Mixing Races in Manhattan

As urban public schools grow increasingly black, city private schools are thriving--as select enclaves for ever brighter whites. Many such schools are seeking more Negroes, but in New York City, for example, private-school enrollment is still only about 3% black. Now one unusual school is showing others how to break the racial barriers.

After eight years of teaching at Manhattan's Dalton School, Augustus Trowbridge felt frustrated in the face of his students' uniform brilliance, decided "there is no justification for the perpetuation of institutions that represent only one society." In 1966 he started his own Manhattan Country School, which has a 30% Negro and Puerto Rican enrollment, hopes to serve as "a private model for public education."

Trowbridge, 33, a private-school product of Philadelphia's Chestnut Hill Academy and Vermont's Putney School, shuns the liberal notion that racial differences should be ignored. Manhattan Country's Negro pupils, most of whom are from poverty areas in East Harlem, may wear "Afro" haircuts with pride, knowing that their white classmates from high-rise apartment buildings cannot match them. No one pretends that there are no racial tensions at the school--but whenever a child tosses a racial slur, it becomes a topic of freewheeling discussion in which teachers lead the students in discovering the falseness of their generalizations.

Picking Beads. Manhattan Country's 102 children and ten teachers occupy three floors of a baroque mansion just off Fifth Avenue. So far, the children are in six classes, ranging from nursery school to a combined fourth and fifth grade. A $60,000 grant from the Kettering Foundation helped start the school, but despite scattered donations from some 30 foundations, it is hard-pressed for the scholarship funds it needs to retain its racial mix. Half the students get financial aid in meeting the tuition, which runs from $1,050 to $1,700 a year. Already 500 applicants are competing for 25 openings next year. They will be chosen mainly on the basis of highly subjective interviews. "It's like having a tray of beads," says Associate Director Ruth Cooke. "You pick out those with a certain sparkle."

The curriculum accents learning by "discovery" and subtly prods the children to teach one another. To act out childhood fantasies, they create weird costumes and run off in them to Central Park, where, as one student wrote in his daily journal, he simply "spied on people." One classroom contains eight doves, a skink, boa constrictor, canary, goldfish, turtles and families of gerbils and mice. The mating habits of a pair of doves, Hawk and Paloma, led to a highly explicit discussion of reproduction, all duly recorded in a scrapbook labeled the "Dove Book." The animals provide a common community of interest--and creating a community is a main Trowbridge aim.

Being Themselves. Such togetherness is turned to individual advantage. When a nine-year-old boy with a reading problem was asked to help second-graders with their reading, he became so proud that he not only overcame his own difficulty, but proved a highly effective teacher as well. A Negro girl, too repressed to talk, was handed a doll by a white girl, who told her: "You're the mother--and mothers have got to talk to their children." She did.

The paradoxical school name stems from the fact that the school has a 300-acre farm in upstate New York, where students spend occasional weeks in nature study. The advantage of the rural experience, says Trowbridge, is that "the farm is neutral in a way the city is not--it makes the same demands on the deprived kids as it makes upon the middle-class kid." To avoid pressuring all students to conform to middle-class values, there is no grading or assignment to ability "tracks"--all in line with Trowbridge's theory that "if children were not always measured comparatively, they might have the incentive to be themselves."

Actually, the faculty finds that the white youngsters seem to benefit more from the integration than do the Negroes. They learn to admire the independence and street savvy of the black children, such as that of the five-year-old who pushes alone into crowded rush-hour buses to attend school--a trip that would frighten his sheltered white classmates. The school has been so successful that only one student has dropped out. He was withdrawn by parents who objected to such close association with children from the ghetto. His parents are middle-class Negroes.

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