History
Professional Children's School was founded by two reform-minded New Yorkers, Jane Harris Hall and Jean Greer Robinson. Ardent theatre-goers, the women learned of the plight of the city's professional children - young people working on the New York stage. Public and private schools of the day did not accommodate the schedules of stage children and, more often than not, children were simply skipping school to work on the stage. Some reformers talked of banning children from the stage entirely. Determined to help these "unknown friends on the other side of the footlights," as Mrs. Robinson would later write, the women decided to found a school especially for New York's professional children. On 6 January 1914, PCS admitted its first two students in borrowed quarters in the theatre district. An immediate success, the school enrolled over 100 students within its first year.
Read more about this topic: Professional Children's School
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“[Men say:] “Don’t you know that we are your natural protectors?” But what is a woman afraid of on a lonely road after dark? The bears and wolves are all gone; there is nothing to be afraid of now but our natural protectors.”
—Frances A. Griffin, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 19, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passé abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)