This is actually a story about books but somehow the schools took over. It does start with the books – four old books from a library of a defunct school and each with this lovely bookplate. 

Beneath the tree is the line  “And some of the blossoms shall turn to fruit”

And some of the blossoms of the Lincoln School turned to fruit. And that fruit is still on the market. 

Lincoln School? Where’s that?

The Most Famous School in New York

Schools come and schools go. They grow, shrink, change shape, expand, splinter, merge, morph, move.

And they die. 

The most heralded, fabled and famous of all NYC schools lasted just over two decades.

The Lincoln School opened in 1917 as a lab school specifically designed to develop, test, and then to promote curriculum materials that reflected the best progressive teaching and methods. Annual tuition that first year was from $200 to $300 depending on the grade level.

Lincoln called itself “a pioneer experimental school for newer educational methods” and operated under the aegis of Columbia University’s Teachers College.

John D. Rockefeller, Jr. provided the funding and he sent his sons there.

The program was designed by Charles W. Eliot, a former president of Harvard; his protégé Abraham Flexner; James E. Russell, the dean of Teachers College, Columbia University and Otis W. Caldwell, a professor of science education at Teachers College and the school’s first director.

In 1916, Flexner had written an influential essay The Modern School in which he proposed an experimental school to try out and test new approaches to schooling.

The Lincoln School was based on the ideas. It was a specific rejection of formalism and tradition. No more Latin, Greek and formal grammar just because they had always been there. 

Instead, a new curriculum and a scientific spirit  that which would test and evaluate critically the fundamental propositions on which it is itself based, and the results as they are obtained.

Flexner knew that children were growing up in an era of unprecedented technological and scientific change. The modern world of speed, communication and industry –  railroads, wireless telegraphy and international relations – made the capacity for abstract thinking vitally important.

Outdated teaching methods and an outdated curriculum were both a problem. “Nothing is commoner in the teaching of ancient languages and formal mathematics than drilling,” he contended. 

Flexner’s solution was to modernize and reorganize the curriculum around four fields—science, industry, aesthetics, and civics—rather than traditional subject disciplines.

Subjects that lacked practical application in the modern world—Latin, Greek, formal grammar and algebra—would be eliminated. Students would benefit far more from field trips and engaging in community‐based learning projects than they would from traditional textbooks.

It was heady stuff in a time of social change and progressive ferment. 

Flexner’s essay is essential reading for all those with any interest in education history and change. And what’s interesting are all the shades and long shadows from that time still traceable in almost every school today. 

Evelyn Dewey, Schools of Tomorrow and Learning by Doing

In Lincoln’s early years, Evelyn Dewey was a collaborator in its publications. Two years before Lincoln opened, Dewey, along with her father John Dewey, had published  a survey of experimental schools  – Schools of To-morrow, (1915)  – a founding text of progressive educational reform.

Evelyn Dewey was probably responsible for the descriptive chapters in Schools of To-morrow, that introduced the phrase ‘learning by doing’.

Digging into the records of the school – the way one does –  has been fascinating. I’ve unearthed all kinds of nuggets. The stuff of schools – the warp and weave of practice and pedagogy have a long history.

The Lincoln School “Descriptive Booklets” were written for prospective parents. The two available online are packed with details about the program design, the school year (much shorter), the schedule and the thinking behind the intentional structures. Everything was planned and purposeful.  

And what were the parents concerned about in 1921? Topics for the parent-teachers meeting give us a clue: Surprise! College entrance tops the list. Also listed: Homework, progress reports, the music program and the new building. Some things never change. 

Lincoln considered itself a work in progress:

In the Lincoln School, the curriculum, since it is in the process of development, changes from year to year; but the purpose remains constant. the aim is to construct a fundamental curriculum which will be representative of the important activities, interest and possibilities of modern life. – from the Descriptive Booklet 1922

In the 1920s and 1930s thousands of educators from across the US and abroad visited Lincoln to see the emerging new ideas of progressive education take shape. It was the most closely watched experimental school in the educational world, an observation and demonstration site for educators. There were so many visitors that the school had to limit the number to six per day.

The school provided a select number of Teachers College students with practical teaching experience and it engaged in vigorous curriculum design and development, The school’s  experimental research institute promoted professional growth and learning and distributed printed materials in national journals and mailings to schools across the United States. 

Lincoln was an explicitly experimental – a place where new ideas were explored, developed and tested and promoted. See the sidebar for an example of the integrated approach to learning at 4th grade.

That Milk Curriculum is a classic of its kind. Comprehensive, thorough, integrated for sure, easy to mock. 

Lenox Hill to Harlem

Lincoln first set up shop in a classy neighborhood – 646 Park Avenue in the premises of the former Charlton School. Charlton was a girls school, founded in 1904, and why it went out of business I don’t know.

This new venture – Lincoln – attracted the attention of the city’s elite who wanted the best for their offspring.  The father of current Attorney General William Barr,  Donald Barr – who became the controversial head of Dalton in 1964 – graduated from Lincoln in 1937. The Descriptive Booklet names Nelson, a 6th grader, who  plays the Egyptian shoulder harp and explains modern banjos and you realize that this must be Nelson Rockefeller, the future governor of New York and vice president.

The school proved popular – the original enrollment of 116 doubled in three years. It soon outgrew its rented premises and moved to a  custom designed facility with gymnasia, science rooms, workshops and a library at 425 W.123rd Street.

I have at hand four lovely books from that library that were donated by the class of 1923.

They were rescued from the dumpster during a school library cull in the mid 1990’s.

Trevor Day School inherited those books via a circuitous route and they are one of the threads that connect The Lincoln School of a century ago with the Trevor of today. 

