Caroline Pratt

Greetings! I am Caroline Pratt founder of New York’s City & Country School and my wooden block units. I am known throughout Progressive Education circles for my beliefs about how children learn. I stand firm in my belief against “the repression of formal education”. I believe the use of open-ended work materials offer children the opportunity to recreate the world around them. You can read one of my books published in 1948, I Learn from Children. I truly have taken great pleasure in learning from children and I encourage you to do the same. Do not copy my activities as a blueprint. Watch and learn from your children letting them guide the learning.
I lived from 1867-1954. After graduating from Teachers’ College I moved to Philadelphia to teach at the Philadelphia Normal School for Girls. While refining my ideas about teaching, I learned quite a bit from the Quaker people. “I began to see education not as an end in itself, but as the first step in progress which should continue during a lifetime. The schools job was to begin education, not finish it.” After teaching first grade for five years in my hometown of Fayetteville, New York, I planned to become a kindergartener. This was a radical idea in the Victorian times. Before now children were looked at sinful and morally corrupt. I rejected this notion along with other Progressives like Jean Rousseau, John Dewey, Johann Pestalozzi, and Friedich Frobel. We viewed childhood as a unique and distinct time in life characterized by innocence and a view of children as essentially good. We saw play and activity as central to growth and development. I varied from others in my belief of play though. I wanted the children to guide their own play, unlike some of my counterparts who encouraged children to be active through controlled activities directed by a teacher.
In my day people wanted to call me a feminist, but I preferred to be called a radical. I chose not to marry and committed myself to a woman centered lifestyle. I scoffed at the notion of women’s role as “natural” teachers and mothers. For me, teaching young children is critical to democracy and should not be left in the hands of non-experts.
In 1913 I opened Play School in Greenwich Village where my students were free to be creative and learn through play. We later changed the name of Play School to City & Country School per the children’s request. They felt they worked too hard for people to think they only played at school. The children think of this as their school as opposed to the grown ups’.
You won’t find textbooks, workbooks, and test at our school. Lessons are based from the interest of children and field trips around our neighborhood. All activities have to be meaningful for the students, not the teacher. Children learn to create a democratic society through their social interactions at play. You will find my wooden block units I am known for. John Dewey praised my wooden unit blocks. Children 2-7 use them as part of their play. They use them to create, solve problems, and challenge themselves. Real world experiences are recreated in class using blocks, paper, crayons, and clay. There is no set curriculum, no subjects, no grading, no direct instruction, and especially no reading. Subject matter is taught as necessary as it emerges through play. For example learning arithmetic takes place in the context of making change when playing store. As children are ready, they begin authoring books about their play and experiences.
Our “eights” and up students have important jobs where they run the school store. They display goods, serve customers, handle money, and record transactions. They even write to wholesalers for supplies, balance the books, and pay the bills of the school store. Students rotate jobs and share responsibility as their ability allows. You see this “play” is work. Real work that is important for the growth of our students and meaningful to them as well.
My only rule is this: students have to work. Work at play. Play is not to release the inner child, or for amusement, play is serious business of building democracy. I believe “ You will not find a child anywhere who will sit still and idle unless he is sick – or in a traditional classroom.”
Through my time learning from children and fighting against the traditional curriculum, I have had my struggles with parents. I have a difficult time seeing them as experts. Our largest area of contention is about reading. “parents are anxious to have their child begin reading, they say, because reading is the beginning of their education…my entire life, and our school, and this very book have been devoted to the cause of demonstrating that education does not begin with books, but with life; that books are only a part of a child’s learning, not even the most important.”
How would my thought “education does not begin with books, but with life; that books are only a part of a child’s learning, not even the most important” go over with parents at your school? If you are a parent and are becoming an expert on curriculum, how do you feel about this thought?