A Centennial Retrospective
Cook County Normal School
The Parker Years
A. H. Champlin of the Cook County Board of Education was charged with the responsibility of recommending Wentworth’s successor as Principal of the Cook County Normal School. His choice was Francis Wayland Parker, who was suggested by Alice H. Putnam, a member of the Chicago Froebel Society. For an essentially conservative group to concur on the appointment of an educator with such clearly established progressive connections as the Froebel Society reflected the substantial naivete of the Board members of that era.
Parker was forty-five years old when he became head of the Normal School. A precocious childhood in Massachusetts had been followed by administrative positions there and in Illinois and by a distinguished military career in the Union Army. He had served as principal of the Normal School in Dayton, Ohio and then as Superintendent of the Dayton public school system. From 1872 to 1875 he had toured Europe studying continental education systems. In Berlin he observed progressive educational concepts and fashioned the educational philosophy that was later to bring national fame to both himself and to Cook County Normal School.
After his return to the United States, Parker held several administrative posts in Massachusetts. Champlin overcame his reluctance to leave Boston by promising him the opportunity to continue his educational experimentation. With Parker’s arrival, the institution entered its most illustrious years.
Upon his arrival in 1883, Parker found the Normal School still a county institution located in the village of Englewood. Cattle grazed on large stretches of prairie which still surrounded the school. The nearest sign of "culture" was more than a mile away at Sixty-First Street and Halsted Avenue, where a lost student might happen upon a farmer’s saloon. But the city influences so feared by the school’s founders were already being felt. Intellectually Englewood had already annexed itself to the city and legal annexation would occur in six years. By 1896 the school itself would come under the jurisdiction of the Chicago Board of Education.
Parker inherited a physical plant that was far from being the finest building west of Philadelphia, as it had been called in 1870. Deterioration had set in, the library had not grown, and the science laboratories were still primitively equipped. Of greater concern was the influence which the County Board of Education had exerted over the hiring of faculty during the last years of Wentworth’s regime. This practice began a long and self-destructive tradition — one never totally overcome until recent years, in spite of strong efforts by the school’s administrators.
Yet in spite of these obstacles, Parker brought international prestige to the school. His era was to see Normal become a laboratory for the testing of his social and educational concepts. His philosophy was as radical as Wentworth’s had been conservative, and while he was not a profound thinker, Parker contributed significantly to the shaping of American educational thought.
Parker’s educational philosophy rested upon the a priori belief that American-style democracy furnished the best and only government for an enlightened people. He believed that the purpose of education in a democratic society was to develop students with the democratic attitudes and commitment to democratic values essential for effective citizenship. The schools were to achieve this purpose through the establishment of a democratic environment in the classroom situation. Thus, in Parker’s view, the destiny of the country was linked to the fate of the schools. His classroom concepts were based on keeping the child free of external restraints, for only the democratic school could protect the child from the selfishness of the aritocracy which Parker constantly attacked.
While Parker’s philosophy was not profound, it certainly threatened traditionalism and "proper order." He proceeded to shape the Normal School to propagate his values. As his influence grew, his tenets were a source of criticism and continual controversy. Given the freedom Parker advocated, students were often boisterous and some visitors said the school appeared in total disorder — perhaps a perceptive observation. Some in the community referred to it as being "in a constant state of recess."
Initially Parker’s philosophy led to divisiveness among the faculty. Those opposed to his ideas gradually left or were dismissed. Their replacements, chosen carefully in the interests of philosophic conformity, succeeded in establishing an efficiently functioning school within the framework of Parker’s concepts.
While Parker believed the freedom of the child depended on an emancipated teacher, his philosophy did not always coincide with his personality. It was common for the Colonel to be heard bellowing down long corridors at some pedagogically errant teacher. Moreover, his military background sometimes ran contrary to his democratic principles. It was accepted procedure for him to be greeted in weekly assemblies by rising students chanting "Hail the conquering hero comes, sound the trumpet, beat the drums." Evidently some of Prussia as well as some of Pestalozzi and Froebel had rubbed off on Parker. Idiosyncrasies aside, Parker had an important impact on evolving American educational thought beyond the philosophic realm. He further popularized the "Quincy System" in which the curriculum was transformed from subject matter orientation into what was claimed to be an integrated whole. His constant criticism of what he termed the system of artificial rewards was not without its eventual influence on the American educational system.
