Stern, Catherine Brieger (1894–1973)

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Stern, Catherine Brieger (1894–1973)

German-born American educational innovator. Name variations: Käthe Brieger. Born Käthe Brieger on January 6, 1894, in Breslau, Germany; died on January 8, 1973, in New York City; daughter of Oscar Brieger (a physician) and Hedwig (Lyon) Brieger; studied at home and at Mädchen Gymnasium in Breslau, 1904–12; University of Breslau, Ph.D. in mathematics and physics, 1918; studied Montessori teaching method; married Rudolf Stern, in 1919 (died 1962); children: daughter Toni Stern Gould (b. 1920); son Fritz Stern (b. 1926).

Wrote on the theoretical framework of her teaching experiences in Methodik der täglichen Kinderhaupraxis (1932) and on the practicalities of running a kindergarten in Wille, Phantasie und Werkgestaltung (1933); wrote on her theories and Gestalt principles in Children Discover Arithmetic (1949); her materials published for classroom use as Structural Arithmetic (1951, 1965, 1966); with daughter Toni Stern Gould, wrote The Early Years of Childhood: Education Through Insight (1955) and Children Discover Reading (1965).

Catherine Brieger Stern, the only daughter of Oscar and Hedwig Brieger , was born Käthe Brieger in Breslau, Germany, in 1894. With three prominent physicians in their immediate family, she and her three brothers grew up in a close and affluent circle of scholarly relatives. Stern inherited her lifelong interest in teaching children from her close relationship with her mother, who worked in an early volunteer kindergarten. Stern began her education at home with a private tutor and then attended the Mädchen Gymnasium in Breslau from 1904 until 1912, returning there to teach for a brief period after her father's death in 1914. At his earlier urging, she enrolled to study physics at the University of Breslau and, despite the disruption of World War I, during which she served in a hospital, obtained her Ph.D. in mathematics and physics in 1918.

Attracted to the arts as well as to science, Stern wrote poetry, produced plays and learned French while studying in Breslau. There she also met Rudolf Stern, a future physician and researcher, who, like her, came from a medical family. They married on April 19, 1919, and had two children in the next seven years. After Rudolf's death in 1962, Stern would write: "we were, almost every day, together" in the 43 years of their marriage.

During her daughter's early childhood, Stern studied the teaching methods of Maria Montessori and, after running her own preschool at home, opened Breslau's first Montessori kindergarten in 1924. Her school grew in size and range of activities, including an after-school club for older children and a teacher-training institute. Stern obtained state certification in order to teach at grade-school level as well. In conjunction with her teaching work, Stern read and wrote articles on educational theory and developed materials for teaching reading and arithmetic based on adapting the learning process "to the natural development of the child." She published two books, one on the theory and the other on the practice of running her kindergarten: Methodik der täglichen Kinderhaupraxis in 1932, written at the urging of her close adviser, chemist Fritz Haber, and Wille, Phantasie und Werkgestaltung in 1933.

Catherine's departure from the educational drilling and repetition favored under Hitler's regime and her Jewish heritage caused the Sterns to flee Nazi Germany. They emigrated to North America with Stern's mother in 1938, and settled in New York City. Stern became a U.S. citizen in 1944. In the United States, Stern continued the work she had begun in Germany, teaching, researching, lecturing and writing. She devised innovative teaching materials designed to reduce dependence on rote learning methods—for example, creating blocks of different lengths and colors to represent one to ten units as tools for teaching the basic principles and relationships of mathematics. Renouncing the traditional approach to reading (spelling out single letters or identifying words by their overall shape), Stern stressed the correspondence of spoken sounds with letter clusters and taught children to see reading, spelling and writing as integral parts of the same constructive process.

In 1940, Stern met Max Wertheimer, founder of the school of Gestalt psychology in Berlin, who became an important supporter. Wertheimer realized that Stern's materials were the embodiment of his educational ideal of learning by insight rather than rote. Stern worked as Wertheimer's research assistant at the New School for Social Research until his death in 1943, giving demonstrations in his classes and studying Gestalt theory, funded by grants from the New York Foundation and the Oberländer Trust. Their work together informed Wertheimer's Productive Thinking (1945, 1959) and Stern's books Children Discover Arithmetic (1949) and Structural Arithmetic (1951, 1965, 1966), the latter term coined by Wertheimer for Stern's materials, which were known in England as the Stern Apparatus.

From 1944 to 1951, Stern, her daughter Toni Stern Gould and her future daughter-in-law Margaret J. Bassett conducted the experimental Castle School in Manhattan, one of the first to teach numbers concepts and reading to pre-school children. Stern and Gould wrote two books together, The Early Years of Childhood: Education Through Insight (1955), based on the Castle School years, and Children Discover Reading (1965). Aided by grants from the Carnegie Corporation (1958–62), Stern spent much of the 1950s and 1960s writing, researching and teaching. Having anticipated by a quarter of a century many of the ideas of the "modern mathematics" movement, Stern was consulted by the School Mathematics Study Group, proponents of the new math program.

Stern was a private woman uninterested in public honors, dedicated to her friends and family as well as her profession. She was also an avid reader with broad-ranging interests and a facility for languages. She remained professionally active until her death in January 1973, following a stroke. Stern's work was carried on by her daughter and daughter-in-law, and her educational materials continued to be used throughout the world, proving particularly useful in the field of special education.