About the Graduate School

A Credo for Bank Street

Our Credo | The Bank Street Approach | Our Conceptual Framework

What potentialities in human beings--children, teachers, and ourselves--do we want to see develop?

• A zest for living that comes from taking in the world with all five senses alert.
• Lively intellectual curiosities that turn the world into an exciting laboratory and keep one ever a learner.
• Flexibility when confronted with change and ability to relinquish patterns that no longer fit the present.
• The courage to work, unafraid and efficiently, in a world of new needs, new problems, and new ideas.
• Gentleness combined with justice in passing judgments on other human beings.
• Sensitivity, not only to the external formal rights of the "other fellow," but to him as another human being seeking a good life through his own standards.
• A striving to live democratically, in and out of schools, as the best way to advance our concept of democracy.

Our credo demands ethical standards as well as scientific attitudes. Our work is based on the faith that human beings can improve the society they have created.

-- Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Founder of Bank Street