Boston last week had its first exhibition of a teaching project so new that there are not even any textbooks to guide the teachers: to students of the seventh, eighth and ninth grades of Boston's public schools was offered a course in economics, one of the most difficult subjects over which many a grown man racks his brains.
The idea of teaching moppets the basic facts of economics dawned two years ago on the fertile mind of a Boston school committeeman, Joseph Lee Jr. A Brahmin, blueblood, Harvard graduate, 40-year-old Joe Jr. is the eccentric liberal grandson of a founder of the Boston banking firm of Lee, Higginson & Co. and a great-great-grandson of Thomas H. Perkins, who turned down a Cabinet post as Secretary of the Navy under George Washington because he owned more ships than the Navy did. His father, the late Joe Lee Sr., was a famed humanitarian who once made a pilgrimage to the home of Leo Tolstoy and was called "the father of the American playground movement." Joe Jr. takes after him.
Young Joe Lee lives in a home on Beacon Hill that was built in 1797, but he has spent most of his life helping underprivileged kids in the slums around the Hill. He loves to sail and swim, so to get the pale-faced children in the sun he persuaded Boston authorities to open a public beach on the Charles River Esplanade, taught them to sail in $25 boats that he designed himself.
He goes about the city in a Bohemian costume that consists of a black Homburg hat, grey flannels, a Mackinaw and heavy brogans.
Unorthodox Joe Lee long ago decided that realism, not theory, should be the basis of a sound education. So dissatisfied was he with the history texts used in schools that he wrote one of his own. (No school has yet adopted it.) Joe's version of the Revolution:
"The people who were here took cannon, powder and shot, and buried them in King George. . . . And King George went up in the air in a million pieces and came down in flakes called dollar bills. And the people went out and grabbed the dollar bills, and then they began to act like kings . . . up to the amount that each had dollar bills."
Democracy, says Joe Lee, "is a device for governing ourselves by the use of money." If democracy is to survive, children must study the elements of economics. He persuaded his fellow school committeemen to try his plan. Last February, in Boston's 42 intermediate schools, some 7,000 pupils began to learn the meaning of consumption (seventh grade), production (eighth), conservation, and industrial relations (ninth). A more advanced course for tenth-grade (second year high school) students will start next year.
First stumbling block for Boston's 180 grade-school economics teachers was the lack of texts. Joe Lee wanted a subjective course revolving around the pupil's personal place in the world of money, not an objective course of simplified jargon and theory. In charge of the project was small, mild Eleanore Elizabeth Hubbard, professor of history at Boston Teachers College, a grade-school teacher herself for 26 years. Miss Hubbard solved the problem by holding weekly conferences with teachers, exchanging ideas for classroom models, graphs, cartoons, games.