Where an Orange Is a Textbook

They do not know what a mirror is, or what an orange is. They do not know their own names. In slum schools across the U.S., normally intelligent children come to kindergarten and first grades innocent of the elementary knowledge and aspirations of their middle-class contemporaries. This mental poverty, caused by their parents' often shocking ignorance and inarticulation, starts the kids off in school so ill-equipped that they slip helplessly backward as they go on (central Harlem eighth-graders, for example, test almost three years behind other New York City students). Thus begins the vicious circle of slum birth to school failure to joblessness to slum adulthood.

One hopeful response to this knowledge gap is to put "culturally impoverished" children into prekindergartens at the age of four and pour the missing commonplaces into them. Working under near-laboratory conditions, New York City Psychologist Martin Deutsch pioneered teaching concepts for preschoolers; now Ford Foundation-sponsored projects are under way in Oakland, New Haven, New York, Boston, and eastern Pennsylvania. The U.S. Office of Education is backing an experiment in Kalamazoo, Mich., and the Johnson Foundation has financed a program in Racine, Wis. Farthest along of all is Baltimore's "Early School Admissions Project," supported by the city and a $155,000 Ford grant.

Sustained Aspirations. The Baltimore experiment began in February 1963 with two classes of 30 pupils each, expanded to its present level of four classes (one white, two Negro, one integrated) six months later. Each class is taught by a team of four women: an experienced kindergarten teacher, an assistant, a teacher's aide whose job is to keep individual records on each child's progress, and an unpaid volunteer who helps at lunchtime and naptime and adds to the casual, familylike surroundings. "We break the class into groups, always trying to bring the communication down to a conversation between a grownup and a child," says Project Director Catherine Brunner.

Since many of the pupils have never been more than a few blocks from home, the teachers take them to parks, the airport, construction sites and libraries, and thus widen their narrow world. Many kids found animals at the zoo to be incomprehensible, and it took photographs, film strips and much patient explanation before they understood what they saw, and learned to talk about it. An orange becomes a textbook for children who never touched or saw an orange before: it teaches the meaning of "rough" and "round."

"We want the children to touch, to hold, to operate, and to care for," says Teacher Velma Branch. A teacher goes behind a screen and asks children to identify the sound of a bouncing ball, an egg beater, a newspaper being crumpled. Pupils smell fruits and flowers, classify objects according to texture, distinguish shapes, care for pets. They even are assigned rudimentary homework: "Take this pear home. Eat it and bring back the seeds tomorrow."

The success of early admissions can be measured this year by testing pre-kindergarten graduates who have advanced through kindergarten to regular school. Two-thirds of them are in the top half of their first-grade class, with about 15% in the top quarter; the control group that started school with regular kindergarten predictably trails behind. If the prekindergarten graduates "can sustain the attitudes and aspirations imparted during this program," says Superintendent of Public Instruction George B. Brain, "we see reason to hope that there will never be the lag in educational development that already looms for the control group."

Crucial Test. Teachers also learn. A kindergarten teacher found that she had always subconsciously divided her class into "dumb" children from poor homes that lack the stimulation for learning, and "bright," better-off children, who are expected by their parents to talk, play, explore. Now she finds that "the preschool youngsters are among the highest achievers in my class, and it makes me wonder whether many of us in teaching haven't been wrong for a long time."

As a three-year experiment that began with teacher training and devising a curriculum, the Baltimore project is scheduled to end in June. The crucial bigger test will come in two years, when the early-admissions children reach the third grade and the learning of skills becomes less important than acquiring conceptual knowledge. Then, if success continues, the board of education has promised to consider expanding the preschool program to all slum-area children. Baltimore would thus become the first city in the nation to lower its entrance-age requirement for the public-school system, adopting a policy that many educators believe is essential and inevitable for the whole U.S.

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