Frank Caplan | |
|---|---|
 Frank and Theresa Caplan | |
| Born | June 10, 1911 Kingston upon Hull, England |
| Died | September 28, 1988 (aged 77) New Jersey, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation(s) | Founder of Creative Playthings, Toy Developer, Educator, Author, Youth Worker |
| Spouse | Theresa Caplan |
Frank Caplan (June 10, 1911 – September 28, 1988) was a youth worker, educator, folk toy collector, and pioneer in developing and manufacturing educational toys for children. He co-founded Creative Playthings in 1945 with his wife Theresa, and worked with artists, architects, and designers, such as Isamu Noguchi, Louis Kahn, Henry Moore, Robert Winston, and the Swiss toymaker, Antonio Vitali, to create innovative educational play objects and playground designs for children.[1] By the 1950s, Creative Playthings had gained international recognition and expanded to become one of the most important manufacturers and suppliers of materials for early childhood education.[2] In 1975, Frank Caplan founded The Princeton Center for Infancy and Early Childhood. He researched and co-authored a national bestselling series on early childhood development with Theresa Caplan, which included, The First Twelve Months of Life (1977), The Second Twelve Months of Life (1978), and The Early Childhood Years: The 2 to 6 Year Old (1983). Together they also co-authored The Power of Play (1973). He was one of the first male nursery school teachers in the U.S. and together with Theresa Caplan collected over 50,000 American and international folk toys, folk art, and contemporary playthings, which in 1984 the couple donated to The Children's Museum of Indianapolis for a permanent gallery on folk, fantasy, and play.[2]
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Transcription
There are now over 300,000 Americans on dialysis. Every year, about 60,000 die. Kidney transplants are hard to get, but hundreds of millions of Americans have a kidney to spare. The numbers are heavily in our favor. The tragedy goes on year after year. Almost nobody wants to do surgery to help a total stranger for free. And selling your kidney is illegal. Voters, and the politicians they elect, have banned the trading of cash for kidneys. Why? Because they underrate the social benefits of markets. They suffer from what I call anti-market bias. People who have never studied economics often equate greedy intentions with bad results. Economists share a standard objection to this bias. Thanks to competition, the surest way to get rich is to make your customers happy. As the eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith put it, It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard for their own self-interest. Think about reviews on websites like Yelp. If you give your customers good value, they'll come back and tell others to do the same. If you rip your customers off, they go elsewhere next time and tell others to do the same. When customers are free to choose, firms can't put profits before people. If they do, they lose their people and their profits. Economists= appreciation for markets leads us to unconventional solutions to all sorts of problems. Take the kidney shortage. Most people would shrug that there are no more kidneys available. But that's false. If just one person in a thousand donated a kidney, everyone on dialysis could get one. There's just one problem. Asking someone to give you a kidney is a huge favor, the kind of favor that only people who know and love you will agree to do. Love already saves a lot of lives, but it's clearly not enough. So why not legalize a market for human kidneys, where people who desperately need kidneys could buy one from a willing donor? Regardless of their politics, almost no one who isn't an economist sees merit to this idea, and almost everyone who is an economist does. Some worry that low-income people would be first in line to sell. But what's wrong with making poor people rich, and sick people well? This doesn't mean that economists always favor unregulated markets. Unlike a typical voter, though, economists rarely complain because business is making money by solving a problem. Economists complain when business isn't making money by solving a problem. When a market visibly isn't working, economists try to figure out ways to jump start markets. In many cases, slightly different government policies would do the trick. Take air pollution. Many economists turn to government because they can't figure out how a person could make money by cleaning the air. But that doesn't mean you can't have market. Liberal economist Alan Blinder promotes tradable pollution permits to cut the cost of reducing pollution. Instead of telling firms how to cut emissions, government could cap their total emissions, then let firms with spare pollution permits sell them to other firms that are over their quota. Blinder says this would reduce the cost of cleanup by at least 50 percent. When firms can sell their spare permits, they have a strong incentive to find cheaper ways to clean the air. If markets can slash the cost of cleanup, why do voters resist the idea? Blinder blames anti-market bias. The public seems to recoil in horror at the idea of selling the right to pollute, as if even a small emission of a pollutant were immoral. There's always going to be some pollution. As Blinder says, to think otherwise, is not to think. When you can't imagine a way for business to make money solving a problem, it's tempting to conclude that no one will ever think of a way for business to make money solving a problem. Even economists, who pride themselves in their appreciation of markets, make this mistake. If you went back in time to 1985 and described the Internet, most economists would have rolled their eyes millions of free websites providing everything from directions to histories of Germany. It'll never happen. Most economists would have been wrong, not because they had too much faith in markets, but because they had too little faith in human imagination.
