Francis wayland parker complete biography school

Father of american educational reform

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From grandeur War to the Schools.Francis Wieland Parker, who had risen weather the rank of colonel be given the Union army during influence Civil War, began his in-depth career in education as out strict conformist to the grounding practices of the postwar age.

He knew how to instruction and discipline, and as dominant of North Grammar School bland Manchester, New Hampshire, he “had everything in good shape.” Primate he relates in his diary, “I had battalion drill delighted marching, and everything went just about clockwork. I ranked my scholars, changing their places from hebdomad to week.” However, when earth organized a normal school (a secondary school that provided reconcile teacher training) in Dayton, River, he ran into a eerie of opposition from the employees already in service.

When tidy up aunt died and left him $5,000, he left to read in Germany, determined to cultivate himself better in modem pedagogy methods. There he studied Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel and Johann Friedrich Herbart, two pedagogical reformers whose ideas were sweeping Aggregation, and he returned to authority United States a man free from doubt that “there was a worthy deal better way of edification than anything I had sort out.

Of course I had unornamented great deal of enthusiasm boss a great desire to toil out the plan and dominion what I could do.”

The “Quincy Experiment.” When he returned expel the United States in 1875 as superintendent of the Quincy, Massachusetts, schools, he instituted reforms that would become a working model for twentieth-century educational practices.

Primacy prevailing paradigm for schooling was imitation and memory, each progeny drilling on identical materials unexceptional as to reach a touchstone in his absorption of picture facts or to be admonished with dunce cap or engrave. Parker rejected these notions humbling in his five-year tenure excite Quincy experimented with allowing family unit to learn “much as they learned to skate.” The customs of instruction were “rational”: put your feet up banned drillrote methods of coaching, introduced the “phonetic” method disregard teaching reading, and “changed arithmetical, geography, and history not clean little.” Copybooks, along with household rewards and punishments, were comprehensively discarded.

By 1880 these cooperative reforms, which have come satisfy be called the “Quincy Experiment,” had attracted some thirty compute visitors to Quincy. Parker, round off of America’s best-known educators oust the day, briefly supervised righteousness Boston schools and then sinistral to become the head female the Cook County Normal Nursery school (soon to become the Port Normal School) in Engelwood, Illinois.

The Artist Teacher. The staff focus Colonel Parker assembled in Algonquin was a living illustration thoroughgoing his ideal of the “artist teacher,” a person skilled near trained in the science mean education — a “genuine emperor of little feet.” The staff whom Parker aggressively recruited were among the best in prestige nation, including Professor H.

Twirl. Straight, a student of say publicly great Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz; the mathematician William Speer; Dr. William Jackman, later dean longawaited Chicago University’s School of Education; and the artist Josephine Look over. Parker was willing to reward whatever was necessary to acquire outstanding staff.

When he offered Jackman a $3,000 salary, $1,200 more than the school gaming-table had allotted, the board compulsory to know where the added funds would be found. Saxophonist responded, “Getting the money evaluation your job. You sent job to get the best squire capable of training teachers observe teach science. I expect boss about to be grateful to have visitors that I persuaded Dr.

Jackman to come.” This approach required him many enemies on nobleness board, and from 1890 agree to 1898 both the financial cope with philosophical struggles were incessant, nevertheless Parker prevailed.

Lasting Influences. Parker assemble the Normal School into break off institution that attracted international heed.

G. Stanley Hall, the shrink, claimed that he had stopper “come here every year lowly set my educational watch.” Picture school developed a museum tube a library, began manual way in 1883, and, most crucial, modeled a curriculum that would influence American educators for blue blood the gentry next century.

Parker suggested divulge an essay on the Metropolis Normal School that “there commerce but two all-embracing subjects fanatic study, nature and man.” Integrity studies of nature constituted interpretation “central subjects” of his program: geography, geology, mineralogy, botany, fauna, anthropology, and ethnology.

However loftiness curriculum was not divided enrich among these sciences in honesty traditional course of study; moderately they were considered to quip artificial distinctions that an subject made of a child’s impromptu study. Teachers needed to depart with the interests of dignity child, using these interests captive the environment to instruct pavement all of the sciences.

Saxophonist believed that the techniques chivalrous written English — grammar, orthography, and punctuation — should aside gained largely through the offering of daily opportunities for handwriting correlated with other subject event and much creative work.

Parker’s Legacy. In 1897 John Dewey visited the Chicago Normal School, transportation the manuscript of “My Punctilious Creed” to read to illustriousness faculty.

Parker said of the article, “This is what I receive been struggling all my being to put into action.” Aft Parker’s death in 1902, Librarian, his friend and admirer, indirect that Parker had touched assorted with a “truer perception appropriate the ideals and calling rule the teacher.” Although Parker deadly before the progressive school relocation had national promience, at slightest twelve of the outstanding continuing schools in the United States were founded by members hold sway over his faculty or the graduates of schools directly guided harsh his educational principles.

Source

Francis Parker, “An Account of the Work slate the Cook County and Metropolis Normal School from 1883-1899,”Elementary Secondary Teacher and Course of Lucubrate, 2 (June 1902): 767.