While aware of the prestige that Parker had brought to the Normal School, not all members of the County Board of Education were delighted by its newly acquired reputation. Many believed the school had strayed from its original path and no longer served the purpose for which it had been established. The forces of educational reaction were always close at hand, and there continued under Parker the wearying tale of subversion of the school’s potential through lack of community and Board imagination. Parker was forced to resist constant political pressure. His attitude no doubt convinced many of his critics never again to employ a chief administrator of so independent a nature. Mediocrity came to seem preferable to Parker’s intransigence. His dismissal of faculty members exacerbated his relations with Board members who had previously appointed these teachers and a totally casual attitude towards the budget and an expansion of the school’s operation in the face of spiraling costs made the continuation of a mutual facade of civility difficult indeed.
Strife between Parker and the County Board of Education began immediately upon his arrival in 1884 and remained endemic throughout his tenure. Struggles ranging from trade union opposition to the Manual Training Department, which Parker established with his personal funds, to attacks of prestigious academicians, who accused Parker of clearly apparent anti-intellectualism, were constant and were recorded in the Board Proceedings throughout Parker’s career at the Normal School. One charge particularly worthy of memorialization was that Parker had planted a vegetable garden behind the school, thus creating an unacademic atmosphere.
Most criticism was leveled at Parker’s financial management of the institution. A year after his arrival, the operating costs of the school had doubled — to $35,000 a year. Each succeeding year there were major increases in costs, and periodically the Board discussed, with varying degrees of seriousness, the abolition of the school.
Parker, throughout, was not without support. A major source of his strength was the press who were not hesitant to point out that the elimination of Parker would hasten the closing of the school. A great deal of land with substantial market value would then be available for sale to speculators. Evidence lends considerable credibility to the newspapers’ suspicions. Parker was always able to rely upon a well-organized delegation of his supporters materializing at crucial moments. To one such, in 1887, when he was threatened with a salary cut, he announced he would resign rather than take a salary lower than that earned by a hog buyer.
The battles with the county officials came to an end in 1896 when the County Board of Commissioners announced that they could no longer support the school and offered it as a gift to the City of Chicago. The Chicago Board of Education forthwith rejected the offer. In turn, the county cut off its support as of January 1, 1897, and the faculty suffered payless paydays for the duration of the academic year.
Determined to maintain the school, the faculty paid the school’s operating expenses until June 1, 1897. During these six months the teachers received letters of consternation and offers of positions from colleges throughout the United States, England, and Canada —clear indication of the faculty’s unique qualifications and world-wide reputation. The city capitulated in June 1897, acquiring an internationally-known institution which now became the Chicago Normal School.
Whether the City of Chicago appreciated its acquisition is questionable as the Chicago Board of Education had been without a formal teacher-training program for the preceding twenty years. Perhaps the one person who saw the full potential of the new educational program was the School Superintendent, Albert C. Lane. Elected to this position as a Republican in 1891, Lane had served eight years as Superintendent of Schools in Cook County. His long desired step forward in teacher training came with the acquisition of the Normal School in 1897.
By 1895, the teaching force in the City of Chicago public school system had grown to 4,826. The 300 high school teachers almost all boasted college degrees, but few of the elementary teachers had more than a high school education. Some old-timers, like Ella Flagg Young and Superintendent Lane himself, had attended only the original two-year normal course. After the early normal school had been closed in 1877 as an unnecessary expense, Chicago alone among the large cities had no provision for training teachers.
Tree Song
The Normal Class are we;
As we plant our chosen tree.
Chorus
Catalpa, catalpa, three cheers for you to-day;
And may you flourish in long years hence,
When you are “schoolmarms” gray.
The chestnut, maple and birch,
Pray, leave us not in the lurch.
Chorus
But grow, and grow,
And far may your branches reach;
With ‘nothing to hinder, and all to help,’
Our motto, may you teach.
For you are a normal tree;
When you no more we see.
Chorus
Though far and wide,
In many a distant clime,
These pleasant scenes, our consciousness,
Shall still reunify.
Of Afric’s sunny strand,
A cosmopolitan band.
Chorus
Catalpa, catalpa, three cheers for you to-day;
And may you flourish in long years hence,
When you are “schoolmarms” gray.
The procedure for becoming an elementary teacher had been very simple since 1877. A high school graduate who could find a political sponsor was designated a cadet to learn from another (untrained) teacher, or, without any experience, was directly assigned as a substitute teacher. A very simple examination was given the applicants, but a letter from a ward committeeman was the only sure guarantee of appointment. In 1885, as he assigned to duty seventy cadets with no training of any kind, Superintendent Howland mourned they would be helpless when confronted with sixty or seventy pupils, but he could do nothing about it: Superintendent Lane did something. In 1892 he opened an after-hours school course for cadets which they were required to attend for six months. He had planned to extend this extracurricular training from six months to a full year, but with the acquisition of the County Normal School, Lane found a still better answer to his problem.
