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CREATING COMMUNITY: EXPERIMENTS IN DRAMA AT FRANCIS W. PARKER SCHOOL, CHICAGO

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2008

Natalie Crohn Schmitt
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Extract

I am grateful to the Francis W. Parker School, Chicago, for allowing me free access to Morning Exercises and to the archives housed at the school. I would also like to thank the many current and former teachers and students who took the time to answer my questions, especially Andy Kaplan and John Holabird. I also thank Eric Martin, Christine Harris, and the anonymous readers at Theatre Survey for their patient editorial work.

Type
Research Article
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 49 , Issue 1 , May 2008 , pp. 37 - 64
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2008

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References

ENDNOTES

1. Shannon Jackson, Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 34.

2. Francis W. Parker, Talks on Pedagogics: An Outline of the Theory of Concentration (1894; reprint, New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1969), 450, first delivered at the also-progressive Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua, NY.

3. John Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed,” The School Journal 54.3 (1897): 77–80, at 80. For Parker's respect for Dewey as the philosopher of Progressive education, see Francis W. Parker, Letter to the Board of Trustees of the University of Chicago, 31 July 1899, in Anita McCormick Blaine Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, WI.

4. John Dewey, “How Much Freedom in New Schools?” The New Republic LXIII (9 July 1930): 204–6, at 204.

5. John Merrill, “The Value, Place, and Use of the Dramatic Instinct in the Education of Young People,” in Expression as a Means of Training Motive, Studies in Education III (Chicago: Francis W. Parker School, 1914), 50–121, at 55.

6. Ida Cassa Heffron, Francis W. Parker: An Interpretive Biography (Los Angeles: Ivan Deach, 1934), 36.

7. “A Birthday Demonstration,” Francis Wayland Parker Papers [hereinafter Parker Papers], Scrapbook 4, University of Chicago, Special Collections, 139, n.p. Unsigned, no publisher, or date provided.

8. Martha Fleming, “Course Description: Chicago Normal Summer School,” in 1897 brochure, Parker Papers, Scrapbook 11, n.p.

9. Martha Fleming, “Speech, Oral Reading, and Dramatic Art,” in Course of Study 1.1 (1900): 55–7, at 55. Online: JSTOR Arts and Sciences IV Collection [hereinafter JSTOR A&S IV], 07/01/1900 to 06/01/1901. links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1545-5890(190007)1%3A1%3C55%3ASORADA%3E 2.0.CO%3B2-Z (accessed 29 March 2008).

10. Martha Fleming, “Speech, Oral Reading, and Dramatic Art,” in Course of Study 1.9 (1901): 795–6. Online: JSTOR A&S IV, 07/01/1900 to 06/01/1901. links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1545-5890(190105)1%3A9%3C795%3ASORADA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y (accessed 27 January 2008).

11. Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003), 59.

12. Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1902), 275.

13. Herbert M. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893–1958 (1985; London: Routledge, 2004), 5.

14. In 1904, Edward L. Norton and Lorley Ada Ashleman confronted many of these objections in “Dramatics in the Teaching of a Foreign Language,” in Elementary School Teacher 6.1 (1905): 33–9. Online: JSTOR A&S IV, 10/01/1902 to 06/01/1914. links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1545-5858(190509)6%3A1%3C33%3ADITTOA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-B (accessed 29 March 2008). Jenny Hall at the Parker School also wrote to confront the “dangers” of drama. Jenny Hall, “Function of Drama,” in The Social Motive in School Work, Studies in Education I (Chicago: Francis W. Parker School, 1912): 54–76, at 74.

15. See, for instance, Elnora Whitman Curtis, The Dramatic Instinct in Education (1910; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), preface by G. Stanley Hall; and Alice Minnie Herts, The Kingdom of the Child, introduction by G. Stanley Hall (New York, E. P. Dutton, 1918); also G. Stanley Hall, “The Activity of the Dramatic Instinct during Adolescence,” in Alice Minnie Herts, The Children's Educational Theatre (New York: Harper, 1911), 96–108.

16. For a report of his admiration, see “Euphoria,” in Popular Education (September 1894), unsigned, no volume or page number, in Parker Papers, Scrapbook 10, n.p.

17. G. S. Hall, “Activity of the Dramatic Instinct,” 101, 105. Hall adapted the idea from Herbert Spencer. Curiously, systematic study of the nature and function of children's own unsupervised pretend play was not begun until the 1970s. Dewey, for instance, merely assumed that children's own pretend play was but imitative of adults', sometimes undesirable, behavior: “If the environment is not good the child learns bad habits and wrong ways of thinking and judging, ways which are all the harder to break because he has fixed them by living them out in his play.” Thus, pretend play was a means to train children. John Dewey and Evelyn Dewey, Schools of To-morrow (London: J. M. Dent, 1915), 63.

