A Centennial Retrospective
The going before is part of the coming after. Antecedents must be known and understood in order to rightly interpret history and understand its philosophy. This is eminently true of the history and evolution of education, One who can see and know only the present can not realize our advanced position in educational affairs or appreciate the efforts of the teachers and educators who fought for the truth and higher standards with the great odds of ignorance, prejudice and sentiment against them . . .
John F. Eberhart, First Superintendent of
Schools of Cook County and
Founder of Cook County Normal School
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| John F. Eberhart |
The Founding:
Teacher Training School, Blue Island
This story begins more than a century ago with the strongly held conviction of one man that much needed to be done about the low estate of teaching in Cook County. Cook County Normal School, Chicago Normal School, Chicago Teachers College, Illinois Teachers College: Chicago South, Chicago State College, and now Chicago State University are the legacy of his belief.
Schooling in Chicago dates back to 1832 when Richard J. Hamilton, a City Commissioner and property owner, donated a twelve-foot-square log stable north of the Chicago river to the public interest for educational purposes. Here a young Easterner named John Watkins taught reading and writing to four white and eight Indian children as they sat on wooden boxes. At that time, there were also twenty children in a school at the little Presbyterian church and a handful of boys in a reading program at the Baptist church. Little is known about these first teachers, but few teachers west of the Appalachians had specific training. In 1832 there were only two private academies in the country in which teachers were trained, and these were in Massachusetts. The most successful teachers were Easterners who had attended these academies. But these, if young men, seldom remained long in such an unrewarding occupation and quickly left for a business or professional career. The young women usually improved their lot by marriage.
One who stayed for a short time was Miss Eliza Chappell who kept the school in the Presbyterian church. It was she to whom the first money from the Chicago school fund was paid in 1834. Under state law income from school lands was to be divided among the schools of the township according to the number of children enrolled and according to some accounting of the number of days attended. This kind of numerical record entitled the teachers to a share in the public money if “orphans and indigent scholars” were admitted. Teachers did not have to admit “pauper” children who were “bound out” to jobs if those responsible for them promised they would be taught to read and write. The only other source of income for these schools was the $2.00 per quarter paid by parents. Not only the salaries of the teachers but rent of space, heating, books and equipment, if any, had to come from the interest on the fund. Women teachers were paid $200 a year and men $500.
The new city government in Chicago gradually assumed responsibility and control over the schools. In 1839 the legislature amended the new city charter not only to give the city council (instead of the county commissioners) full control of school lands and funds, but also the right to appoint the local school district trustees and a board of seven school inspectors. The council furthermore had the right to choose textbooks and prescribe the course of study. They did not use this right and turned all such matters over to the inspectors in 1841. However, the council kept to itself the right to control all school contracts, even then substantial enough to be politically significant.
From the beginning of the Chicago school system there were never enough seats for children who came, and there were many who never came at all. The schools quickly grew too large for the small churches, so rooms and buildings were rented wherever they could be located. The only building owned by any of the school districts in Cook County was a frame house built on school land at Madison and Dearborn. All school buildings were bare, had little light or ventilation and uneven stove heat in cold Chicago winters. All the spaces used were without ornament or equipment for school purposes, and none had enough seats on days when attendance was high. Each teacher was left to his/her own devices to keep order and dispense knowledge, with difficulty in achieving the first objective often submerging the second.
The tremendous explosion of population, production arid wealth had little influence on the schools except to intensify their problems. Between 1837 and 1847 the population of Chicago increased 4½ times, but school expenditures had risen only threefold. The new wealth had no impact on the fixed income formula of the school fund nor even on the rents on unsold land established for seven years by contract in 1843. A new State law increased the formula only a mite — not enough to pay the costs of educating all the additional children. In 1843 there were 818 “scholars” enrolled in Chicago’s schools, and the council had eight teachers under contract, an average of one teacher for 102 pupils. The average number of students per teacher for the first twenty years ranged between eighty and one hundred — a considerable task for teachers with no training.
