I Learn from Children: An Adventure in Progressive Education

I LEARN

from

CHILDREN

I LEARN

from

CHILDREN

AN ADVENTURE

IN PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION

CAROLINE PRATT

INTRODUCTION BY

IAN FRAZIER

GROVE PRESS

New York

Copyright © 2014 City and Country School

Introduction by Ian Frazier copyright © 2014

Essay by Kate Turley copyright © 2014

Afterword by Susan Semel copyright © 2014

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This book was originally published in hardcover by Simon & Schuster in 1948.

First PERENNIAL LIBRARY edition published 1990.

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

Design by Gabriele Wilson

FIRST GROVE/ATLANTIC EDITION

ISBN: 978-0-8021-2270-4

eISBN: 978-0-8021-9215-8

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

www.groveatlantic.com

To

Helen Marot

Whose Spirit Still Lives

CONTENTS

Introduction by Ian Frazier

Author’s Foreword

1 What Is a School?

2 First Experiments

3 Trial Flight

4 School Begins

5 New Teachers for a New School

6 We Leave MacDougal Alley

7 Sevens—A Growing-up Year

8 The Eights Take a Job

9 More Jobs for Children

10 Book-Learning Has Its Turn

11 Plays—By and for Children

12 Democracy in Miniature

13 A Teacher Cooperative

14 The Education of Parents7

City and Country at One Hundred by Kate Turley

Caroline Pratt, City and Country School, and Progressive Education in the United States by Susan F. Semel

Acknowledgments

List of Illustrations

INTRODUCTION by IAN FRAZIER

This is a book written by a woman who did not worship books, and a statement of educational theory by an educator who usually said as little on that subject as she could get away with. In other words, it’s an enormous lucky break for people who want to know more about a seminal genius of American education, Caroline Pratt. She published the book in 1948, when she was eighty-one. By then she had retired from her life’s work of teaching young children and she wanted to leave this brief autobiographical narrative for those who would follow her revolutionary precedent. All her life she had relied on a deep channel of inspiration that existed mostly below the level of language. She distrusted language because the terms that were readily available—the catchphrases and nostrums of early-childhood education—could only distort the originality of her vision. In the later years of her life, setting aside her misgivings, she wrote this book and thereby produced an American document as important in its way as the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin or Frederick Douglass.

Caroline Pratt came from rural New York, in the exact center of the state. A pin pushed through Fayetteville, her hometown, would make a spindle around which a puzzle piece in the shape of the state could rotate without a wobble. Both sides of her family had been in the area for generations and there are geographic features named after them to this day. She thought of herself as a country person; her own self-education, in the fields and woods and farms of her childhood, remained for her the ideal of how children should learn. But like many millions of Americans of her time, she left the country for the city. In New York City this generation of rural transplants mingled with real immigrants, most of them from Europe, to produce a combination of plainspokenness and sophistication that gave American modernism its own particular style.

When you read the book you feel you know her. For me there’s an additional sense of kinship because her years of birth and death correspond almost exactly to my great-grandfather’s. Louis Wickham, my father’s mother’s father, was born in 1866 and died in 1954. Caroline Pratt died in the same year but was born in 1867. I knew my great-grandfather and loved to spend time with him. His affinity with young kids was on the order of Caroline Pratt’s, and I explain this by noting that both were Civil War babies. Both had fathers who fought in the war, and both grew up in the calmer period that followed it, when America became a playful nation (hot dogs, baseball, summer vacations, amusement parks, bicycles, postcards). My great-grandfather often put aside his duties as a lawyer to do things with his kids and grandkids, and as a very old man he paid unfeigned and flattering attention to me. As a war baby myself (from the famous Baby Boom generation after the Second World War), I think I understand where he and Caroline Pratt were coming from. In their generation, as in mine, the freshness and naturalness of childhood were supposed to renew the broken world.

The school Caroline Pratt founded in Greenwich Village turns one hundred years old in 2014. Originally she called it the Play School, but its students objected that it was a real school, not a play one, so she changed its name to the City and Country School. Over the years, the school grew, and it now accepts children between the ages of two and thirteen. This book’s reissue is a part of the school’s centennial celebration. I know the book is sometimes assigned to the oldest class—the Thirteens, as they are known at the school—for their summer reading. I would hope to write this introduction so the Thirteens can read it without throwing the book on the ground.

