Stories of the Eight-Year Study: Reexamining Secondary Education in America

Vignette: Alice V. Keliher (1903-1995): Fate, Frank, and Film

113 Vignette Alice V. Keliher (1903–1995): Fate, Frank, and Film In the spring of 1929 I was awarded the Grace Dodge Fellowship for the following year. . . . This made it possible to join a small group . . . in a tour of children’s programs in Europe. I begged and borrowed so I could take with me a movie camera and managed to take motion pictures of many of the centers we visited. . . . This probably was one of those strokes of luck that occur once in a lifetime. (Alice V. Keliher, c 1975)1 Alice Keliher’s career included other strokes of luck, many stemming specifically from taking this one movie camera to Europe. Her curiosity and zeal for innovative forms of technology, along with much administrative talent and an act of fate, combined for a remarkable career. Keliher, perhaps now best remembered in early childhood education as “the grandmother of day care,” represents one of the “dauntless women” of that field who combined a love for children with an interest in psychological development, human relations, depth psychology, and progressive education.2 We sense that there was little planning in her career; good things just seemed to happen, from leading the human relations movement in the PEA to shaping copyright laws for film and guiding the day care system in the United States to serving as a presidential Alice V. Keliher, photograph, ca. 1936, New York University Archives 114 Stories of the Eight-Year Study advisor for Head Start. Another view, however, is that her administrative abilities and dogged determination ensured projects to succeed, qualities important to Lawrence Frank, who acted as catalyst, as the maker of opportunities, for her career.3 This is not to suggest that she did not have her share of difficulties and disappointments—she was involved in a blacklisting incident in 1950 (reported in both the New Republic and the Washington Post), and her professional papers include too many unpublished manuscripts for us to believe she was satisfied with her scholarship. But her “passionate career-long effort to protect children from hasty, mechanistic, defeating experiences” and her seeming willingness to complete projects no matter how difficult, along with Frank’s touch, took her in many wonderful and unforeseen directions.4 I Alice Virginia Keliher was born and raised in Washington, D.C., where she began her career teaching elementary school. She enrolled in summer courses at Teachers College and later moved to New York City where, after one year of full-time study, she finished her bachelor’s degree in 1928. Receiving her MA degree in 1929, she completed the Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1930 with William H. Kilpatrick serving as her advisor. Stemming from her film experience during the 1929 European travels, she was offered a position at the Yale University Psycho-Clinic (later called the Clinic of Child Development) with Arnold Gesell where for the next three and a half years she produced “literally miles” of motion pictures of babies for the naturalistic study of infants.5 This is when, in 1930, Keliher first met Frank, who was then a program officer for the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Foundation, the funding agent for Gesell’s project. From this clinical work, Keliher contributed to Gesell’s 1934 publication, An Atlas of Infant Behavior, which, among other aims, sought to establish a set of behavioral norms for infant development.6 She was promoted to instructor in Child Development at Yale University but resigned in 1933, feeling “the chalk dust in my blood,” and she took an administrative supervisory position in the Hartford , Connecticut, public schools.7 Keliher held this post until 1935, when she accepted the full-time position with the PEA’s Commission on Human Relations. She reminisced years later that she was quite happy with her Hartford position and would not have left without Lawrence Frank specifically inviting her to develop materials about adolescents that would, in his words, “stop fractionating the child.”8 Keliher’s friendship with William H. Kilpatrick, Teachers College’s “million dollar professor” and then the leading proponent of progressive education, did not cause her to accept all child-centered practices 115 Vignette: Alice V. Keliher (1903–1995) uncritically. While serving as a summer lecturer at Teachers College in 1932 and 1933, she was upset with the lack of creativity and free expression of ideas at the Lincoln School. She believed the...