Maddoggerel

I grew up in New York’s Greenwich Village during the frothy 1930s and 1940s. My family, never far from its Russian roots, was, like that of most of my friends, artistically inclined, secular Jewish, and politically on the humanistic left. Before my birth, my father was a consultant to the Soviet Jewish land settlement movement. My mother had been a preschool teacher trained in the Dewey tradition. I was therefore destined to experience several remarkable progressive schools including Bank Street kindergarten, City and Country, the Little Red Schoolhouse and the Elisabeth Irwin High School. Then came the not particularly progressive Cornell University. I received a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Columbia’s Teachers College, a return to the Deweyan world. Given this upbringing, it is hardly surprising that my career has concerned children in schools, communities and institutions. For fifteen years my office was in a Vermont forest where kids and parents would come for a day or so to think through personal or family issues. On retirement in 1995, I began annual visits to Haiti and Russia where I got to know young people surviving without family help. I have written several books and have taught at Harvard, Boston College, Boston University and Concordia University. I was the founding dean of Goddard College’s individualized master’s degree program. Recently, I did a study of my family’s history. I am also writing about children. 

Mary Field Belenky, a developmental psychologist, and I have been married for well over fifty years.