Lapsing Lincoln?

Old John D. Rockefeller had little schooling, but no individual has influenced U. S. education more than he. Through his second largest philanthropy, the General Education Board, he angeled Progressive Education. Prime monument to his influence is Manhattan's Lincoln School, which for 22 years has done more than any other institution to shape U. S. public schools. Last week progressive educators were abuzz about: i) an attempt to put Lincoln School quietly out of the way, 2) an attempt by a Rockefeller grandson to prevent it.

Lincoln School, a kindergarten-to-college private Progressive school, is operated by Columbia University's Teachers College. It was started in 1917 when Dr. Abraham Flexner, now director of the Institute for Advanced Study, and harvard's late, great Charles W. Eliot got G. E. B. to put up the money. Later G. E. B. gave Teachers College a $3,000,000 endowment to run Lincoln and a building to house it. Lincoln School became so exemplary an institution that many a bigwig, including John D. Rockefeller Jr., sent his children there. The thousands of teachers who came to Teachers College to study each year went back to introduce in their own schools Lincoln's activity program and other progressive methods.

Two years ago Teachers College's Dean William F. Russell said: "Lincoln School celebrates 20 years of service. May it have many score more." But last fall, soon after Dean Russell ended another T. C. experiment, New College (TIME, Nov. 28), Lincoln's teachers and parents began to hear reports of a plan to liquidate their institution. Reason: T. C.'s Horace Mann School,* a demonstration school less progressive than Lincoln, had been running large deficits (now aggregating some $240,000) because of Lincoln's competition. A T. C. committee headed by Provost Milton Del Manzo was reported planning to merge the two schools and to scrap most of the progressive features of Lincoln's program.

Month ago Lincoln's Parent-Teacher Association held a meeting, and Dr. Del Manzo admitted that a merger was likely. Thereupon up rose Nelson Rockefeller (John D.'s grandson), a Lincoln alumnus whose seven-year-old son Rodman is now in the school, to announce that he was having an investigation of the school made by leading educators. Chief investigator: Dr. Luther H. Gulick, director of the Regents' recent $500,000 survey of New York's public schools.

One phase of the investigation concerns Teachers College's management of Lincoln's G. E. B. endowment. Terms of the grant leave T. C. free to use the money as it sees fit for experiments in elementary and secondary education. But Lincoln's parents and Dr. Flexner hold T. C. to be morally bound to use it for Lincoln School. They were shocked to learn that T. C. had spent part of the endowment for research not connected with the school, for salaries of professors nominally but not actually on Lincoln's staff. It was estimated that the college had thus diverted $200,000 of Lincoln's funds to its own uses, had given back $59,000 to meet Lincoln's deficits of the past three years.

* Not to be confused with Horace Mann School for Boys, a conservative preparatory school in Fieldston, N. Y.

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