Mother of Childhood Schooling

From its headquarters in a converted yeast factory in New York's Greenwich Village, the staff of Bank Street College of Education views the nation's scholas tic trends with a certain justifiable smugness. Bank Street itself has for many years been a yeasty factor in one of U.S. education's newest preoccupations: the preschool teaching of young children. Now observing its 50th anniversary, the college suddenly finds its expertise in great demand.

The massive federally financed "Head Start" program, like many other current teaching interests, is old stuff to Bank Street, which began as a laboratory school to study the teaching of children who had to meet only one requirement: to be able to walk. Some of the pupils even wore diapers. Bank Street, foreshadowing another practice, a decade ago added classes for the mothers of its nursery-school pupils to help them help their children. On the basis of its reputation as "the mother of early childhood education," it has just been selected by the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity to run one of ten regional centers evaluating the Head Start programs.

Dirty Hands. Bank Street was one of the first teachers colleges to accent the special problems of urban schools, and it did so by plunging into on-the-spot work in New York's poorest neighborhoods. Says a Columbia Teachers College professor: "Bank Street was willing to go down and dirty its hands in the New York City schools at a time when Columbia and New York University wouldn't be caught dead there." The Bank Street staff now advises teachers in 24 Harlem area schools under foundation contracts.

Ever since it began training teachers, Bank Street has shunned "how to teach" courses, insisted that, as Vice President Charlotte Winsor explains, "the first step in learning to be a teacher is learning how to learn." On that principle, the school accepts only graduate students who already hold liberal arts degrees from other colleges. It throws its students immediately into practice teaching in the public schools, emphasizes individual instruction, and hopes that its graduates will get the idea that teaching is not a mass-production matter. "We try to do unto teachers as we hope they will do unto their children," says Mrs. Winsor.

Integrated Textbooks. In the wave of curriculum reform now sweeping the public schools, the techniques of helping children to "discover" truths and relationships is of central importance. Lucy Sprague Mitchell, a John Dewey disciple who founded the school and ran it until her retirement in 1956, knew all about the discovery method many years ago. She had all the school's heating pipes painted red and all the water-pipes blue. Then, when the children asked why, she let them follow the colors to the furnace and water main.

She also broke away from moralistic story books with adult vocabularies, wrote her own Here and Now Story Book in words that kids really use. Bank Street, accenting city settings and depicting both Negroes and whites, also turned out one of the nation's first "integrated" textbooks. Still, while Mrs. Mitchell, now 88, adopted many Dewey ideas to make school a happy experience, she deplored the progressive schools that overemphasized "life adjustment." They were likely, she warned, to "raise a generation of well-adjusted morons."

For all its impact, Bank Street College, now headed by John Niemeyer, 58, is still a small school. It has only 120 full-time students, all pursuing a master's degree, and 238 children in its laboratory school--which last year received 250 applications for 31 openings. Yet Bank Street is bigger in accomplishment than many schools a hundred times its size. And, befitting its new stature after half a century of pioneering, it has acquired a site near Columbia University, where it plans to build a new $5,000,000 building.

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