Mitchell, Lucy Sprague 1878-1967

MITCHELL, LUCY SPRAGUE 1878-1967

Educator, founder of the bank streetschool of education

A Different Path

Lucy Sprague Mitchell, writer, teacher, and social reformer, is remembered primarily for her work in building experimental schools and as a researcher who carefully studied children's language-learning patterns. At a time when many educated women who sought careers spurned the notion of marriage and family, Sprague chose to marry economist Wesley Clair Mitchell and raise four children while pursuing a full career.

Background

Lucy Sprague, the daughter of a wealthy Chicago family, grew up in an archetypal Victorian household. She viewed her mother as "ardent but suppressed, delightful but tragic" and eagerly embraced the notion of education as a means of escaping a similar fate. She was largely self-educated before college but attended Radcliffe as an undergraduate and graduated magna cum laude with honors in philosophy (the first honors awarded to a Radcliffe student from that department) in 1900. Like many female graduates of the day, Sprague found herself after four years of exciting college life back at home with her family. At the turn of the century a popular manual for girls titled After College, What? warned that for many educated women the answer to the question of the title was "deep and perplexing unhappiness" and "a decided homesickness for the stimulation of college life." Lucy Sprague discovered that this was true in her own case, and when in 1903 she was offered the newly created position of dean of women at the University of California, Berkeley, she eagerly accepted.

Professional Educator

Sprague was a competent, efficient, and pioneering dean. Toward the end of her deanship a wave of education in sex hygiene swept the country, and she was required to become actively involved with issues of sexuality. Under the leadership of reform-minded doctors and women's-rights advocates, a "social purity" campaign had been launched to end the "double standard of conduct and the evils of prostitution and disease. Dean Sprague, who admitted that she had scarcely heard of gonorrhea or syphilis before she conducted research on the topics, held discussion groups on social diseases with women students until all twelve hundred of them had been reached. Although she enjoyed her work in college, Sprague yearned for the opportunity to learn about nonteaching professions for women from some of the leading pioneers of women's work in New York City. Two events affected her decision to leave Berkeley: her father's death and her acceptance of Mitchell's marriage proposal. Sprague's inheritance made her independently wealthy, and Mitchell offered to conduct his profession anywhere she decided she wanted to live. They married in 1912 and settled in New York, where Mitchell joined Columbia University's faculty and Lucy explored her professional options.

Influence of John Dewey and Edward Thoradike

The Mitchells were friends with the philosopher-educator John Dewey and his wife during the years 1913-1917, and Lucy Mitchell and John Dewey often discussed the philosophy of education, especially the ideas Dewey espoused in Democracy and Education (1916). Edward Thorndike also influenced her thinking when she attended his classes on the application of science and statistics to education. In 1914 Mitchell worked giving intelligence tests to mentally retarded children, and in January 1915 she convinced the New York Board of Education to establish the Psychological Survey, an agency whose long-range goal was to establish mental and motor performance norms for children from ages eight to thirteen. Through this work during the next two years, she gained expertise as a tester as well as new knowledge about children's abilities and the learning process. Her work in setting up the Psychological Survey established her among the community of experimental, progressive educators in New York.

Contributions to Early Childhood Education

Mitchell then turned her professional interest and her own fortune to the study of early schooling, even at the kindergarten and prekindergarten levels. In 1916, along with her friend Harriet Johnson and others, Mitchell masterminded and sponsored the following innovations in education: a Bureau of Educational Experiments, a school to implement and experiment with the principles of progressive education, a laboratory to record and analyze how and why young children learn, a teachers' college to promote progressive methods, a workshop for writers of children's literature, and a bulletin to disseminate the collaborators' findings from their research. Years later, in 1950, the Bureau of Educational Experiments became certified as the Bank Street College of Education. The school that Mitchell founded served as a model for subsequent early education programs that were considered "developmentally appropriate." But perhaps the greatest contribution of Mitchell and her collaborators was her lifelong focus on the way children learn. Her "Here and Now" stories, published in 1921, set a precedent for realistic children's literature that appealed to prereaders' interest in the things in their world. Programs for young children popularized by Mitchell and other progressives were labeled "flamingly radical" and "loony" during the 1910s, but by the 1950s these same "developmentally appropriate" schools were considered traditional nursery schools. Lucy Sprague Mitchell and her colleagues professionalized the study of early childhood education, and their legacy lived on in programs such as Head Start and in the work of the Bank Street College of Education.

Sources:

Joyce Antler, Lucy Sprague Mitchell: The Making of a Modern Woman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987);

Polly Greenburg, "Early Childhood Education as Social Reform," Young Children (July 1987): 70-84.