A Cultural Odyssey

A lifetime of research has led Edmund W. Gordon to the conviction that it is the out-of-school extras that nurture children's intellect.

New York

A half-century ago, the noted psychologist Edmund W. Gordon and his physician wife, Susan, opened a children’s health clinic here in central Harlem. For as little as a quarter, poor families in the community could go to the Harriet Tubman Clinic for Children on St. Nicholas Avenue to get a child a checkup or vaccination.

Now, in his ninth decade, Gordon is back doing good in Harlem.

This time, he has even bigger plans for the community. He wants to saturate children living here, starting first in a 65-block-or-so radius from his office, in what he calls “supplementary education.” By that phrase, Gordon refers to the whole gamut of out-of-school educational experiences that shape children’s intellectual development—the hours parents spend reading to their children and engaging them in dinnertime conversations, the programs run by the Boys and Girls Clubs and the YMCA, school-based after-school programs, tutoring services, music lessons. In middle-class families, Gordon says, such experiences are often taken for granted, abundant and invisible like the air children breathe. For some poor and minority children, many of them living right here in this stretch of poverty-pocked real...