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The Beginnings
In the year 1916, conventional wisdom had it that children were to be
seen and not heard. Typically, public education consisted of a teacher,
usually a woman, standing in front of her class and lecturing or conducting
drills.
Yet there were in New York City at that time imaginative women who asked
whether it had to be that way. Harriet Johnson was one, Caroline Pratt
another, Elizabeth Irwin yet another. And into their midst, on the eve
of World War I, came a young woman with a rich academic background, a
receptive mind, and boundless energy and determination: Lucy Sprague Mitchell.
Mrs. Mitchell had been the first Dean of Women at the University of California
at Berkeley. She knew John Dewey, the revolutionary educator, and was
influenced by his personality and writings and by the writing and thinking
of other humanists of the day. In New York, she was caught up in the new
milieu and was stirred by the activism of her new friends. Like them,
Lucy Mitchell looked upon the building of a new kind of education as essential
to the building of a better world, a more rational and humane society.
Mrs. Mitchell therefore decided to devote her life to improving schools
for children. She and the colleagues she drew around her knew that reform
meant not just a strengthening of the kinds of schools then in existence,
but a fundamental change in schools – partly in structure, but most
of all in the concept of how children learn. She determined to draw together
a group of thinkers from different fields to study a variety of new experimental
schools. Mrs. Mitchell discussed her ideas with her cousin, Elizabeth
Coolidge, a musician and scholar who had recently inherited a considerable
fortune. Elizabeth liked what she heard and asked for a detailed written
plan for what was to become the Bureau of Educational Experiments.
With the help of her husband Wesley Clair Mitchell, a leading economist
of the time, and her friend Harriet Johnson, Mrs. Mitchell drafted a proposal
for the Bureau, and it was accepted. Mrs. Coolidge promised to underwrite
the venture with $50,000 annually for ten years – with two unusual
provisions: that there be no reports on how the money was spent and that
the entire sum be spent every year.
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