There was no real change in the situation until 1845, when the house at Madison and Dearborn was sold for $45.00 and the inspectors got the city to agree to build a school across Madison Street on a piece of “canal land” which had been given to the school fund. The new brick building was three stories high and very plain inside and out. It cost $7,500 and was nicknamed “Miltimore’s Folly,” after the inspector who had been most insistent on its construction. It housed 543 children from two adjacent school districts as soon as it opened, and the next year 843 children appeared from one district alone. In. 1850 there were 13,500 children of school age in Chicago, only 1,919 of whom were enrolled in the district schools. There were more children in private and parochial schools than in the public schools, and thousands were in no school at all. By 1854 the seven buildings used for schools were so overcrowded that one thousand children who came to enroll were turned away.
In spite of the lag in the construction of bui1dings, Chicago’s school enrollment rose to 6,826 by 1855, to 14,199 in 1860, and to 29,000 by 1865. The 21 teachers in 1850 had doubled to 42 by 1855 to keep pace with the fourfold rise in enrollment, with each teacher assigned 160 pupils. Even so, the school enrollment was only 21 percent of Chicago’s school age population, many of whom came to enroll but were turned away. The ratio had improved somewhat by 1860 with teacher/student ratio averaging 1 to 115. It was into this abominable situation that William Harvey Wells came in these formative years. He became one of the most effective administrators in the early history of public education. He left his mark not only on the city and its schools, but on growing school systems throughout the Middle West.
Philadelphia had opened a public high school in 1838 and New York City followed suit in 1849. In 1848 Philadelphia had introduced a normal training course for prospective teachers within its high school curriculum. Wells himself had been the principal of two private academies of recognized standing in the East, and he came to Chicago with a normal training course as one of his main goals. The new Central High School opened in Chicago in 1856 with 169 students, growing to 324 by the time Wells left in 1864. Included in the curriculum from the outset was a two-year normal course for prospective teachers. By 1858, the Chicago high school was sending back into the lower schools a few teachers with at least some training for their work. A few made an immediate difference, for these were among the 123 teachers in 1860 who were responsible for the education of 14,000 children.
Wells’ plan for new buildings was a kind of small educational park where a grammar school was the center of a cluster of nearby smaller primary schools for not more than 600 pupils. When constructed, however, the buildings were not very good, hastily erected without proper planning for heat, light, and air. When finished they were still barren of basic equipment. The Brown School, Wells’ finest model, built in 1857 and used for one hundred years thereafter, was the first school in Chicago to substitute crude steam heat for stoves. The stringency in financial resources prohibited anything better, slowed new construction and kept teachers’ salaries among the lowest in the nation, In 1856 a Chicago policeman was paid $800 per year ($15 per week) while a female teacher drew $250 a year — neither position requiring specific qualifications.
One of the students in the new Brown School was a thirteen year old girl named Ella Flagg. She enrolled when her family moved to Chicago in 1858 and, as a gifted student, she taught arithmetic there as a child monitor under the old Lancastrian system. After she took the two-year normal course, she returned, at age eighteen, to the Brown School as its assistant principal. Like Wells, she tried to interest her student teachers in the children as individuals, going far beyond the mechanics of the rigid construction they were taught to apply. In 1865 the normal division of the high school offered a half-year of experience in classroom teaching under guidance in a practice lower school. Ella Flagg, now a veteran of twenty years of age, was put in charge. The practicum, however, in the next years was reduced to two-weeks by the Chicago Board of Education, whose members were dissatisfied when the hopelessly incompetent, who were children sponsored by the politically powerful, were weeded out. By 1871, Ella Flagg asked to be transferred out and the normal division was separated from the high school and located in six rooms of a new building erected by the county in the new village of Englewood.
John. F. Eberhart had been appointed Commissioner of Schools for Cook County in 1859. He was a strong-willed man who, much to the surprise of his contemporaries, took education seriously. When he first visited the county schools, he was appalled at the absolute lack of professional standards. Teachers were often negligent of their duties, incompetent in subject and method, and frequently totally uneducated themselves. Eberhart, aware of what Wells had begun to implement in the City of Chicago, was himself convinced that the establishment of a formal training program for teachers in Cook County was similarly imperative.
Eberhart proceeded to his task in the face of the same apathy from the supervisors in the county as in the city and the same lack of public understanding. He was adamant, however, and the County Commissioners decided that an appropriation of $50 for his proposed program would be reasonable and would, no more, purchase momentary quiet. With this money Eberhart began by holding a. teacher training institute in what was later to become Oak Park. Seventy-five teachers attended that first conference held in April, 1860.
