Education: Melting-Pot Schools

A generation ago, U. S. immigrants found sanctuary and a melting pot in church or shop. Today’s immigrants, a more intellectual group, find both in school. Most famed German immigrants welcomed by U. S. schools are Thomas Mann, now at Princeton, and Albert Einstein, at the nearby Institute for Advanced Study. At the New School for Social Research in Manhattan is a “University in Exile,” whose entire faculty consists of European notables. But it is as students, not teachers, that many refugees have found a chance to begin life afresh in U. S. colleges,* public and private schools.

These schools open their doors to adult refugees for fun and work by night, to children by day. A newly formed Progressive Schools’ Committee for Refugee Children, representing some 20 Eastern schools, has found institutions so eager to enroll such children that there are not enough refugees to go around. Reason for their eagerness: presence of refugees in a school is more educational to the other children than books or newspapers.

Organizers of the Progressive Schools’ Committee were Mr. & Mrs. William Mann Fincke Jr., who run little Manumit School on a 175-acre farm in the Berkshire foothills at Pawling, N. Y. Aided by scholarship funds from an anonymous philanthropist, Mrs. Fincke, a buxom, vivacious blonde, daughter of famed Feminist Louise Fowler Gignoux, took under her motherly wing six adult refugees (including a German actress who supported herself and daughter in the U. S. by scrubbing floors), 23 children (Gentiles & Jews) of lawyers, bankers, teachers, artists. Last week Mrs. Fincke had some astounding stories to tell of refugees’ behavior.

> Refugee children refuse to listen when their schoolmates tune in Adolf Hitler’s broadcasts to the U. S. One little girl at Manumit could not be persuaded to take off her underwear when she went to bed, had nightmares in which she dreamed that German storm troopers broke into her room. A boy constantly drew pictures of machine guns, tanks, people shooting Hitler.

>A little German girl mocked children of an Episcopalian minister at their prayers, threw the Bible on the floor and danced around it. Reproached, she said: “I thought this was a democracy and I could do whatever I liked.”

>When the children, habituated to working under orders in Germany, were given the voluntary responsibility of feeding chickens at Manumit, the chickenswent hungry.

>Refugee children, even though they were not starved in Germany, eat enormously, eight or ten times a day, but gain little weight. One boy begged to be made a cook’s helper so he could eat all day. Mrs. Fincke’s explanation: food is a form of security. When she asked a little girl why she ate so much, the child replied: “I must eat against the war.”

*The Intercollegiate Committee to Aid Student Refugees, an undergraduate group, reports that scholarships, living expenses already are offered on nearly twoscore campuses. At Harvard, for example, the university provided 20 $500 scholarships for refugees; students and faculty raised $11,000 for food and shelter.