Here are the books: The two volume Treasury of War Poetry and two volumes of poetry by Amy Lowell: Men Women and Ghosts (1916) and Pictures from the Floating World (1919). I wonder if they were ever integrated into a course of study.

The cards in the back indicate they had not been taken out for some decades. 

Caldwell and his team at Lincoln put together an integrated experienced based curriculum designed to connect the classroom with the realities of the everyday municipal, industrial and  agricultural life.

Science and math classes stressed the  practical application of these subjects in modern life. the program connected with local community resources – and made excursions of docks, fire stations, markets, train stations churches and telephone exchanges. 

Programs of work were structured around themes and questions and integrated the study of music, industrial art, language with social studies. The democratic spirit and focus on community were the “foundational to effective and upright living.”

Courses were carefully planned and structured experiences. Teachers studied the outcome of their work, organizing and interpreting the data they collected on student’s progress and intellectual growth. There’s a whole section on Measurement in the Descriptive Booklet. 

This was all in keeping with the purposes of the school – experimental and experiential curriculum development twinned  with character training in  social responsibility for the modern world.

This meant the practical application of knowledge  and courses that had a direct connection with the everyday work of the world of finance, government, municipal life, industry  and agriculture. There was an increased focus on math taught through its vocational application and also on science, partly because it taught good citizenship.  

Caldwell was a biologist and wrote extensively on the purposes of universal education and the role of science and biology in social advancement and ethical citizenship. In an increasingly complex age, secondary education was bulwark to combat political and economic ignorance and indifference. See sidebar.  

Lincoln encouraged, and indeed expected, its teachers to engage in research and experimentation. It prized academic freedom and teacher collaboration.

Wholesome and Stimulating

The Lincoln School is more than meeting expectation as a laboratory of educational experimentation. Teachers and pupils conspire to make its institutional life wholesome and stimulating– Dean Russell Teachers College Record  1922.

Living in a Machine Age

In 1936, one of those teachers – Alice Stewart – wrote an article in Teachers College Record about a new course she and her colleagues had created. It was called Living in a Machine Age.

Over a period of months students in the course  students spent ten days living in a historic village studying agrarian tools, traveled around New York City to study electricity and the water supply, and took a car apart in the school’s yard. The course involved teachers in industrial arts, science, social studies and physical education.

The purpose of the article was not to have other schools and teachers adopt the course but rather to encourage them to develop their own interdisciplinary and integrated courses.

As practitioner-researchers, Lincoln School teachers set out to produce a body of research that measured the value of new curricular through teachers’ and students’ work and observations. 

Lincoln had its enemies and detractors. The sidelining of the emphasis on Latin and Greek as the hallmark of scholarship upset the traditionalists who saw the school as a sterile environment that downplayed the imagination and emotion of poetry, aesthetics and the arts. Critics worried about the role of the industrialist philanthropy that had bankrolled the enterprise. 

In its heyday Lincoln’s teachers produced a stream of articles and pamphlets that were distributed freely to schools across the country. Its influence on American public education was broad and deep.

A School Merger and a Bitter Legal Struggle

In 1940, a Special Committee of the Board of Trustees of Teachers College recommended – for reasons of both intellectual and practical economy – that Lincoln be amalgamated with the larger and less research-intensive Horace Mann School. The two schools merged and operated as a demonstration school.

Upset  parents and teachers objected and they took their case to court with a rancorous law suit that eventually found its way to New York’s highest court – the Court of Appeals.

The transcript of those court proceedings provides another glimpse into the work influence of the Lincoln School as distinguished witness after distinguished witness gave their testimony. 

When Teachers College closed down the combined Horace Mann-Lincoln School in 1946, some of the former Lincoln School parents established the New Lincoln School. It opened in 1948.

They wanted to continue the tradition of progressive, experimental education, with an emphasis on the individual child, an interdisciplinary core program, electives and the arts. 

The new school’s first location was on 110th Street on the north side of Central Park. They bought the Lincoln library books at auction for $5,100.

My books were on the move.

In 1956, the school  and moved its Lower School to the former Boardman School on East 82nd Street.

Two decades later in 1974 the school now known as New Lincoln moved to 210 East 77th Street. The book collection went too. 

Another Merger

Falling enrollment and hard times led to a merger with the Walden School in 1988. The new name was officially the New Walden Lincoln School and it was located on W88th Street. The student bodies – and the library collections – were combined.  

Walden was another storied school founded in the early years of the progressive era. Here’s the page of the 1920 Porter Sargent Guide to Private Schools that lists both Lincoln and the Children’s School – the name by which Walden was first known.

Walden was founded by Margaret Naumberg who had travelled with the Deweys to Italy and met Maria Montessori. She had been been Evelyn Dewey’s roommate at Barnard College. The ed world is small and interconnected.

The Walden School – The Children’s School – opened in 1914. Naumberg was particularly interested in child psychology and believed in letting children develop their own interests and ideas. She became an art therapist and she encouraged her teachers to undergo psychoanalysis. She stated; ”The purpose of this school is not merely the acquisition of knowledge by children. Its primary objective is the development of their capacities.”

It was a different approach than Lincoln’s. In some ways Walden and Lincoln represent two competing – or at least contrasting – strands of progressive education.

Lincoln was highly structured, modern, methodical, planned, data driven. It believed in new ideas rigorously tested. The program was structured, organized, integrated and modulated. New Lincoln was its own hybrid variety, developed in a different era. Walden’s focus was on individual development, self-knowledge and self-expression. It valued spontaneity and creativity. 

The merger of Walden and Lincoln did not survive and the school was taken over by The Day School (formerly The Day School of the Church of the Heavenly Rest) in 1991. Six years later the school was renamed Trevor Day School.

It was around this time that renovations to the library meant a long overdue serious review of the book collection. Lots of stuff had to go. I was the lucky recipient of my four volumes.