The Center for Early Education had its beginning in 1939, when a group of parents organized a nursery school, called the School for Nursery Years, whose educational approach was to be based on the psychoanalytic concepts of child development. (Miss Anna Freud has likened the school to a similar venture in Vienna, the Kinderheim Baumgarten.) The nursery school prospered and attained wide recognition in the community, and it was felt desireable to provide special training for the teachers who staffed this analytically-oriented school. By 1947 this aim was realized with the establishment of a teacher training program as an added activity of the school.
In the ensuing decade, the State and Federal Governments became increasingly aware of the importance of nursery school education, and the school felt it necessary to achieve the status of a college in order to maintain its position of leadership. In 1964 it was given recognition as an academic program and authorized to grant the degree of Associate of Arts. A cooperative arrangement was effected with a branch of the State College System, under which the courses in nursery education are accepted for credit toward a Bachelor of Art degree. With all of these new arrangements, the School for Nursery Years changed its name and became the Center for Early Education.
Although small in size and operating on a modest budget, the Center conducts an extensive and varied program. Twenty full-time college students are enrolled in the training program for teachers, and the nursery school accommodates seventy children. There are all-day workshops conducted in conjunction with other community agencies, and a sizeable evening division. An active research program is studying the correlation of types of object relations in nursery school children with their modes of adaptation to the school. Some years ago the staff collected some of its experiences and published them in the form of a book, Parent Guidance in the Nursery School (IUP, 1960).
The psychoanalytic community is heavily invested in the work of the Center. The institution's President is a psychoanalyst (Dr. Rocco L. Motto, the author of the second portion of this article). A number of outstanding psychoanalysts—such as Miss Anna Freud, Drs. Erik H. Erikson, Lawrence Kubie, Anna Maenschen, Fritz Redl, and Emmy Sylvester — have given their sponsorship. The two Psychoanalytic Institutes in the Los Angeles area are also sponsors, and many of their members have, as individuals, contributed their services to the Center. A number of prominent analysts have been active participants in the Center's programs for as long as twenty years.
Psychoanalysts have also invested in the Center in a very material sense. With increasing demands from the community and continuous program expansion, the school has found it necessary to construct a larger building. The Federal Government has made some funds available for this purpose, but the remainder of the financing has had to come from the analytic community and its friends. The new quarters are scheduled for completion in the Spring of 1968. The Center then intends to develop into a four-year college; and it looks forward to the possibility that ultimately it may complete its educational edifice with a graduate program.
(H. V. D.)