Margaret Wise Brown

by Leonard S. Marcus

  Whatever Margaret’s private reservations may have been as the semester got under way that October, she soon decided that Bank Street was a truly exciting place to be. For one thing, she had never before been so busy. Mondays through Wednesdays she continued as a teacher’s assistant in the Little Red School House. There were thirty-five eight-year-olds, she told Marguerite Hearsey, “and they are all alive.”22 On Thursdays and Fridays academic and arts classes met at 69 Bank Street from nine in the morning till seven in the evening, with little time set aside for lunch, recreation, or rest. With a sense of having pledged herself to what she ebulliently called the “service of discoverie” (quoting Samuel Johnson), she plunged headlong into Bank Street’s varied activities.

  During the 1930s Bank Street was the scene of a robust social experiment which after nearly two decades of intensive spade work and much progress was ripe for a fresh harvest of accomplishments. One aspect of the school’s considerable appeal for Margaret and many others was that it operated as a laboratory where learning proceeded as much by observation and experiment as by formal classroom study. Margaret and her fellow trainees were but one of three main groups working side by side. A dedicated core faculty of psychologists, educational reformers, anthropologists, and artists taught the trainees. Both groups had regular contact with the children and staff of the Bank Street nursery school. The trainees helped the faculty carry out their research studies, in which the children were the subjects; they also helped in the day-to-day supervision of the nursery school and “cooperating” day schools for older children like the Little Red School House and the Rosemary Junior School of Greenwich, Connecticut.

  The central idea that unified Bank Street’s varied endeavors was the assumption, basic to the American progressive schools movement as a whole, that to teach children effectively one had first to understand how the young experienced reality at every stage of their natural development. At traditional schools, including virtually all American public schools at the time of the founding of the Bureau of Educational Experiments in 1916, children were treated as incomplete adults who chiefly required lessons in discipline and in certain skills—the three Rs, civics, and other subjects—as preparation for their future lives in the marketplace or at home. Progressive educators maintained that the young had legitimate interests and needs quite apart from these.

  Almost from the start, a major goal of the bureau’s faculty and staff had been to contribute to the establishment of an accurate, flexible definition of children’s developmental stages, a towering intellectual challenge grounded in the work of many others—theorists as diverse as John Dewey, Edward L. Thorndike, and Sigmund Freud. The ultimate aim of Bank Street teaching, in turn, was to provide children with learning situations in which to develop as fully as possible in accordance with their individual potentials. Margaret and her thirty-odd classmates were encouraged to discover their own practical means to that end through a continual open-minded give-and-take between the theories which they studied in class and their own daily encounters with children.

  Bank Street was unique in the United States as a place where the three distinct functions of developmental research, teacher training, and nursery-level education—each of which was a focus of numerous experimental efforts around the country—had been thoroughly integrated. The school’s organizational scheme was itself an expression of one of the most fundamental principles of Bank Street’s educational philosophy, that of “relationship thinking,” the notion that understanding is enhanced whenever the individual elements of a question are seen in relation to each other and to the larger whole. Even the boxy four-story structure (once a Fleischmann’s Yeast factory) which housed the school offered up to visitors a striking illustration of the concept of relationship thinking. Indoors at 69 Bank Street, exposed utility pipes had been color-coded in red and blue, so that the building’s interior functioned as a working diagram of itself, a sort of outsize educational toy highlighting the web of technology on which daily life depends.

  Margaret’s new environment was an informal, noisy, bustling place where no one person seemed to be in charge unless, as a staff member wryly suggested, it was the janitor. It was a “rabbit warren,” as one of the school’s numerous visiting observers recalled, a labyrinth of cramped and cluttered offices, chockablock corridors, and spacious nursery playrooms.

  The staff of a dozen or so—the “sane maniacs” another visitor called them—were selected with a view toward representing the widest possible range of theoretical outlooks. While a materialist psychologist tracked changes in the children’s cranial measurements in a study of the relationship of skull size to intellectual capacity, others watched the nursery children for fresh bits of behavioral data or lectured the staff and students on Freud. When a German emigré who had studied with Maria Montessori appeared one day, eager to enroll in the teacher training program but unable to pay tuition, she was promptly hired as the school’s librarian. When an educational toymaker whose ideas interested the staff needed a workshop, space was cleared for his use near the freight elevator. During Margaret’s time at the school, an aspiring young publisher of experimental children’s books, William R. Scott, was also given space, an “office” in the school’s projection closet. As in the Vanderhoef household of Kaufman and Hart’s comedy, You Can’t Take It with You, many who came to visit 69 Bank Street ended by staying.

  The one hundred or so children enrolled in the nursery school at any one time came from all parts of the city and from diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds. There were children of celebrities—the son of actress Ruth Gordon and producer-director Jed Harris, the daughter of artist Ben Shahn, and others. While many of the children were from families of privilege, the school also offered a substantial number of scholarships in a deliberate experiment in democracy carried out on the scale of the classroom.