Thirteens, this is a book that describes how you have been educated. Caroline Pratt kept her pronouncements few and strong and simple, and perhaps the most important of them all is: I was in my twenties when I began to look for the child’s lost desire to learn. It seemed to me that if we could keep this desire alive through childhood and into adult life, we would release a force more precious and powerful for good than any physical force the scientists ever discovered for mankind’s use.

Just to the west of where Caroline Pratt grew up was a part of New York State called the Burned-Over District. The name came from the many religious movements, tent revival meetings, and spiritual enthusiasms that flared up in the frontier communities there in the early 1800s. Among the new faiths that began in the Burned-Over District was Mormonism; there were many other locally grown faiths and sects as well. From her early environment I see Caroline Pratt as a kind of frontier prophet, like the preachers who had traveled her state. But the faith she preached was a faith in children, and she expressed its essence in the statement above. She believed fervently in children’s inborn desire to learn—in their curiosity, good sense, and ability to take useful instruction from their encounters with the world. She even used religious terms for her calling, describing herself as a zealot for her ideas. That desire to learn was the natural energy she hoped to work with in her teaching, the way a well-planned irrigation system engages a river. It is not too much to say that her respect for the child’s native desire to learn approached the holy.

The problem was how to use that natural energy in an urban setting, with none of the obvious worldly resources of woods and farms and fields that had been available to her own youth. This book is the story of the journey of discovery that she made. From her early experience in teaching, and in learning the then-accepted methods of how to teach, she knew what she did not want. She did not want rote learning imposed on children from above. Classrooms used to feature desks and benches bolted to the floor. Young students of today may have trouble imagining that such furniture ever existed. Caroline Pratt abhorred bolted-down anything. The reason bolted-down desks are now so rare in elementary-level classrooms may be at least partly because of her. Any signs of educational rigidity dismayed her. In her vision, what happened in the classroom should be fluid and come not from above, from the teachers, but from the children.

How to bring the world and its inherent quality of instruction into the classroom? She thought about the problem and came up with a solution as simple as the most brilliant solutions often are: blocks. She had taught manual arts and knew how to work with wood. From pieces of maple she made sets of building blocks in basic shapes, each shape in proportion with the others so they could adjoin each other in simple multiples. That makes them sound more complicated than they are—everybody who reads this probably remembers them, and played with them in childhood. Caroline Pratt’s blocks, called Unit Blocks, became the most widely used elementary-level playtime blocks in the country. The ingenuity of their design was that they brought the physical, instructive world inside. They were farms and woods and fields made portable, stackable, maneuverable. In sufficient supply and with enough open floor space, the blocks could take children’s natural curiosity and teach them with only the lightest teacherly intervention from above.

As a child I had a set of these blocks and sometimes wondered why I found them so unsatisfactory. When I played with them their blankness frustrated me, and I usually returned to my painted tin fort and plastic Indians and cowboys. After I read I Learn from Children and visited City and Country School, I understood my problem. You need a whole lot of these blocks, a big expanse of floor space, and other kids to collaborate with. Social interaction is one of the principal skills they teach. Under the right circumstances kids build amazingly with them. To see the Unit Block replica of New York City’s Grand Central Station constructed by the Sixes (the six-year-olds) at City and Country is to witness one of the wonders of the kid world. You no longer question how the Egyptians could have built the pyramids.

A key fact about City and Country School is that Jackson Pollock once was a janitor there. The school started in a three-room apartment in the Village, moved a few times, and in 1921 settled into the location that became its permanent home (expanded over the years) on West Twelfth Street. Caroline Pratt originally wanted the school to include a summer campus upstate but that effort was soon abandoned, and survives only in the name. To some extent the Village itself formed the school, and maybe vice-versa. The school’s experimental structure or lack of structure frightened parents who wanted their kids to be sure to get into a competitive college, but artist parents, plentiful in that part of town, took to it and enrolled their children. For awhile Pete Seeger was the music teacher.

