Fattened Guinea Pig

The guinea pig of progressive education had become a fat house pet. Last week Columbia University's Teachers College decided to close down Manhattan's combined Horace Mann-Lincoln Schools.

Founded in 1887, the Horace Mann School became one of the nation's leading laboratories of schoolteaching. Its first, timidly daring explorations did much to lift U.S. schools out of a three-Rs rut. Its experiments in such fields as manual training, natural science, and language-teaching by conversation were copied throughout the nation. But with success, Horace Mann settled down as more of a proving ground for tried methods than a laboratory for new ones.

Teachers College broke out again in 1917. With a generous helping of Rockefeller money it opened the Lincoln School, "to insure the permanence of experimental work."

Lincoln was such a success that everybody wanted to get in the act. Kids at Lincoln made drums from coconuts and formed their own symphony orchestras. Tenth-graders solemnly analyzed the biases of the daily newspapers. Fourth-graders built their own bank of plywood and paid for their lunches by check." Older students made trips to T.V.A.

Progressive ways like Lincoln's sent many a graduate on to other schools for the embarrassing discovery that he was short in such progressive nonessentials as spelling and long division. They also gave rise to many a joke, like the one about the boy who went home triumphantly with an "A in sandpile." But doctors, lawyers, professors, writers and middling prosperous intellectuals lined up to send their kids to Lincoln. As more & more of them paid out Lincoln's high (current top: $600 a year) tuition, Lincoln--like Horace Mann--settled down into its once-new ways.

To save money, Teachers College merged Lincoln and Horace Mann in 1943. The result was a comparatively un-daring, scholastically successful prep school which trained an intelligent, prosperous few for college. Teachers College decided that it could spend Mr. Rockefeller's $3,000,000 better on public schools, many of which were eager to experiment, and whose students were more representative. Horace Mann-Lincoln will shut next year unless parents can take it over and move it somewhere else. Said the school's executive director: "It's just one of those tragedies."

In indignant mass meetings the school's Barents thought it was more than that. Cried P.T.A. President Mrs. Louis Gimbel Jr.: "Teachers College is just making a monkey of itself." But Horace Mann-Lincoln's bright, progressively educated pupils took a calmer view. Said one: 'There's nothing particularly special about us now."

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