Bank Street Experimenter

About the time that Lucy Sprague Mitchell came to live in Manhattan in 1913, the superintendent of New York City's public schools could boast, "I like to pause at 11 o'clock in the morning and reflect that all over New York thousands of pupils are reading the same page of the same book." School desks were screwed firmly to the floor, and pupils were expected to sit quietly at them. Teachers were supposed to know their subjects well, and little else besides.

To bright-eyed Lucy Mitchell (wife of the famed Columbia economist, Wesley C. Mitchell) such rigidity seemed all wrong. To do something about her convictions, she went to her wealthy cousin, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge,* got a promise of $50,000 to start a "bureau of educational experiments." Taking over an old four-story yeast warehouse on Greenwich Village's Bank Street, she opened one of Manhattan's first "progressive" nursery schools. Over the years, she also hired psychologists, physicians, educators and social workers to study child growth and maturity levels from infancy to adolescence.

Last week, in Our Children and Our Schools (Simon & Schuster; $4), Lucy Mitchell laid down Bank Street's ideas about education and described how they can be put into practice.

"That's Tommyrot." Although she has always been a progressive, Lucy Mitchell concedes that some of the early U.S. experimenters went too far: "Many were terrified of any kind of memory work. They thought if stultified the child. That's tommyrot. There's no reason why a child shouldn't spell well or why he shouldn't know his multiplication table."

Another early progressive idea--"that children could manage themselves"--is also disavowed by Bank Street. "Immediate complete freedom for the child," says

Lucy Mitchell, "is as chaotic as the same thing for a country."

As Mrs. Mitchell's work progressed, she and Bank Street got increasing recognition. Bank Street techniques--free-moving, informally arranged classrooms, teaching the three Rs by tying them in with children's daily lives, frequent outside excursions (e.g., to visit fire departments, stores, etc.), a hands-off policy to encourage free artistic expression among the children--have been widely, if cautiously, picked up by many public schools.

Excuse for Existence. This fall, with spry, 72-year-old Mrs. Mitchell still in charge, Bank Street will be operating pilot classes in four New York City schools; 300 teachers, many of them from public schools, will be taking courses at Bank Street headquarters.

That is the way Lucy Mitchell wants it to be. "I am not in favor," she says emphatically, "of station-wagon progressive education ... I have always felt our school was purely a laboratory for the public schools. That was the excuse for its existence."

*Best known as the U.S.'s No. 1 music patron (the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress, the Coolidge String Quartet).

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