The community of Englewood viewed the transfer as inevitable, and, indeed, many friends of the school rejoiced at the transfer, which they felt would ensure the school’s expansion. They assumed the city enrollees would augment county students, but did not foresee the increasingly restrictive entrance procedures which the city adopted and which altered the school’s growth. Not all, however, were sanguine. The Reverend R. A. White, minister of the Stewart Avenue Universalist Church, said perceptively from his pulpit, "This is only another way of destroying the distinctive features of the school and defeating its present management."
Colonel Parker became head of the new normal school and brought with him a whole new range of ideas about children and pedagogy — and sharp criticism of the mechanical teaching methods characteristic of the normal schools of the day. Some of Parker’s ideas were not approved by all the members of the Board of Education; the mayor announced that he did not care, for example, for Parker’s method of teaching reading. Moreover, Parker soon found himself embroiled, quite unnecessarily, in a controversy involving the replacement of Superintendent Lane himself. Thus, Parker’s relations with the Chicago Board proved no more cordial than those which had characterized his tenure with the County Commissioners.
During these years the search for direction for public education was nationwide, with no unanimity of opinion anywhere. For a time, the nation’s attention focused on Chicago through the report of a Commission appointed by Mayor Harrison to study the entire school system. He appointed eleven men, including two members of the Board of Education, three city council members, and former Board member William Rainey Harper, now the founder and President of the new University of Chicago in Hyde Park. Harper was chosen Chairman of the Commission and with his usual thoroughness and energy produced a 248-page report in a year’s time. He invited as advisers the presidents of thirteen of the most prestigious universities in the country, from Harvard to Stanford, and the superintendents of schools of twelve of the nation’s largest cities. President Harper did not dodge the unpleasant realities, no matter how suavely he presented them. He sent questionnaires to principals, interviewed teachers, visited schools, and drew on his own shrewd observations as a former member of the Board of Education. The report contained twenty specific recommendations, with reasons to substantiate them, and details for implementation, supported by a wealth of footnotes.
The Commission recommended that applicants for teaching positions should present a certificate of good physical condition from a physician and one of three kinds of proof of professional status — a certificate from the Chicago Normal School (then one year’s training), an A.B. degree including nine months of study of teaching, or evidence of four years of successful teaching. An A. B. degree should be required for teaching in high school, or three years of successful teaching in lieu of it, or six years of successful teaching plus "collegiate scholarship."
All candidates should be examined by a Board of Examiners. Teachers should be on probation for two years, their salaries should recognize the grade of teaching, the length of service, as well as success in teaching and advances in scholarship. More men teachers should be brought into the system even if it cost more money. Dismissal of a teacher should take place only on the recommendation of the superintendent after two changes in assignment had been permitted, unless a majority of the Board dissented.
Admission to the Chicago Normal School should be by the Board of Examiners, and dismissal only by the faculty of the school. The course of study should be extended from one year to two. There should be practice teaching under guidance, and graduates should be supervised by the Normal School faculty for a year after their assignment. There should probably be three normal schools, rather than only one, and the Board of Education should encourage teachers’ institutes and establish a library for the use of teachers.
None of the Harper recommendations which required legislation were put into effect for years, and some, such as the simple matter of a school principal being able to direct the engineer and janitors in his own school, are still not in effect eighty-two years later. But the reasons given for the recommendations mirror the actual workings of the 1898 Chicago school system.
When none of the Harper Commission recommendations were enacted, Parker became convinced that the Normal School, under the control of the Chicago Board of Education, would not be conducive to implementing his educational experiments. The endless political battles had taken their toll, and the desire for a less volatile situation was becoming more appealing. Besides, his wife was dying and Parker wanted to be free to spend more time with her. Nonetheless, when he submitted his resignation as Principal of the Normal School on May 30, 1899, it came as a surprise to the Board of Education.
Taking twenty of the thirty-three faculty members with him, Parker spent one year at the short-lived independent Chicago Institute and then moved most of his faculty to the University of Chicago. Parker went to the University of Chicago with reluctance. He became convinced that in leaving the Normal School he had lost the most creative arena for educational experimentation in the Midwest. His judgment from the vantage point of the history of the two institutions is subject to some question; however, it does reflect the transitory glory that belonged to the Cook County Normal School. Parker died suddenly on March 2, 1902, leaving behind an institution which he had served for sixteen years — one now called upon to sacrifice its prominence in the field of progressive education for the role of public servant.