18. Clifford Eugene Hamar, “College and University Theatre Instruction in the Twentieth Century,” and Paul Kozelka, “Dramatics in the High Schools, 1900–1925,” in History of Speech Education in America: Background Studies (New York: Appleton–Century–Crofts, 1954), 572–94 and 595–616, respectively; and Garff B. Wilson, Three Hundred Years of American Drama and Theatre: From Ye Bear and Ye Cubb to Hair (Englewood Cliff, NJ: Prentice–Hall, 1973), 312–17. See also Shannon Jackson, Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 40–78.

19. Percival Chubb, Festivals and Plays in School and Elsewhere (New York: Harper, 1912), xxii. Chubb generalizes from his teaching at the Ethical Culture School, New York City.

20. William Orr, introduction to Esther Willard, Pageants and Pageantry (Boston: Ginn, 1912).

21. Percy MacKaye, Community Drama and Its Motive and Method of Neighborliness (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), 45, 20.

22. Stanton Coit, Neighborhood Guilds: An Instrument of Social Reform (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1892), 116.

23. Jackson, Lines of Activity, 17.

24. Jinni Tennyson, “Felix Adler's Universal Moral Code: Drama Activities in the Ethical Culture School,” Youth Theatre Journal 17 (2003): 17–26, at 20.

25. Felix Adler, Distinctive Aims of the Ethical Culture Schools (New York: Society for Ethical Culture, 1902), 4; Tennyson, 20.

26. John Dewey, “University of Chicago School,” University Record 1.46 (1897): 565. Before founding this school in 1896, Dewey sent his own children to Parker's Chicago Normal School. He served as a trustee of the Parker School. His School and Society (1907) was dedicated to Anita McCormick Blaine, the financial force behind the Francis W. Parker School.

27. Francis W. Parker, “The Evening Meeting,” record of undated speech, 1891, Parker Papers, Scrapbook 9, n.p.

28. Parker's 1894 Talks on Pedagogics, the first American treatise on pedagogy to gain international repute, had sold more copies than any other book on education at the time. See Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), 134. “The Cook County Normal became the model teacher-training institution in the United States.” See Edward Dangler, “From Quincy to Chicago—The American Comenius,” Harvard Educational Review 13.1 (1943): 19–24, at 22.

29. For a brief time, then, the university had both Dewey's and Parker's elementary schools. For this messy history, including Dewey's departure from the university in 1904, see Jack K. Campbell, Colonel Francis W. Parker: The Children's Crusader (New York: Teachers College Press, 1967), chaps. 14 and 15, and Robert Eugene Tostberg, “Educational Ferment in Chicago, 1883–1904” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1960), chaps. 8 and 10.

30. Marie Kirchner Stone, The Progressive Legacy: Chicago's Francis W. Parker School (1901–2001) (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 197. From the onset there was some ethnic and considerable economic diversity. African Americans were first admitted in 1944. In the main, the Progressive movement attended to class and gender inequalities, not racial ones. See McGerr, 182–218 (“The Shield of Segregation”).

31. Anita McCormick Blaine, “The Dramatic in Education,” Elementary School Teacher 4.8 (1904): 554–8, at 556. Online: JSTOR A&S IV, 10/01/1902 to 06/01/1914. links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1545-5858(190404)4%3A8%3C554%3ATDIE%3E2.0.CO%3B2-N (accessed 29 March 2008).

32. Dewey, “How Much Freedom,” 204.

33. Christine A. Ogren, The American State Normal School: “An Instrument of Great Good” (New York: Macmillan, 2005), 161.

34. McGerr, xiii.

35. “Report of the Morning Exercise Committee” 1906, Flora J. Cooke Collection [hereinafter Cooke Collection], Chicago History Museum, Box A, folder 7. Parker School archives through the mid-1950s are housed in that collection, thereafter at the school.

36. These can be viewed by year in the Cooke Collection. They were apparently saved by Flora J. Cooke herself, because they are intermixed with her correspondence.

37. The Morning Exercise as a Socializing Influence, Studies in Education II (Chicago: Francis W. Parker School, 1913), no editor specified.

38. Martha Fleming, “Morning Exercises,” Elementary School Teacher 3.5 (1903): 296–306, at 296. Online: JSTOR A&S IV, 10/01/1902 to 06/01/1914. links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1545-5858 (190301)3%3A5%3C296%3AME%3E2.0.CO%3B2-A (accessed 29 March 2008). Fleming's writings on drama and Morning Exercise in this journal though 1907 were extensive.

39. Speakers in the early years included Harriet Monroe, Albert Einstein (in German), Will Durant, and, annually, Jane Addams.

40. Martha Fleming, “Speech, Oral Reading, and Dramatic Art,” Course of Study 1.2 (1900): 139–40, at 139. Online: JSTOR A&S IV, 10/01/1900 to 06/01/1901. links.jstor.org/sici?sici= 1545-5890(190010)1%3A2%3C139%3ASORADA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-R (accessed 29 March 2008).

41. Parker, Talks on Pedagogics, 11. The concept is discussed most fully in chapter 2. Parker's doctrine was adapted from Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841), founder of pedagogy as a discipline.

