In Memoriam: Professor Millie Almy, 1915-2001

GSE Professor Emerita and early childhood education pioneer Millie Almy died at her home in Berkeley on August 15, 2001. Professor Almy played a leading role in the beginning stages of preschool education in the United States and went on to a distinguished career as a scholar.

Millie Almy grew up on a farm in the little town of Clymer, New York. Her father was a farmer and her mother a school teacher. From an early age, Millie Almy wanted to be a public speaker and practiced by addressing the cows on the farm, once getting knocked into a milk bucket when the cattle protested her oratory. The family lost their farm during the Great Depression.

Professor Almy's career as an educator began in the mid 1930s. "By 1934, when I was a student at the child study program at Vassar, there were still relatively few nursery schools," she said in an oral history recorded by the UC Berkeley Library in 1991. Day nurseries mostly focused on physical care of children, not on providing a setting for play and education. Kindergartens were largely privately run at the time.

Millie Almy was a leader in the movement to change the nature of care for preschool children and to conduct research in early childhood education settings. She started work at model programs for younger children at Vassar and Yale, and went on to direct a regional alliance of federally funded preschools in the area of Buffalo, New York, during the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Ironically the preschool movement received a major impetus from the involvement of the U.S. in World War II. "It became increasingly clear that the United States would become involved in the war in Europe," Professor Almy said about this period in the early 1940s. "It also became evident that women would be needed in industry related to a war effort, and that they would need to have care for their children."

Following her hands-on work in nursery schools, Dr. Almy went on to complete a Ph.D. in education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She taught at Teachers College from 1952 to 1971, when she joined the Berkeley faculty. "She made a conscious decision that her students would be her family, and we're all connected because of that," said Dorothy Stewart, who studied with Professor Almy in the late 1970s and early 80s and now directs the Old Firehouse School in Lafayette. "She cared not just about our intellectual life but about our personal lives. She made a point of getting to know our families," Stewart added.

While at Berkeley Professor Almy founded and coordinated an interdisciplinary program for the preparation of personnel for key positions in daycare and related child development services. She also acted as assistant dean for graduate affairs from 1979-80. Professor Almy retired from the Berkeley faculty in 1980.

Millie Almy's publications include Ways of Studying Children (1959), Young Children's Thinking: Studies of Some Aspects of Piaget's Theory (1966), The Early Childhood Educator at Work (1975), and The Impact of Piagetian Theory on Education, Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Philosophy (1979).

Professor Almy also served as president of the National Association of Nursery Educators. "She could cross worlds between the academic and the practitioner. She was as well loved by nursery teachers as by her Berkeley colleagues," Stewart said.

Throughout her career Millie Almy was a strong advocate for quality preschool education. "Until we have adequate salaries, more qualified people, and learn to use community resources better, this will be an eternal problem," she said of the lack of well-trained personnel in early childhood centers.

In her later years Millie Almy suffered from macular degeneration, causing blindness. She discovered books on tape, and continued to maintain her intellectual interests through that medium. "Millie Almy embodied all of the values and commitments that we try to promote here at the Graduate School of Education," said GSE Dean P. David Pearson. "As a national leader in research, policy, and practice in early childhood education, she was highly respected by her peers throughout the nation and the world. But here on the Berkeley campus, she will be remembered as a revered teacher and mentor of graduate students. She will be missed“and remembered with great fondness."

Donations in memory of Millie Almy can be made to the Graduate School of Education Dean's Discretionary Fund. Please make checks payable to the UC Berkeley Foundation.

Millie Almy