Private Schools: Mixing Races in Manhattan

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Being Themselves. Such togetherness is turned to individual advantage. When a nine-year-old boy with a reading problem was asked to help second-graders with their reading, he became so proud that he not only overcame his own difficulty, but proved a highly effective teacher as well. A Negro girl, too repressed to talk, was handed a doll by a white girl, who told her: "You're the mother—and mothers have got to talk to their children." She did.

The paradoxical school name stems from the fact that the school has a 300-acre farm in upstate New York, where students spend occasional weeks in nature study. The advantage of the rural experience, says Trowbridge, is that "the farm is neutral in a way the city is not—it makes the same demands on the deprived kids as it makes upon the middle-class kid." To avoid pressuring all students to conform to middle-class values, there is no grading or assignment to ability "tracks"—all in line with Trowbridge's theory that "if children were not always measured comparatively, they might have the incentive to be themselves."

Actually, the faculty finds that the white youngsters seem to benefit more from the integration than do the Negroes. They learn to admire the independence and street savvy of the black children, such as that of the five-year-old who pushes alone into crowded rush-hour buses to attend school—a trip that would frighten his sheltered white classmates. The school has been so successful that only one student has dropped out. He was withdrawn by parents who objected to such close association with children from the ghetto. His parents are middle-class Negroes.