Education: Pioneers

This fall U.S. schools with ideas or money or both are sprouting innovations as bright as autumn foliage.

> Warren, Pa. (pop. 14,500) is overruling pedagogues who insist that five is the age to start school. In the first such community-wide experiment, Warren schools will enroll smart tots aged three years and eight months.

> Greenwich, Conn, has a new $1,000,000 elementary school with movable walls designed solely for team teaching. That method is paying off in Pittsburgh, biggest U.S. experimenter in the art, where team teaching will now involve more than 7,500 youngsters in nine schools in predominantly Negro areas.

> Almost commonplace in prosperous suburbs this year are “ungraded” primary classes, which spur kids to hustle through each subject at their own pace. Newton, Mass, aims to use this idea at all levels, from kindergarten through high school.

< The better high schools are getting still better. Logic, Greek, Portuguese and a fifth year of French will be taught this year in Lake Forest. Ill. With Harvard’s help, Capuchino High School in San Bruno, Calif., will develop a new physics course incorporating history, philosophy and the cultural impact of science. In Beverly Hills, which is starting a twelve-year foreign language setup, the high school even boasts two summer campuses in Spain and Austria.

> School reforms are percolating downward. Fresh from rewriting U.S. high school physics, M.I.T.’s Jerrold Zacharias and colleagues are busily doing the same for elementary school science. Astronomy starts in fourth grade in East Whittier, Calif., and geometry in second grade in Burlingame. Calif. At San Francisco’s Herbert Hoover Junior High School, which last year had 14-year-olds earning college credits in math. 40 of this year’s seventh-graders will be so well started that once they get to college they may get M.A.s in math before they graduate.

> English is taught via French at Manhattan’s Ecole Française (enrollment: 224), a private grade school that believes in early language learning and reading-by-phonics. French, being more phonetic, is easier to learn first. Kindergartners start by handling Montessori method alphabet cards with “tactile” sandpaper letters, soon form words and start reading and writing in French. Apparently they have no trouble switching to English in first grade: “We just add the sounds,” says the headmistress, Mrs. Eric Correa. Now the kids are doing arithmetic in French as well as English.

< French via the methods used to teach deaf children to speak was the new wrinkle this summer at private Grosse Pointe (Mich.) University School. Example: student and teacher sit before a mirror to master the lip movements of French pronunciation. In one week, four-year-olds learned five numbers, 25 words, a dozen phrases. Five-and six-year-olds learned twice as much. The Grosse Pointe public school system will now try the method in fourth to sixth grades.

> Reading and writing for three-year-olds via “play” with electric typewriters is a crackling success at Hamden Hall Country Day School in New Haven, Conn. The idea man is Yale Sociologist O. K. Moore, who attributes it all to the human drive for “competence.” The typewriter kids are really not taught; they discover how to read and write for themselves. Hamden Hall already boasts first-graders who read at seventh-grade level. This year Hamden Hall is giving the Moore treatment to 60 tots, some of them aged 2.

> Math as a way to discover every conceivable relationship in the world permeates all teaching from kindergarten through sixth grade at Miquon, a private school near Philadelphia. The secret is Socratic questioning by some really crack teachers. It started as a remedial course for slow kids, now involves all students in games, puzzles, logic, solid geometry, algebra, graphing and the theory of sets. This fall Miquon’s system is being tried in several Chicago public schools, will be tested on 5,000 kids across the country.