State of New York. Four figures represent the colonial heritage and ideals of City College: the male figures of an Indian and a colonial sailor on the left, and the female figures of Alma Mater and Discipline on the right. The Indian wears a feathered headdress and carries a bow and quiver, while the sailor holds a sextant and a shield depicting a Dutch windmill, two beavers, and two flour barrels. Alma Mater bears a Phrygian cap, symbolizing Liberty, and holds a spindle with the thread of life. Discipline, holding a sword in one hand and a scourge and balance in the other (the balance, like the sword, associated with Justice), is “waiting to accompany the Graduate and to prepare him for the Battle of Life with the Scourge for himself and the Sword for others.”21 Thus the male figures represent historical continuities while the female figures connote the fundamental American ideals of Liberty and Justice. Beneath the four figures the motto EXCELSIOR is writ large above a cornucopia, the abundance of fruits and vegetables signifying colonial diligence and the rewards of Liberty and Discipline. City College may have been free, say these symbols, but it was not cheap.
With his background in science, Louis dreamed of becoming a doctor and did indeed attend Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons for a year. The prospect of more years of study, which would have kept him financially dependent on his brothers, persuaded him to drop out and get a job. He worked initially as an eighth-grade teacher but quickly moved into administration. At that moment in history, a career in education made sense. A huge expansion of public schools was under way, driven by an enormous influx of Eastern European Jews as well as other immigrant groups.22 A college degree was the only qualification necessary to teach, but Louis had greater ambitions and enrolled in graduate programs in education. He earned a Master’s in Pedagogy from New York University (NYU) in 1903; in 1905, he earned both a Master’s Diploma in Pedagogy from Columbia Teachers College and an MA from Columbia University. In 1934, he completed a doctorate in education at NYU. He himself became a teacher of teachers, for several years lecturing part-time in the Department of Education at his alma mater.23
In 1917, Louis succeeded the founding principal of Public School 64 on the Lower East Side, where he made his most distinctive contribution to public education. The 3,000 children of P.S. 64 were housed in an innovative building designed by Charles B.J. Snyder, the school system’s remarkable chief architect. P.S. 64 was (and is) a grand structure emulating a French Renaissance palace. Maximizing light and air in a neighborhood mostly devoid of both, the building showed the local slum-dwellers that their children were worthy of the most beautiful and elegant edifice.24 There they would be educated to rise above the poverty surrounding them.
P.S. 64, which enrolled only boys except in the kindergarten and gifted classes, catered to the “whole child”–his health, his social welfare, his vocational orientation, and his academic training. It was the site of two “experiments.” The shorter was a nineteen-week study conducted in 1918 by a Boston physician specializing in childhood malnutrition.25 The other, a multi-year collaboration between Louis and his colleague Elizabeth Irwin, was designed to create “an environment in which the child himself could feel that he belonged.”26 Irwin, a psychologist at the school from 1912 to 1921, defined the central tenet of the experiment: the pioneering use of intelligence tests to assess each child’s native ability. The tests, considered hallmarks of progressive education, classified the pupils under five broad headings: “gifted,” “bright,” “average,” “dull normal,” and “defective.”27 Each child was placed in a group of his intellectual peers. Because their IQ was the sole trait shared by children in any given group, the experimenters hypothesized that teachers would be able to observe and understand each child’s “personal tendencies and endowments” and hence to individualize instruction; because the school valued “all kinds…of intelligence,” it could direct every pupil toward “a life of personal effectiveness and social usefulness.”28 Devoting particular energy to vocational education for the “dull normal,” Principal Marks provided “remarkable equipment” for teaching them “carpentry, metal working, plumbing, and electrical wiring.” Equally interested in students at the top of the spectrum, he chaired Section 14, “Bright Children,” of the New York Society for the Experimental Study of Education and contributed to the group’s monthly Bulletin.29
Irwin and Marks described the successes (and failures) of their work in Fitting the School to the Child: An Experiment in Public Education, published in 1924 and favorably reviewed.30 Writing in a friendly, accessible style that conveyed their passion and excitement, they hoped to encourage others to replicate the successes. Their task was formidable. Eighty percent of the children in P.S. 64 were born on the Lower East Side; the same percentage was born to Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe. Since most of the other children had Italian-born parents, nearly all of them were bilingual and many had parents with minimal or nonexistent English. In this neighborhood of “hopeful striving such as we should expect of a vigorous immigrant population,”31 families united to foster the education of children thought to be particularly gifted, just as Louis’s brothers had done for him. Among the many successful graduates was the sociologist Lewis Feuer, who appears in a different guise in Chapter 6. When I was introduced to Feuer in the mid-1960s in Toronto, he asked if I was Harry Marks’s daughter. “I know him,” Feuer said, “he’s a decent guy but his father, he was a great man. He was the principal of the school I went to.” And then Feuer began singing the P.S. 64 school song.32
Having had a good start under its first principal, P.S. 64 succeeded remarkably under its second. In a city in which only 61.7% of children passed from eighth grade into high school, 84% of the graduates of P.S. 64 did so.33 Louis became well known as a champion of “progressive methods of teaching” that had been previously thought to be the province of private schools. These methods, according to his obituary, were only then “winning general acceptance”; indeed, he modeled P.S. 64 on “some of the best private schools,” among them the Fieldston School, attended by his son.34 The experiment ended at P.S. 64 in 1922, but not because Louis left that year. Rather, the building was requisitioned for a junior high school, and the elementary children were moved to other schools. Irwin transferred the experiment a few blocks away to an annex of P.S. 61 known descriptively as the Little Red School House; now located in Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan, the institution survives as a socially inclusive private school.35
Himself a child of the Lower East Side, Louis had given back to his neighborhood; after four years as principal, he was ready to move on. He was also keen to improve his financial situation, since inflation had reduced the once-considerable buying power of his principal’s salary. Late in 1921, he ranked third on the examination for the Board of Examiners and was elected a member of that body, which was charged with establishing criteria for hiring and promoting teachers and principals, as well as standards for subject matter and grade levels. A member of the P.S. 64 staff wrote to congratulate him: “Someone has said that the two happiest things in life are a friendly marriage and work that we love: as you have been so absolutely blessed in both respects you are indeed a fortunate voyager.” Rising to president of the Board of Examiners in 1938, he drew on his work there in his doctoral dissertation. Even though he earned a superintendent’s certificate in 1937, he continued as an examiner.
Besides his paid work, Louis contributed to his profession in other ways. A handsome gavel with an inscription engraved in silver testifies to his presidency in 1940 of the Schoolmasters’ Club, an important organization of educators.36 He was also president of the Emile Fraternity, another professional association. After his death of colon cancer–he merited a sixteen-inch obituary in the New York Times complete with his photograph–his Emile colleagues produced a hand-lettered, illuminated testimonial celebrating the personal qualities that were inextricably connected to his professional success: “Genial in social contacts, kindly, gentle, and understanding in the discharge of his difficult duties, ever forward-looking in his approach to educational problems, he contributed mightily…to the advancement of education.” Louis gave his expertise as well to the School Committee of Temple Rodeph Sholem, which presented him with an elegant silver-plated fruit bowl in 1919, “in appreciation of faithful service.” Rabbi Stephen Wise, by then nationally prominent, officiated at his funeral as he had done at Louis’s wedding thirty-five years earlier. Among the five hundred
