Education: Back to the Sandbox

Because his idea of education is a rather special one, Ken Reiner was disgusted with his daughter’s lack of progress in public school. Because he is a millionaire, he found a rather special solution to his problem. He built a school of his own, and now that it is in operation. Reiner and his children are content. It is a rather special school.

To most educators, classroom permissiveness died of overindulgence ten years ago, and the return to discipline is well advanced. But to Ken Reiner, permissiveness makes happy children happier and good teachers better, and at his Midtown School in Hollywood’s Silver Lake district, he has taken it to new heights. The children may write on the walls, throw sand and food at each other, shun their classes and practice card tricks and wander about the fanciful school grounds all day, smiling at the wonder of it all. The teachers, wary of inhibiting the children, let them do whatever they want to do, and what they usually want to do is play.

Pie and Arithmetic. Inside the four octagonal, glass-sided buildings, classes are in session: arithmetic is cutting up an apple pie and observing how it disappears as it is eaten. The children may lie on the floor and chat with each other while the teacher recites the lesson and, if even that bores them, they are free to wander outside to play among the jungle gyms, the playboats and sandboxes, the swings and the barbecue pit. If a teacher asks for a composition, she is the one who gets out the pad and pencil; the student will dictate it to her and she will type it up for him.

Midtown’s 60 students are set apart in four groups—the 2½-to—5, the 5-to-7, 5-to-9, and a top form for the 9-to-17-year-olds. Eleven teachers are on hand to offer guidance, but their classes are chaotic and short. If the children take no interest in the lesson, the teachers spend their time sawing up boards or joining the children at play.

The headmistress is Reiner’s freethinking wife Alice. “We try hard not to impose phony adult standards.” she says. “They learn by doing. If they want to take off all their clothes, that’s perfectly all right with us. The parents aren’t quite ready for that yet, but they did agree that the girls could strip down to bikinis.” Says a parent: “They learn without realizing they’re learning. It makes us feel like such good parents.”

It Looked Foggy. Learning without knowing it may mean making applesauce (a big thing at Midtown), or it may mean taking a trip to the mountains to gather material for class. One group spent a day on Mount Baldy last winter, played happily in the snow, then came back to school to have their teacher record their conversation. The result is Midtown’s beginning-readers’ primer, a work of the children’s own creation: “Snow in the mountains. It looked smoggy. It looked frosty. It looked foggy. It looked dark. It felt cold. Then it rained. Then it hailed. Then it snowed . . .”

Teacher Walter Merlino last week provided his students with a superb example” of the Midtown dogma of doing, not learning. He suggested that his class go to the Los Angeles Federal Building to join women demonstrators in a march against atomic testing. “You should feel strongly against atom testing before you march.” cautioned Merlino, who then talked foggily about fallout, concluding: “The point is to at least stop the U.S. and at least cut the amount of fallout in half. Who wants to go?” Every child, presumably filled with strong feelings, raised his hand.

“I Couldn’t Go Back.” Reiner, a vastly successful manufacturer of women’s hair clips (TIME, Aug. 10, 1959), was himself educated at New York’s progressive Ethical Culture School and at Purdue. To keep his school running, he contributes about $100,000 a year toward the difference between tuition and costs. The six-acre filled ravine where the school stands and the dazzling buildings cost him a million dollars, and Midtown’s impressive array of planned improvements may cost a half-million more.

From all this, the brighter students, though short on the three Rs, get a disturbing sophistication. “I couldn’t go back to public school,” said one boy. “My teachers didn’t understand me.” Another, asked why he took no interest in mathematics if he wished to become an inventor, said: “I’ll get mechanical brains to do that kind of stuff.”

An occasional student, though, is worried that a Midtown education will leave him rudderless in the hard and heavy waters of the world. Said Tom Perley, 10: “I want to be a doctor, and so next year I’m going to public school for the sixth grade so I can get used to doing homework.” But the teachers of Midtown’s children like the school fine. Exulted Teacher John Moran: “You know what I did yesterday? Peeled apples!” Walter Merlino advertises his own case as a cheering example. “They might not want to be organization men.” he said, finding comfort for his students. “They may end up as teachers in a private school.”