Education: Other Half

Last year Manhattan's famed Progressive Lincoln School sent a group of 16-year-olds to the coal fields of Morgantown, W. Va., to learn how the other half lived. After exploring coal mines and living with Morgantown high-school youngsters for ten days, Lincoln's students returned to Manhattan to ponder what they had seen, gain two years in understanding and thinking power, by scientific tests (TIME, Oct. 31). Thereupon Lincoln School and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which financed the trip, decided to find out whether their educational experiment would work as well in reverse. Last week they took 13 Morgantown youngsters to Manhattan.

All coal miners' children (ambitious to be doctors, lawyers, businessmen, teachers, actresses), the nine Morgantown boys and four girls, aged 16-19, had, with three exceptions, never seen a big city. First stop after they left their strike-bound coal fields was Washington, where they were bedded in a tourist camp, rose at 4:30 to begin sightseeing, ended the day marveling at how little work Congressmen did to earn their pay.

They arrived in Manhattan to sup at the house of a Lincoln student off Park Avenue. Next day, fresh-cheeked and inquisitive, they rode a subway to Wall Street, visited other business districts, the Aquarium, Bellevue Hospital (which awed them), Radio City, headquarters of the Consolidation (Rockefeller) Coal Co. (which owns some of their mines). In rapid succession during the next six days, pausing only to eat and take a few winks of sleep, Morgantown's children rode a tug around New York Harbor, where the girls hallooed at sailors on U. S. warships, inspected the Europa, bridges, power plants, tenements, museums, topped a whole day of sightseeing with a whole night of prowling through riverfront markets.

Unlike many thousands of U. S. citizens who visited New York City last week, they gave only a fleeting glance to its World's Fair. They heard Pearl Buck lecture on China at Town Hall, Columbia's Professor Clyde R. Miller lecture on propaganda at Lincoln School. To relax, they sailed in a yacht, saw Pins and Needles and a show at Radio City Music Hall, where they went backstage to pose for pictures with the Rockettes.

Tests of their thinking power were yet to come. Their first thoughts on the Big Town were varied. Sighed Molly Milano at week's end: "It's just a movie come true." Said William Propst, 19: "After all, I like the quiet of my home town."