Who Is Francis W. Parker?

John Dewey once referred to Francis W. Parker as the "father of progressive education," and in fact, Dewey chose to send his own children to the school Parker started. Born in 1837, this New England native was a country schoolmaster and a colonel in the Union Army before he began to read the works of Horace Mann; after traveling widely in Europe, Parker turned his thoughts to reshaping American schools. His efforts in the schools of Quincy, Massachusetts drew national attention; and in 1875 he began a Chicago school that was a model of progressive education and teacher training. His Talks on Pedagogy (1894) was probably the first American treatise on pedagogy to gain international repute.

Francis Parker's goals were twofold: to move the child to the center of the education process, and to interrelate the several subjects of the curriculum in such as way as to enhance their meaning for the child. "If I should tell you any secret of my life," he wrote, "it is the intense desire I have to see growth and improvement in human beings . . . to see mind and soul grow." He was committed to organizing schools as democratic communities, and he insisted there was nothing novel about his approach. "I am simply trying," he wrote, "to apply well established principles of teaching, principles derived directly from the laws of the mind. The methods springing from them are found in the development of every child. They are used everywhere except in school."

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