The County Commissioners, hearing Eberhart’s report, admitted their surprise at the response and conceded some success to the venture. Eberhart secured their agreement that the training was necessary and should continue. Thereafter, two such institutes were conducted yearly for Cook County teachers. Nevertheless, the complaints about the thoroughness and the efficiency of the educational work being done in the common schools of the County remained during the next year, for the institutes were but a small effort that could not rectify the deficiencies on a wide scale. Gaining in reputation and in security, Eberhart reported in 1866 to the County Board in favor of a permanent teacher training school. The subject was fully discussed, and in view of the fact that the State Superintendent of Schools heartily endorsed the proposal, in December, 1866 the Committee on Education reported in favor of the establishment of a County Normal and Training School.
In March 1867, the full Cook County Board of Supervisors authorized the establishment of such a school for the experimental term of two years. The Commissioners appropriated $5,000 to fund the new institution, and the Committee on Education was empowered to receive propositions front the several villages and towns of the County regarding the location of the school buildings. Harlem, Blue Island, Lyons, and Richton at once put forth bids for the institution, each making favorable proposals setting forth the advantages of its community. The site was finally selected ten miles from the City of Chicago’s southernmost point, and in Septernber, 1867, Cook County’s first teacher training school was inaugurated in Blue Island with Professor Daniel S. Wentworth as Principal.
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Daniel S. Wentworth |
When Eberhart appointed Wentworth as head of the new institution, it was a move indicative of his determination to establish a man of recognized educational ability in immediate and firm control. Wentworth was a graduate of the Bridgeport, Massachusetts Normal School. As an Easterner, he had both familiarity and some sympathy with the Horace Mann movement. He had come to Chicago just ahead of Wells to serve as a principal and a member of the Chicago Board of Education. Eberhart certainly hoped that Wentworth’s appointment would provide the school immediate credibility with both the County Commissioners and the general public to ensure the school’s continuation.
The experimental school opened in Blue Island on September 2, 1867 with thirteen students enrolled in the teacher training program. Rooms promised by the County Commissioners were not yet available, so the students were hastily accommodated in a leaky freight car on a railroad siding nearby. This expedient was fortunately temporary, for better quarters were soon located in the one-story law office of Daniel O. Robinson, where the enrollment soon grew to thirty-two. Though small by modern standards, in 1856 the training school of the Board of Education in Chicago had opened with twenty-two pupils in the course at the Brown School, and when it closed down some twenty years later, its enrollment was only thirty-five. In 1857, the State Normal School in Bloomington opened its first term with an enrollment of nineteen.
During thc first year of operation in 1867, the Normal School in Cook County enrolled sixty-two different pupils, with an average attendance of forty-one. The average attendance in the second year was sixty-four. Somehow a qualified faculty was assembled by Wentworth and induced to live on this southern frontier of Chicago. The teaching force for the Normal School in Blue Island in 1867 consisted of four persons: Mr. Wentworth, Miss Armanda Paddock, Miss Augusta A. Frost, and Miss Mary R. Gorton.
Wentworth recruited these teachers from his known acquaintances in the East, who doubtlessly embarked on their adventure ignorant of the character and quality of life they were to endure temporarily. But both faculty and students impressed visitors with a common high spirit, harmony, and determination, and the two experimental years in Blue Island justified Wentworth’s expectations and Eberhart’s hopes.
By December, 1868, the question of the permanent location of the school was brought before the Committee on Education, which had to recommend final action to the County Board in March of the following year. On the 12th of that month, the Supervisors visited the various villages from which propositions had been received, and one week later when the vote was taken, Englewood’s winning bid of $85,000 for the location of the school within its borders was announced.
Englewood, a village numbering only one thousand persons, offered superior inducement in land, and cash secured the prize. The old School District No. 2 in the Town of Lake offered $25,000 in cash. L.W. Beck gave ten acres making twenty acres in all. H.B. Lewis and other public-spirited citizens advanced $25,000 in cash, The value of the site at the time of the first discussion of location was from $40 to $50 per acre; after the location it rated from $150 to $200 per acre.
The site being thus finally chosen for the permanent location of the school, work was at last begun. The buildings were erected at a cost, when completed, of $95,000 from plans drawn by J.K. Winchel, architect, who also supervised the construction. The final touches were complete for the opening of classes in the Fall term 1870. Thus did Eberhart’s dream become a living reality.
