III

FRANCIS WAYLAND PARKER

To write of Colonel Parker's work in such a dispassionate way as to form a lasting estimate of the value of his services to the cause of education in the United States would require a perspective of years, and also a mind free from bias towards or against Colonel Parker's personality. It is not easy even, taking into consideration Colonel Parker's great qualities and his weaknesses, to make a fair, comparative statement of his services from the standpoint of a friend.

Among the multitude of able, self-sacrificing men who have contributed notably to the improvement of elementary schools during the last fifty years it will not be deemed invidious, I trust, to mention the names of Victor M. Rice of New York, Horace Mann of Massachusetts, J. M. Wickersham of Pennsylvania, Newton Bateman of Illinois among the State Superintendents of Public Instruction; William T. Harris, John Hancock, A. J. Rickoff, J. L. Pickard, George Howland, W. B. Powell among the city superintendents, and D. B. Hagar, Edward A. Sheldon, Richard Edwards, Francis W. Parker, Joseph Baldwin among the normal school presidents.

However, an overwhelming majority of teachers familiar with the development of elementary schools, it is believed, would place the names of Horace Mann, Edward A. Sheldon, and Francis W. Parker as indisputably the greatest reformers of this period, and to me Francis W. Parker is incontestably the greatest. Horace Mann, outside of Massachusetts and New England and a section of Ohio, was merely an echo from some other world. Edward A. Sheldon had a wider influence in uplifting primary education in the area reached as well as in the extent of his vast personal influence upon his associates and followers; therefore, while less known to the general public because seldom engaged in controversies, and of a more

retiring nature than Horace Mann, his influence was more farreaching and more potent upon the cause of primary education in the United States. As compared with Mr. Sheldon, Francis W. Parker had the whole of the United States for his theater of action. In addition to the qualities possessed by the two other great reformers just mentioned, he had a fire of enthusiasm; a contempt of criticism; a fearlessness of expression; a gift of prophecy, and a belief in the triumphs of the innovations which he championed which endeared him to the hearts of teachers everywhere. Charges of inconsistency had no terrors for him. Insinuations relative to his lack of scholarship, cynical remarks contrasting his position with that of the confessedly great thinkers of his time, did not affect in the slightest degree his sermons, painting in graphic and exaggerated forms the narrowness and emptiness of prevailing methods in the elementary schools; holding up, like a new Peter the Hermit, a vision of the new life and changes of which he was the prophet. He never hesitated to criticise opposing views, no matter who elucidated them or what the time or place. Every meeting where educators gathered together was to him a forum, an arena, calling upon him to enter the combat.

His life as a teacher may be divided into three periods: that closing with his leaving Manchester; that beginning with his experience at Dayton and ending with his resignation in Boston; and that beginning in Chicago as principal of the Cook County normal school and ending with his death. The first period of his life was characterized by industry, zeal,—often misdirected, and great fondness for children. The second period of his life, beginning at Dayton, is noteworthy as marking his transition from the position of a grammar-school principal, who is seeking to do the best that can be done in the conduct of his particular school, to the higher plane of relating his thoughts and management to that of the best thought of the great teachers of all time. To other men of his time these thoughts appealed perhaps as strongly as to Colonel Parker, but they lacked the strenuous element, which, always prominent in Colonel Parker, made him put the expression of his best thought into the schoolroom.

He was not deterred from this by his inability to see the outcome of his experiments or because he could not definitely plan out the various stages of growth thru which his pupils would pass, or because he could not answer even in his own mind the objections which were urged against the practicability of doing in the schoolroom what theoretically was the best thing to be done. In the conflict which resulted in Dayton we can see in Colonel Parker the birth of his sweet dogmatism, usually characteristic of the man of action, and at the same time his openmindedness to what came to him from the outside world. It would have been a calamity to the schools of the United States, however, as well as a great hindrance to the development of Colonel Parker, had his triumph in Dayton been so pronounced as to cause him to remain there. His studies in Germany, his acquaintance with the scientific methods of the trained German schoolmasters, gave him the power to clarify his views and also gave him standards by which to gauge the efforts of teachers which made it possible for him to see some things in his profession in a proper perspective.

The story of his coming to Quincy has often been told. Yet in some inscrutable way it has grown to be believed that the schools in Quincy were in a very bad condition at this time. The belief that such was the case among superintendents and boards of education had a pronounced effect at this period in the direction of decrying and discrediting the value of the work done in Quincy during the five years in which Colonel Parker was superintendent. In the report of the very able school committee of Quincy for 1874-75, the year before he was elected superintendent, I find this statement: "At no time within our observation has the average condition of the public schools of this town been so satisfactory." "As regards order and discipline very little fault can be found." "That very much is still to be desired in our system of teaching is too evident for dispute." "That after eight or nine years of constant study in our common schools select pupils should show an amount of acquirement no greater than the examinations for admittance to the high school

annually disclose, indicates that there is something lacking to the complete efficiency of the system."

There is no reason to believe, therefore, that the schools of Quincy were any less efficient than those of any other towns and cities either East or West. The next annual report of this committee continues: "The committee had long felt the necessity of a gradual remodeling of our system of teaching. If we wished to keep up with the march of modern improvements in pedagogics it had become essential to introduce important modifications in our method of imparting knowledge." And this bringing up of a whole teaching force in a town to a high plane was the first result of Colonel Parker's work in Quincy.

Coming at a time when the State of Massachusetts was beginning to formally recognize the necessity of skilled supervision of city and town schools the object lesson set forth in Quincy, the challenging of existing methods of teaching and of school management, in the forceful, exaggerated terms presented by Colonel Parker on every opportunity, compelled the opposing forces to draw their lines of demarcation in such a way as presented the issues at stake clearly and definitely before the people. The accessories of an able and progressive and open-minded school committee in Quincy, the development and establishment of a number of ably edited school journals which presented from time to time the salient elements of the controversy, the interest of the newspapers, attracted doubtless by the new features of Colonel Parker's utterances all these conspired to give a laudable publicity to the experiment in Quincy which every other school reform movement of our times has lacked.

Within an appreciably short time, therefore, the attitude of teachers and school officers toward the discipline in elementary schools changed in the most remarkable manner. The first result of this was the development of a new spirit in the schools, that spirit which our foreign visitors in 1893 thought so wonderful and found so general. Such a condition as is here set forth had an immediate indirect influence upon the teaching in the schools. With the development of freedom in the