Course in Babies

Does formal education break down a school girl's maternal instinct? Helen Parkhurst, head of Manhattan's flourishing Dalton School, thinks it does. She believes a girl's interest in babies diminishes from her freshman to her senior year in high school, is further lessened in college. By the time many a college girl marries, thinks Miss Parkhurst, she is distinctly uninterested in babies. What to do about it? Miss Parkhurst has an idea.

Last week at the Dalton School, just off Park Avenue, arrived a batch of bright new babies. They had been carefully picked for health and background by a committee consisting of four pediatricians, Miss Parkhurst and Mrs. Evangeline Brewster Johnson Stokowski, auburn-haired wife of the Philadelphia Orchestra's flamboyant conductor. Dalton's high-school girls will feed, bathe, dress them, fuss over them scientifically under the eyes of Nurse Mary G. McMahon. The procedure, supplemented by lectures on the care, feeding, psychology of infants, will constitute a course in baby-raising. Each high-school class was assigned one baby for two years. Then the babies will be exchanged for a new consignment.

For Dalton such a course is less remarkable than it would have been for a more conventional school. Dalton's children never sit at desks. They work and play freely, learn things by doing things. Ages range from the 18 of senior high-school girls down to that of one-year-old Andrea Sadja Stokowski. Not the least interested of the many girls who inspected and fondled the live specimens was towheaded Andrea Sadja, whose scientific preoccupation had to be restrained by Nurse McMahon. But not for some 13 years, until she is a high-school freshman, will she be allowed to enroll for Dalton's course in scientific baby-raising. By then the present specimens, like their caretakers, should have grown up to carry out the Dalton School's motto: "Go Forth Unafraid."

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