurice, and Patrick—all residents of California. For 20 years he and Mary sojourned for four months each winter in Los Angeles, to be near these family members, and sunshine.

Patrick will be remembered for his kindness, generosity, intelligence–and definitely for his laugh. His was a life well-lived. He will be missed, but his spirit lives on in the many people he touched.

There will be a memorial service celebrating Patrick’s life at 2pm on April 19, 2025 at Orchard Park Quaker Meetinghouse, 6924 E. Quaker Street, Orchard Park, New York.

Online condolences may be placed at www.TheDietrichFuneralHome.com