  The impression that no single individual had primary authority in the running of the school was, however, largely an illusion cultivated by Lucy Sprague Mitchell, the central figure responsible for the founding of the Bureau of Educational Experiments and a woman of idealism, practicality, and selfless ambition. A levelheaded visionary in the progressive mold of Jane Addams and John Dewey, she considered herself above all a social reformer. Her interest in education was rooted in her commitment to democratic values and the belief that a democratic society could flourish only if all its members were given the chance to develop to their fullest potential and taught to work together cooperatively. Lucy Mitchell was genuinely determined that Bank Street should, through all its activities, serve the world as a model democracy based on ultimate respect for children’s developmental needs and priorities. However, if it became necessary from time to time to play the benevolent despot in order to further that goal, she was prepared to do so.

  In 1935, when Margaret first met her, Lucy Mitchell was fifty-seven years old and at the height of her powers. Everything about her seemed larger-than-life. A taller than average woman, Mitchell had a sparkling but somewhat formal manner that many people found intimidating. “Don’t talk while I interrupt,” she good-naturedly chided everyone at the school at one time or another.23

  Her loose-fitting, deep-pocketed dresses and long beaded necklaces presented a curiously unstudied contrast to her patrician bearing. An incorrigible chain-smoker, Mitchell sometimes absently lit a second cigarette while a first still dangled from her hand. She often seemed to be in an extraordinary hurry and she spoke in a rapid but deliberate deep voice which broke off in mid-sentence to begin a different thought without the least regard for those unable to keep pace with her racing intellect.

  As a seminar leader, researcher, student advisor, benefactor, and writer, Mitchell continually energized and inspired those around her. With a knowledge of literature, geography, comparative religion, philosophy, history, and current affairs which was at once encyclopedic and lightly held, she displayed a great knack for conveying the clear essence of any subject that engaged her curiosity.
Equally important, she made others—Margaret not least among them—eager to learn.

  Born in Chicago in 1878 into an enormously wealthy family of transplanted New Englanders (her father, Otho Sprague, was a founding partner of Sprague Warner and Company, the wholesale foodstuffs concern later known as General Foods), she was denied nothing in childhood for “financial reasons,” as she later recalled.

  But I was denied, as a child, all the art expressions that I think are very deep in me. I was never allowed to choose the color of a dress because I was told I wasn’t old enough. My father was really upset if he found that I had written anything. When I was 7 or 8 I wrote poems by the yard, but my terror in life was that he would find them. I would actually have been disciplined.24

  Her mother had been both a “delightful and tragic” person. “Mother,” she recalled, “was an artist by temperament, and . . . might well have been a professional musician; she had a quality that I can only describe gently as gypsy-like. She was naturally a very impulsive and very affectionate person, but shy about expressing her affection.” Otho Sprague, ten years older than his wife, had “very little sympathy with that type of spontaneity.” He was, in his daughter’s later estimate, “a very controlled man and a businessman,” who treated her mother (to whom she thought him genuinely devoted) “like an older daughter.”25

  Through her father’s philanthropic activities in Chicago, young Lucy Sprague became aware of the social and educational experiments of Jane Addams and John Dewey; by the time she was in her teens, their ideas and activities interested her greatly. At Radcliffe College, where she majored in philosophy and was elected president of the Class of 1900, she took full advantage of the freedom that living away from home afforded her and pursued her intellectual interests with all her considerable might and main.

  Not least of the revelatory insights gleaned in four years of intensive study was the realization that learning itself might be an impetuous form of play.

  When I first heard of [William] James’ theory that behavior produces emotion, as well as that emotion produces behavior, I resolved to test it. These men in the philosophy department were highly individualized in their behavior as well as in their thinking. If I behaved like one of them, would I not feel like him? . . . For a week, I walked breezily, swinging my arms like William James. I let my mind and my speech fly off in a tangent if it felt like doing so.26

  This delightful experiment suggests the young woman’s deepening accord with James’ underlying faith in firsthand experience. In a series of public lectures (published in 1898 as Talks to Teachers) James argued that the mental growth of children was certain to be advanced by regular exposure to non-cerebral, firsthand experiences such as manual work with different tools and materials, play with a variety of toys, and exploratory trips outside the classroom. “A child brought up alone at home”—James might almost have been describing Lucy Sprague’s own first years when, as a sickly, house-bound child, she haunted her father’s library—“with no acquaintance with anything but the printed page, is always afflicted with a certain remoteness from the material facts of life,”27 a remoteness that detracted from one’s subsequent ability to realize one’s potential as a mature individual and citizen.

  A few years after graduation, Lucy Sprague won appointment as the first dean of women at the University of California at Berkeley and the school’s first female English instructor. In the spirit of James and Dewey, she not only counseled and lectured her students but also marched them down to orphanages, settlement houses, poor houses, and the San Francisco docks in an effort to acquaint them at firsthand with the world that lay beyond the privileged ranges of their academic studies.

