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Curriculum: Educational Philosophy

History

The Bank Street School for Children traces its beginning to 1916 when Lucy Sprague Mitchell founded the Bureau of Educational Experiments as part of an interdisciplinary collaboration among teachers, researchers, a social worker, and a pediatrician. Lucy Sprague Mitchell and her colleagues, among them Harriet Johnson, set out to discover what kinds of environments were optimal for children's growth and development. They believed in the close relationship between childhood development and learning and understood that children's emotional lives are inseparable from their learning, interests, and motivation. Out of that small, early experimental effort grew the Harriet Johnson Nursery School, for children ages three to five. Together with eight other progressive schools in New York City and its suburbs, the Harriet Johnson Nursery School collaborated with the Bureau in its work with, and later preparation of, teachers, to create and maintain the kinds of learning environments the Bureau believed best supported and stimulated children's learning and growth.

The School for Children, as it is known today, reorganized in 1954 to expand the ages it served until, in 1967, the first class of "thirteens" graduated. When the College moved uptown in 1970, the School for Children expanded from 250 to 350 students. Today it enrolls approximately 430 students between the ages of three and fourteen. As the school grew in size and complexity, the Family Center was brought into its administrative purview, and After School and Summer Camp programs were established. All of these comprise the division of the College known today as Children's Programs.

Many of the underlying principles that inform the school's practice today have their origins in the progressive movement of the early twentieth century, and specifically in the work of John Dewey, the Bureau itself, and in the formulations of Barbara Biber and Edna Shapiro of Bank Street's "developmental interaction" approach to learning. Influenced by the ideas of the educational theorist, John Dewey, the founders of Bank Street wanted to study how children learn and how to create classrooms- and a school- that would become a microcosm of the ideals and practices of a democratic community. School was seen as a place to study child development and as a vehicle for social change. The intellectual and social life of the individual was considered inseparable. As opposed to rote learning practices prevalent in schools at that time, the founders of Bank Street established classrooms in which children were active: venturing out and inquiring about the world around them.

Mitchell and her colleagues saw children as unique and complex human beings, blessed at birth with an avid desire to learn which, if nurtured, would fuel a lifetime of learning. They believed children learn best in environments especially suited to their ages and stages of development. In such school settings, children learn more naturally, happily, and well. Their study of children led to the articulation of the developmental-interaction approach to learning, which stresses the different developmental stages of children's growth, the inseparability of the social, emotional, and intellectual components of children's minds, and the importance of children's active, experiential engagement with society. These ideas are the basis for our thought and practice. They are constantly refined, reexamined, and have even been renamed throughout the social changes of the past and present century.