Arbuthnot, May Hill

Arbuthnot, May Hill (1884–1969) educator; born in Mason City, Iowa. While she was principal of the Cleveland (Ohio) Kindergarten-Primary Training School (1922–27), the school was made a department of elementary education at Western Reserve University and she became associate professor. She established the first nursery schools in Ohio, and the Western Reserve Nursery School that she founded became a nationally known center for the study of early education. In 1939 she and William Gray of the University of Chicago produced the Basic Readers: Curriculum Foundation Series (1940, 1946), the "Dick and Jane" books used by more than half the children in the U.S.A. Her college textbook, Children and Books (1947), became the most widely used textbook on children's literature, largely because of her insistence on high standards of evaluation and the importance of literary quality. Her Arbuthnot Anthology of Children's Literature (1953) went into several later editions.