<DIV>?A lucid presentation of what progressive education can accomplish.”?<I>The New York Times</I><BR><BR>How should schools prepare students for the Information Age? The successful worker of the future ? a creative, independent thinker who works well in teams?would seem to be too self-contradictory to be the deliberate product of a school.<BR><BR>A century ago, the American educator Caroline Pratt created an innovative school that she hoped would produce such independent thinkers, but she asked herself a different question: ?Was it unreasonable to try to fit the school to the child, rather than . . . the child to the school?” A strong-willed, small-town schoolteacher who ran a one-room schoolhouse by the time she was seventeen, Pratt came to viscerally reject the teaching methods of her day, which often featured a long-winded teacher at the front of the room and rows of miserable children, on benches nailed to the floor, stretching to the back.<BR><BR>In this classic 1948 memoir, now in its fourth edition, Pratt recounts, in a wry authorial voice much closer to Will Rogers than John Dewey, how she founded what is now the dynamic City and Country School in New York City; invented the maple ?unit blocks” that have become a staple in classrooms and children’s homes around the globe; and came to play an important role in reimagining preschool and primary-school education in ways that resound in the tumultuously creative age before us. This edition features a new introduction by Ian Frazier, as well as additional commentary, and an afterword.</DIV>