About the Author:

Margery Baumgartner

I grew up intending to be a teacher, my Junior Year Abroad when this was an innovative idea in 1930, but in the Depression there were no jobs for French teachers, only welfare investigators, so I attended Univerisity of Pennslyvania, School of Social Work for two years, where I heard about a better kind of teaching, Bank Street College of Education. I saw my husband through medical school, two years internship, two years residency in psychiatry, one year in research, and as his 30th birthday approached he suddenly died. I had no insurance, no home, no income. I was in New York for a day with friends, I dropped in at Bank Street and came out with a generous placement at a nursery school in a settlement house and bus fare for a year to be a Bank Street student (’41-’42), completing my MS in Education in 1958 when degrees became available.

After five years teaching at an exceptional school, The Charlestown Play House in Phoenexville, PA, I experienced various settings public and private including 13 years at the Child Study Laboratory, San Diego State University. I was asked to start a school, Pacific Horizon, in La Jolla which is described in a book I edited, Absorbed in Living, Children Learn, published by National Association for the Education of Young Children.

In 1969 I was asked to start The Family School for young children which continued until 1992, when I was 82 years old. From this experience came two books, We’re Early Kids! a year studying anthropology with five-year-olds, and Children Should Be Seen and Also Heard, fifty years collection of poems by young children.