Progressively Progressive

By 1938, John Dewey was worriedly deploring the excesses of progressive education. He was right. Yet the best of his ideas survive and thrive--not in the few U.S. schools that still seem to be straight out of Auntie Mame, but in such well-ordered citadels of learning as Chicago's private Francis W. Parker School.

One measure of Parker's vitality is that last fall its 50-year-old plant was condemned as a firetrap--and last month it proudly opened a handsome new $2,500,000 building on the same North Side site. Vital were the $750 loans by Parker parents, who provide, says Principal Cleveland A. Thomas, "the highest order of parent participation of any school I have ever known." The parents could feel confident of a sound investment. Said Harvard College's Dean John Monro, chief speaker at the dedication of the building: "I have never known a dull boy to come to us from Parker. They all care a lot about something that really matters."

Character & Community. Parker owes its name and ideas to Francis W. Parker, a New England schoolmaster, whom Dewey himself called "the father of progressive education.'' Colonel Parker--he won the rank as a Union officer in the Civil War--was less a Dewey-style theorist than an artist with children. His talent revealed itself in his famed 1870s reform of the rote-taught schools of Quincy, Mass. Said he: "The primary concern of education is character. A school should be a model home, a complete community, an embryonic democracy."

The idea attracted Mrs. Emmons Blaine, daughter of Reaper Inventor Cyrus McCormick, who gave the colonel $1,000,000 to launch the Parker School in 1901. The colonel spawned all sorts of innovations in U.S. education--specialized teachers, morning assemblies, the teaching of art, music and drama.

Heaven for Educators. Parker permits such progressivisms as a science teacher bringing a live cow to class because "city children rarely see one." It shuns conventional marks through the eighth grade. And yet, the school heavily emphasizes the three Rs, beginning in prekindergarten. First-graders read the newspaper, and second-graders get daily drills in public speaking. Science has always been strong; college math and physics have been offered for years.

Parker's 570 boys and girls cover trigonometry in three weeks, and start calculus in their junior year. Almost all of them go to college; more remarkably, 80% of them last year went to the college of their first choice. According to the National Registration Office, a private school monitor, they also get nearly twice as many A's and B's in college as the average for graduates of other prep schools.

Parker has one teacher for every eleven students, a fulltime psychologist and 25 part-time teaching assistants. Pay is not high--the lure is freedom in teaching. Specializing in one subject, Parker's teachers get a chance to cover it at many levels. Barr McCutcheon teaches algebra to fifth-graders and transfinite arithmetic to seniors, for example, and McCutcheon need not bother with standard math texts--"a bore." "For an educator, this is heaven," says Principal Thomas, who notes that 36 teachers applied for a single vacancy in the history department this spring.

Reality for Students. Parker's lively blend of progressive and conventional teaching is well illustrated by Jack Ellison's pioneering (1949) twelfth-grade course in cultural anthropology and sociology. It starts with study of primitive societies, goes on to such books as Louis Wirth's Urban Civilization. It culminates in a six-week independent study of some community problem from urban aesthetics to Puerto Rican migrants. The final report can be written, tape-recorded or even filmed. To produce it, Parker's students have done everything from living with an Indian tribe to bird-dogging Chicago's peripatetic Police Chief Orlando Wilson.

It is Teacher Ellison's aim not only to talk up "community service," but also to prod students into discovering what "realistically can be done." Adds Principal Thomas: "It is our prime responsibility to satisfy the student's need to know the world as it really is. Failure to teach in this way can lead our young only to disillusionment."

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