People sometimes referred to Caroline Pratt’s methods as expressionist education. She and the school were part of a greater excitement of the time. With her lifelong companion, Helen Marot, she lived what could be described as a radical life. In 1914, when the school was founded, Caroline and Helen were also caring for two young children of Margaret Sanger, the birth-control advocate, who had fled the country for fear of prosecution. Helen, a Quaker, worked as a labor organizer and edited the Socialist publication The Masses and, after that was suppressed by the government, The Dial. A great affection for their lively neighborhood informed the school from the start. Everything had to be firsthand with Caroline Pratt, so she took the children out into the streets and over to the docks and the river to observe and ask questions of coal haulers and bargemen and post office workers. Nobody had a greater reverence for everyday reality than she did. (And hence her wariness toward books, especially fantasy books: they were not firsthand.) She was trying to produce citizens for a new, hoped-for, socially just society.

What the children learned always grew from their firsthand projects. The Sevens began reading and writing as they drew up plans for their megaconstructions of blocks and devised names for streets and buildings. The Eights operated the school store and learned basic arithmetic from it, and social studies topics like local history and basic manufacturing (the crucial part of pencils came from graphite mines near Lake Champlain, as reading these pages will inform you). The Nines ran a post office for the school and picked up more mathematics along the way, as well as communication systems and local geography. The Tens hand-lettered all the school’s posters and invitations and signs, the Elevens were in charge of the school’s printing presses, the Twelves made toys for the younger children and put together a monthly school publication, and the Thirteens took photographs, painted, made furniture, and did other handyman jobs. All these pursuits branched off into different areas of learning.

Today the Eights and the Nines have switched jobs, the Tens make signs, the Elevens are in charge of the printing press, and the Twelves help with a younger class, the Fours. The Thirteens run the school newspaper and prepare for standardized testing and high school, where they will probably encounter a more conventional style of education.

City and Country School now occupies a complex of buildings between Twelfth and Thirteen Streets in the block between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. When I first came to New York forty years ago I spent some time at the office of an architect across from what is now the main entrance, on Thirteenth Street. In the many times I went on that street I had no idea the school was there; New York is an almost infinite collection of unguessed-at universes. On a weekday morning at about seven forty-five (I was never awake at that hour, in those years), the kids were waiting to enter brimming with the raw energy Caroline Pratt was eager to use. The door opens, the kids hurry inside. The classroom buildings have four floors, and the sound of feet running up and down stairs begins a hive-like echoing clamor.

Many of the school’s classrooms resemble familiar adult workspaces—like a political headquarters, or a shop floor, or the writers’ room of a live television show. The kids don’t have to sit still or be always quiet. They walk around, exchange ideas, show each other their work, consult. The buildings enclose an open courtyard area in the center where big wooden boxes and boards provide a large-scale equivalent of the Unit Blocks. Kids move these objects around and make forts and vehicles and high-rises with them. When I was there, a girl of perhaps five walked up a plank to the top of one of the boxes and leaned back and crossed her arms and surveyed the scene. A boy was standing in a box among some tilted smaller boxes arrayed with planks. I asked him what he was doing and he said, This is a speedboat for doctors and it can transform into anything. It has a telescope that can look down into the ocean. This part is the flashlight and X-ray camera. This boat can also be a submarine—you just push this button and swipe your card here and it will go down.

Sarah Whittier, who teaches one of the classes of Twelves, is a woman with high cheekbones and pale blue eyes who graduated from City and Country in 1967. Her classroom is the same one she had as a student when she was a Nine. She told me that no connections she made in any school she attended afterward were as close as those from City and Country. She and her classmates are still in touch almost every day. This place was and is our extended family, she said. "I still remember the smell of autumn, the thrill of school starting again. We were dumbfounded when kids who didn’t go here told us how much they hated school. We loved school."

Ann Roberts, the teacher of the combined class of Thirteens, comes from Fairfield, Iowa. She got involved with C&C when she was looking for a school for her son and heard the students singing with real heart, one of those old songs like ‘Drill, Ye Tarriers, Drill’ as she walked by on the street. I came in and took a look and it reminded me of my grade school in Iowa. It was a little dowdy. I liked the way the pipes were painted. In my grade school, for no reason that I can recall, we were taught one day how to make a bed, with hospital corners. I’ve carried that skill with me the rest of my life. That’s the same kind of teaching you find here.

Gino Crocetti, another graduate (’59), has taught science, math, and thinking skills at C&C for thirty-four years. The students’ science projects range from making sail cars to melting zinc out of coins to going online and seeing what the Mars Rovers are up to today. Caroline Pratt wanted kids not just to learn, but to learn how to learn, and to take that ability with them on into their lives, he told me. "I try to teach them what it is to know something. You begin with a curiosity in yourself and proceed outward from it. And once you do know something—once you’ve followed your curiosity and mastered a particular question—then you’ll always have a touchstone. For the rest of your life you’ll be able to tell when you really do know something, and when you really don’t."