Education and youth work
Frank Caplan was born in Kingston upon Hull, England, on June 10, 1911, to Russian Jewish parents.[3] In 1914, his family immigrated to the United States and settled in Harlem, New York. He graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in 1927 and began attending City College of New York at night. After graduating in 1931 with a bachelor's degree in sociology and history, he took a job as the director of the Block Recreation Project, working with street gangs to create club centers for leadership training. His interest in toys began when working as one of the first male nursery school teachers in the U.S. under Caroline Pratt, founder and director of City and Country School in Greenwich Village, New York City. Later, he worked at the Jewish Center in Far Rockaway, Long Island (along with his future wife, Theresa Caplan, and artist, Mark Rothko), where he made puppets and simple playthings for children. In 1934, he set up a cooperative farm-camp for city children.[3]
On May 30, 1934, Frank Caplan married Theresa Caplan (b. Kupferberg, June 6, 1913 – April 13, 2010). In 1936, he received his master's degree in the Philosophy of Education from Teachers College, Columbia University and began work as Senior Project Supervisor of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Youth Service Division of the New York City Board of Education, a novel experiment to develop education programs for 16- to 25-year-olds living in economically distressed areas of New York City.[3]
Creative Playthings
Research and publications
In 1975, Frank and Theresa Caplan co-founded The Princeton Center for Infancy and Early Childhood, a pioneering organization that researched and prepared books and pamphlets for parents and professionals. The center authored The Parenting Advisor (1977), Parents' Yellow Pages (1978), and Growing Up Years: Your Child's Record Keeping Book (1978). Frank and Theresa co-authored The Power of Play (1973), The First Twelve Months of Life (1977), The Second Twelve Months of Life (1978), and The Early Childhood Years: The 2 to 6 Year Old (1983), which covered the mental, physical, language and social development of early childhood with advice for parents and answers to common concerns. The series was praised for embracing both mothers and fathers, as well as supporting diverse family types.
Folk toy collecting
In the 1950s, Frank and Theresa Caplan began collecting folk toys on their numerous international travels. Their casual collecting grew into more formal collecting of folk toys from around the world in the hopes of establishing a Museum of Fantasy and Play. In 1984 they donated their collection of over 50,000 folk toys, folk art, and contemporary playthings to The Children's Museum of Indianapolis. The collection, now known as the Caplan Collection, was first used in the exhibit "Passport to the World."[4]
Frank Caplan died on September 28, 1988. Theresa Caplan died on April 13, 2010, survived by their daughter, Judith Inglese, and son, Richard Caplan.[5]
Selected works
- Caplan, Frank and Theresa Caplan. "The Value of Play for Learning." Theory into Practice, Vol. 13, No. 4 (October 1974): 239–243.
- Caplan, Frank and Theresa Caplan. The First Twelve Months of Life: Your Baby's Growth Month By Month. New York: Bantam, 1995 (Orig. published 1977). ISBN 0-553-57406-X.
- Caplan, Frank and Theresa Caplan. The Second Twelve Months of Live: Your Baby's Growth Month By Month, 15th Edition. New York: Bantam, 1982 (Orig. published 1978). ISBN 0-553-26438-9.
- Caplan, Frank and Theresa Caplan. The Early Childhood Years: The 2 to 6 Year Old. New York: Bantam, 1984 (Orig. published 1983). ISBN 0-553-26967-4.
- Caplan, Frank and Theresa Caplan. The Power of Play. Norwell, MA: Anchor Press, 1974. ISBN 0-385-09935-5.
- Caplan, Frank. "Extending Educational Service to Autonomous Groups of Unemployed Youth." Journal of Educational Sociology, Vol. 19, No. 9 (May 1946): 546–554.
- Caplan, Frank. "Block Recreation Project." Journal of Educational Sociology, Vol. 7, No. 8 (April 1934): 516–520.
References
- ^ Ogata, Amy F. (Summer–Autumn 2004). "Creative Playthings: Educational Toys and Postwar American Culture". Winterthur Portfolio. 39 (2/3): 129–156. doi:10.1086/433197. S2CID 151517793.
- ^ a b "Creative Playthings Puppet Family". Oakland Public Library. March 31, 2008. Archived from the original on 1 July 2011. Retrieved 1 July 2011.
- ^ a b c Caplan, Theresa & Frank (1999). Frank Caplan: Champion of Child's Play. New York: Vantage Press. ISBN 0-533-12955-9.
- ^ McGovern, Justine (Summer 1993). "Folk Fantasy and Play: Selections from the Caplan Collection of The Children's Museum of Indianapolis". The Journal of American Folklore. 106 (421): 370–371. doi:10.2307/541441. JSTOR 541441.
- ^ "Frank Caplan, 77, Toy Developer". The New York Times. September 30, 1988. Retrieved March 20, 2018.
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This page was last edited on 1 April 2024, at 14:35