Lucy Sprague Mitchell

Sprague grew up in a wealthy Chicago household — her father built a wholesale grocery fortune — and arrived at Radcliffe College in 1896 already used to getting what she wanted. She graduated with honors in philosophy in 1900, having spent her college years living with Radcliffe's president, Alice Freeman Palmer, and working in Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology by using a lab technically outside Harvard Yard, since women were not allowed inside it. In 1903, at twenty-five, the University of California at Berkeley made her its first dean of women, a post invented for her that she used to open careers to female students most of the faculty assumed would simply marry.

She left Berkeley in 1912 to marry the economist Wesley Clair Mitchell and moved to New York, where progressive education was having its moment. In 1916 she cofounded the Bureau of Educational Experiments with Mitchell and the nurse-educator Harriet Johnson, building on ideas she had studied under John Dewey at Columbia. The Bureau ran experimental classrooms instead of theorizing about them, testing how young children actually learned before writing curriculum to match, and it grew into what is now Bank Street College of Education. Mitchell also rewrote children's literature to match: her here-and-now stories, collected in The Here and Now Story Book in 1938, replaced fairy-tale settings with the sidewalks, trucks and weather children already knew.

The Bureau ran, in its early years, largely on money Mitchell could raise from people she knew personally — her cousin, the arts patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, was an early backer. A laboratory built to prove that better teaching could work for any child was funded like a private family project, and at first it served a small number of them. Critics of the here-and-now philosophy made a related complaint: that stripping fairy tales and fantasy out of a young child's reading in favor of trucks, weather and the corner grocery store underestimated what children's own imaginations could hold. She kept at both the institution and the argument for four decades, raising four children of her own the entire time.

Mitchell wrote a joint memoir of her marriage, Two Lives, in 1953, and kept working into her eighties, nineteen years after Wesley died in 1948. She died in Palo Alto, California, on October 15, 1967, at eighty-nine. The institution outgrew its founder's name almost immediately: Bank Street College of Education is a fixture of American teacher training now, and its child-centered model shows up in classrooms that have never heard of Lucy Sprague Mitchell. The Bureau's original premise — watch children before you theorize about them — became such standard practice in early education that it stopped sounding like an argument at all.

Lucy Sprague Mitchell's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Bureau of Educational Experiments company
  Cofounded with Wesley Clair Mitchell and Harriet Johnson; became Bank Street College 1916
• North America book
  A geography text for children built on the here-and-now method 1931
• Streets: Stories for Children Under Seven book 1933
• The Here and Now Story Book book
  Her best-known work, replacing fairy tales with children's daily surroundings 1938
• Two Lives: The Story of Wesley Clair Mitchell and Myself book
  A joint memoir written after her husband's death 1953

• 1896 aged ~18 Enters Radcliffe College
• 1900 aged ~22 Graduates Radcliffe with honors in philosophy
• 1903 aged ~25 Becomes the first dean of women at the University of California, Berkeley
• 1912 aged ~34 Marries Wesley Clair Mitchell and leaves Berkeley
• 1916 aged ~38 Cofounds the Bureau of Educational Experiments in New York
• 1938 aged ~60 Publishes The Here and Now Story Book
• 1948 aged ~70 Wesley Clair Mitchell dies
• October 15, 1967 aged 89 Dies in Palo Alto, California, at eighty-nine

• John Dewey 1859–1952
  Philosopher and educational reformer whose progressive ideas shaped modern American pedagogy. studied under and built the Bureau on his ideas
• Jane Addams 1860–1935
  Social worker and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who founded Hull House and the settlement house movement. fellow builder of a progressive-era institution
• Booker T. Washington 1856–1915
  Educator and founder of Tuskegee Institute who advocated for vocational training for African Americans. took a different route to remaking American education
• Margaret Mead 1901–1978
  Cultural anthropologist whose studies of Pacific Island societies shaped 20th-century social science. extended the child-study tradition into anthropology