Three hundred and sixty-eight students from 252 families attended City and Country during the 2013–2014 school year. The school receives vastly more applications for admission than it has places. This fact can depress you when you think of all the kids who could benefit from going to the school. Caroline Pratt knew what she knew and what she didn’t. Her inspiration for a school for early childhood education did not extend to every other grade level or size of school. She resisted impulses to expand too much, and City and Country still resists them. Others of her strictures have been set aside. Books are vital to the school, including books of fantasy. The lack of firsthand knowledge provided by reading Harry Potter stories is not much worried about. She also thought that kids should not be taken to baseball games and she despaired at what she considered to be the unhealthy bond boys had with their fathers over baseball. No prophet gets every last thing right.

If C&C will never exist as a massive plant or national franchise, it has been widely helpful as an example. Scores of educators visit it each year. Caroline Pratt’s ideas have worked themselves into the educational fabric not only in this country but abroad. Preschool education in Iceland seems to be largely based on her teachings, and dozens of Icelandic teachers come to Thirteenth Street annually. She couldn’t patent her Unit Blocks—in them she had discovered something too basic to claim, as if she had invented water—but their acceptance by day care centers and nursery and elementary schools is by now close to unanimous. Designed to help children mimic architecture, the blocks ended up influencing architecture itself. Many modern buildings evoke a grown-up architect’s memories of Unit Blocks, stacked boldly and unconventionally. And her focus on the school’s neighborhood to provide instruction and a grounding in community may have provided an early model for the neighborhood-focused format of children’s TV shows like Sesame Street.

Read this book enough and you’ll see evidence of Caroline Pratt’s influence all around. She had more inspiration than words to express it and she worked toward its realization every day and half blindly, the way an artist does. Her gifts outstripped her need for self-promotion; among people of her time who significantly influenced the future she remains among the lesser-known. Her book not only teaches, it omits to say anything it isn’t sure of and leaves room for interpretation and discussion, like the Constitution. Often when you see this book in the hands of educators it’s marked up with pencil notes and flagged with Post-its. I Learn from Children reveals the deep discoveries of an original mind; long after its first publication, this book continues to live, as true visions do.

AUTHOR’S FOREWORD

How utterly the life of a child in this country has changed during my lifetime I would scarcely believe if I had not seen it happen. Three-quarters of a century have spanned the change: my father was a Civil War veteran; I remember the day we all went down to the store to see my mother make our first call on a telephone; I remember watching the explosive progress of the first automobile down our village street.

Put it this way, as the statistics put it: before 1867, the year I was born, only one out of every six people lived in cities of more than 8,000 inhabitants, and there were only 141 such cities; by 1900, one out of three people lived in such a city, and the number of those cities was 547. (I quote from Leo Huberman’s America, Incorporated.) Nearly half a century has passed since 1900, and the transition from rural and village life to a big-city industrial civilization is a half century further along.

I have seen the world of the child grow smaller and smaller. From the wide wonderful place of my childhood, it has become a narrow cell, walled about with the mysteries of complex machinery and the hazards of a motor-driven urban setting.

When I grew up in Fayetteville, New York, school was not very important to children who could roam the real world freely for their learning. We did not merely stand by while the work of our simpler world was done; I drove the wagon in haying time, sitting on top of the swaying load, all the way to the barn. At ten, my great-aunt used to say, I could turn a team of horses and a wagon in less space than a grown man needed to do it.

No one had to tell us where milk came from, or how butter was made. We helped to harvest wheat, saw it ground into flour in the mill on our own stream; I baked bread for the family at thirteen. There was a paper mill, too, on our stream; we could learn the secrets of half a dozen other industries merely by walking through the open door of a neighbor’s shop.

No wonder school was a relatively unimportant place—a place where we learned only the mechanical tools, the three Rs, and a smattering about things far away and long ago. Our really important learning, the learning how to live in the world into which we were born and how to participate in its work, was right at hand, outside the schoolhouse walls.

This is the change I have seen, from a world in which children could learn as they grew in it, to a world so far beyond the grasp of children that only the school can present it to them in terms which they can understand, can prepare