  Despite her innovative “curriculum of experience” and the challenging responsibilities that went with her dual appointment, she grew restless at Berkeley.28 In the fall of 1911, she made a three-month visit to New York for the purpose of undertaking a series of exploratory “apprenticeships” with leading figures in the city’s progressive reform movement.29

  In January of 1912 she accepted the long-standing marriage proposal of a respected young Berkeley economist, Wesley Clair Mitchell (known affectionately as Robin), who agreed to move east with her permanently. During the couple’s first years in New York’s intellectually vibrant Greenwich Village, Lucy Mitchell continued to investigate the city’s wide range of ongoing social reformist experiments. As she did so, she collected more mentors.

  From John Dewey, whose lectures at Teachers College she began attending regularly, she acquired a powerful conceptual framework within which to focus her own still fragmentary ambitions and ideas. In the series of lectures that formed the basis of his monumental Democracy and Education, she heard Dewey argue that education was essentially an organic process whose true end was the nurturing of human growth. It followed from this that democracy, as the social system that allowed for the freest possible exchange of information and ideas, provided the optimal conditions for education to flourish and that, conversely, every classroom ought to be viewed as a democracy in microcosm, as a place where individuality was valued and where children learned to act as responsible members of an interdependent community.

  In Edward Thorndike’s researches, Lucy saw the promise of a reliable system for measuring individual differences in children’s mentalities and thus of acquiring a scientific basis upon which to design educational programs to suit individual needs. Thorndike’s use of statistical analysis, moreover, showed her that techniques with which she was already somewhat familiar through her husband’s economics research might also be applied to the field of educational reform.

  Harriet M. Johnson, whom Mitchell once described as having “a genius for friendship and a genius for work,” was among the most original thinkers within the city’s educational reform avant-garde.30 In 1916, when a substantial sum of Sprague family money became available to her, Lucy asked her husband, Harriet Johnson, Evelyn Dewey (the coauthor with her father of Schools of Tomorrow), Caroline Pratt (whose radically experimental Play School, in Greenwich Village, had replaced traditional pedagogy with block-building, expressive dance, and a host of other group-oriented opportunities for “self-education”), and a few other trusted advisors to help her plan a central clearinghouse for information about all the varied educational experiments going on nationwide. This Working Council soon greatly enlarged their plan to include the direct sponsorship of a wide range of worthy experiments, all to be coordinated by a newly formed Bureau of Educational Experiments.

  Among the bureau’s first ventures were projects relating to psychological testing, sex education in the public schools, and nutritional research. Through the bureau, Lucy soon became deeply involved in Caroline Pratt’s Play School as a benefactor and teacher. By 1918, she was also the mother of four children, two of them adopted. Determined to resolve the dualism of motherhood and career, she became increasingly interested in the nursery school movement, then a new American phenomenon. In 1919, the bureau adopted Harriet Johnson’s plan for a “scientific” nursery school; it opened that year in a building owned by the Mitchells.

  It was at this time that Lucy Sprague Mitchell, as a teacher, mother, and frequenter of the bureau’s own experimental preschool, embarked on what was to become one of the central focuses of her own (and eventually of the bureau’s) research: the study of language development and its relationship to other aspects of the child’s emerging self. As Lucy worked with and observed young children, she was struck by the playfulness and inventiveness of their everyday speech. Recalling her own childhood impulse to write poetry, which her father had suppressed, she resolved to understand language development and to discover how parents and teachers might best foster the process.

  Her first major goal was to arrive at a general theory of the stages of language development during the child’s early years. To do this, she committed herself to recording word for word a significant sample of both the casual remarks and more organized group discussions of the nurs
ery and Play School children—a four-year-old’s comment, for example, that “sometimes there is a sunny [i.e., full] moon, sometimes half a moon”; a conversation among five-year-olds about American history:

  G: Saturday is George Washington’s birthday.

  E: But George Washington is dead.

  J: Yes, he lived thousands and thousands of years ago.

  M: He was the first boss of this country.

  J: No, he was the president of New York.31

  Thousands upon thousands of such linguistic fragments were collected by her and others associated with the bureau. Lucy herself was always ready for impromptu notetaking. In the big pockets of her gypsy-style dresses she kept a supply of small stenographic record books, scores of which she filled with children’s words. As the mounds of data accumulated, she patiently sifted for patterns.

  Lucy Mitchell’s investigations in this field were of pathfinding importance. Among the more striking insights to emerge early on was the observation that “communication is not the earliest impulse that leads to the use of language”—a discovery that ran directly counter to the most basic assumptions of traditional pedagogy, with its emphasis on vocabulary building and early mastery of the mechanics of grammar, syntax, and spelling. “Children,” she was convinced, “begin to play with sounds long before words have any meaning to them.” It was the “rhythm, sound quality and patterns of sound” they first responded to and which constituted the

  chief elements of language as an art medium. . . . Even [Jean] Piaget . . . suggests that children will soon outgrow the childish pleasures in rhythm and sound qualities and speak sensibly like grownups. And so they do! To Piaget, this dropping of art elements from language is progress, the overcoming of an immaturity. To me it is a tragedy, for to me a child’s pleasure in rhythm, sound quality and pattern is the seed from which literature grows.32