Salvation in the Nursery

Eric Bennett is a four-year-old who lives in a predominantly Negro housing project in Detroit. His mother supports four sons on $198 a month in alimony and relief. Some of his playmates have never seen crayons, children's books, raw carrots or dogs (barred in the project). Many of them rarely see their fathers; others see too much of them because the men are jobless. Society has a way of dealing with boys like Eric. Sooner or later, they take an IQ test, get labeled "stupid." and quit school. The tests reflect "cultural" knowledge--things like dogs, crayons and fathers.

Last week Detroit had under way an experiment aimed at salvaging Eric and 46 other youngsters before they are marked for life by their home environment. The project: a unique nursery school that educators hope will be widely imitated. "It's extremely important that we get kids from underprivileged areas into school at the age of three or four," says Teacher Bert Pryor. 45, the school's founder. "By the age of five or six, many children have already jelled into a pattern of failure in school."

Up the Amazon. Teacher Pryor, assistant principal at James Couzens Elementary School, got the idea for the nursery in 1959. when the Ford Foundation picked his school as part of the Great Cities School Improvement Program to cut down school dropouts. Pryor milked $2,500 from Ford and the Detroit board of education, got permission to launch the nursery at Couzens on his own time after school. Circulating leaflets in the housing project, he sold the parents of 20 three-year-olds with his message: "Now is the time to help your child be a good student."

Pryor's current preschoolers get the standard nursery treatment: painting, sandbox play, training in manners and cymbal-crashing marches about the room. The difference is that Pryor's kids are in a brave new world. Used to monosyllabic conversation at home, they hear grownups speaking clearly and concretely for the first time. For them, field trips to farms outside Detroit are as exotic as journeys up the Amazon.

To the Top. Best of all is the effect on parents. Pryor insists that mothers come to class frequently and read aloud to the children. "It gets them into the habit so that they read to their children at home," he says. One mother was so mortified by her first recitation that she enrolled in an English-improvement class, now holds her own in the nursery. Another bought children's books, is peddling them evangelically to other parents. Says she: "The least we can do is to get books into their children's hands."

Pryor has no conclusive evidence that he has changed his students' lives; the kids are still too young for him to be sure. But 15 of his products are now first-graders at Couzens, and twelve of them are booming along at the top of their classes. Moreover, the good start they got is being passed on to younger brothers and sisters at home.

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