[On July 14th, 1946, Dr. Benjamin Spock published the first edition of The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. In that book and throughout his career Spock was one of our most vocal & vital early childhood educators and advocates, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy him and a handful of other such advocates, leading up to a special weekend post on my favorite early childhood educator!]
On two ways to contextualize an iconic nursery school, and why it also rightfully stands alone.
When the groundbreaking African American teacher and early childhood advocate Dorothy Waring Howard founded the Garden of Children, one of America’s first Black nursery schools, in 1929 Washington D.C., she was very much following in the footsteps of the legendary Ida B. Wells. Almost exactly four years ago, I wrote in this post about Wells’s founding of a kindergarten in 1897 Chicago to serve her own children and other Black children who were being denied access to this new educational opportunity (a story I learned, as I noted there, from Wells’s great-granddaughter Michelle Duster and her excellent bio of Wells). I can’t say for sure if Howard knew of Wells’s kindergarten, although Howard had studied early childhood education at the University of Chicago so she at least was familiar with that city’s educational histories. But in any case, I love the throughline from Wells’s grassroots classroom to this longstanding and legendary early childhood space.
As I traced in Monday’s post on Jane Addams, it’s also always the case that any individual advocate and reformer is part of a legacy of figures through which we can create a fuller picture of a multi-generational system of activism. So for example, when I see that Howard studied as an undergraduate at Columbia University before continuing her studies at Chicago, I immediately connect her to John Dewey (subject of Tuesday’s post), who in 1905 came to Columbia (where he would teach for 25 years at the groundbreaking Teachers College) from a decade of work at the University of Chicago (where he had established an influential laboratory school). And I similarly have to imagine that anyone studying early childhood education in early 20th century Chicago would have had at least some connection to the groundbreaking educational theories and practices being employed by folks like Neva Boyd at Hull House (also highlighted in Monday’s post). Too often we view individual reformers in a vacuum (the couple pieces I found on Howard while researching this post tend to do so), and as someone who tries always to highlight my own debts to other scholars and thinkers and teachers, I value the chance to do so with anyone I write about here as well.
At the same time, connecting Howard’s nursery school to such predecessors and influences cannot and should not minimize the singular importance that this space had, most especially for the precious (in every sense) community that it served for many decades. In this 2016 blog post for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, intern Evelyn Mantegani writes about how a former Garden of Children student named Eunice (no last name given) saw a picture of the school on the museum’s Facebook page and reached out to share her memories and experiences. Eunice had a great deal to say about just how important the school was for these young Black children in segregated DC (and America), a perspective she distills with “It was something we all knew, that we were as good or better than anybody else.” But without doubt my favorite quote of hers is when Mantegani asks her about how she feels knowing that a photo of her nursery school will be in a Smithsonian exhibit, and Eunice replies, “I think it’s great, but to me it’s no big deal. It should be in there.” If there’s a more pointed and powerful reflection of Dorothy Waring Howard’s legacies, I can’t imagine what it could be.
Next early childhood educator tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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