42. Ibid., 352.

43. Ibid., 337.

44. Fleming, “Morning Exercises,” 297. It followed from Colonel Parker's and then Flora Cooke's belief that “the greatness of the next generation depends upon how this generation takes care of its young” that the older children had better behave respectfully at presentations by the younger ones. (Cooke Collection, Box 3, folder 20).

45. Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed,” 77.

46. Fleming, “Morning Exercises,” 301.

47. Ibide.

48. The following descriptions and quotations are from Elsa Miller, “Thanksgiving Exercises,” in Morning Exercise as a Socializing Influence (Chicago: Francis W. Parker School, 1930, revision of 1913 edition): 121–34. Specific citations appear parenthetically in the present text.

49. Again, see McGerr (“Shield of Segregation”).

50. Miller, “Thanksgiving Exercises,” 127. Unlike many immigrant groups at the time, Jews did not establish parochial schools.

51. Martha Fleming, “Speech, Oral Reading, and Dramatic Art,” Elementary School Teacher and Course of Study 2.4 (1901): 286–95. (For a brief period the journal had both names.) Online: JSTOR A&S IV, 07/01/1901 to 07/01/1902. links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1545-5904(190112)2%3A4% C286%3ASORADA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-2 (accessed 29 March 2008).

52. Arthur Detmers, “A Birthday Offering to the Father of His Country,” in Morning Exercise as a Socializing Influence (1930 rev. ed.): 168–70. I do not know the year of this Exercise.

53. “Coming Morning Exercises,” Parker Weekly 1.2 (13 March 1922), unsigned description of upcoming Morning Exercises, 1.

54. Francis W. Parker School Archive, Chicago.

55. “The child is intensely interested in primitive man and primitive ways of living, not because they mark the beginnings of our civilization, but because they correspond to his own stage of development and reflect his own limited ability and crude ideas.” Emily J. Rice and Gudrun Thorne-Thomsen, “History and Literature,” Elementary School Teacher and Course of Study 2.1 (1901): 44–48, at 41. Online: JSTOR A&S IV, 2/1/1901. links. jstor.org/sici?sici=1545-5904 (190107)2%3A1%3C40%3AHAL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-V (Accessed 30 March 2008). The curriculum at Dewey's Laboratory School similarly followed from this idea.

56. Campbell, 218–19.

57. This small gymnasium was placed immediately off the gracious entry hall, where it met the school's need for daily communion in Morning Exercise.

58. Margo Jones, Theatre-in-the-Round (New York: Reinhart, 1951), 38.

59. Heffron, 94.

60. John Merrill, “Creative Effort—Dramatizing Mother Goose Rhymes,” in Creative Effort, Studies in Education VIII (Chicago: Francis W. Parker School, 1925): 82–94, at 94. John Merrill contributed to almost every volume in the Studies in Education series.

61. Sarah Greenebaum, “Creative Effort in the Morning Exercise,” in Creative Effort, 145–57. Sarah Greenebaum, Parker class of 1915, taught eighth grade there from 1922 to 1963. A powerful force in maintaining the tradition of Morning Exercise, she required four a year from her class and instituted the requirement that all new teachers give a fall Morning Exercise on Parker and his practices.

62. Parker, Talks on Pedagogics, iv. Parker's wife taught Delsarte at the Normal School.

63. Parker Weekly 1.2 (15 May 1911). Francis W. Parker School archive, Chicago.

64. “Delcroze,” Cooke Collection, Box 40, unnumbered folder dated 1919.

65. Parker Weekly 2.25 (25 March 1912), and Lura Thomas Smith, “Preparation of an Exercise on Cicero,” in Morning Exercise as a Socializing Influence (1930 rev. ed.): 45–52, at 51. Francis W. Parker School Archive, Chicago.

66. See Nan Johnson, Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866–1910 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), 166–7.

67. Franklin Parker, “Francis W. Parker and Public Education in Chicago,” Chicago Schools Journal 42.7 (1961): 305–12, at 312.

68. “The usual method of learning natural history, itself a latecomer in curricula, involved memorizing a text and reciting the lessons from it on command of the instructor.” The first biology laboratory was introduced into a university in 1883 at Johns Hopkins. Keith R. Benson, “From Museum Research to Laboratory Research: The Transformation of Natural History into Academic Biology,” in The American Development of Biology, ed. Ronald Rainer, Keith R. Benson, and Jan Maienschein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988): 49–86, at 59, 63. At about the same time, chemistry labs were also first introduced, also at Johns Hopkins. (Wade Freeman, Department of Chemistry, University of Illinois at Chicago, e-mail to author, 2 February 2005.) However, laboratory research within an academic setting was slow to gain widespread acceptance.

69. Francis Dummer Merriam, “I remember …,” in Between Home and Community: Chronicle of the Francis W. Parker School, 1901–1976, ed. Marie Kirchner Stone (Chicago: Francis W. Parker School, 1976), 137.

70. J. Hall, 64. For many photos of “chastely made” and beautiful sets at Parker School, see John Merrill and Martha Fleming, Play-Making and Plays: The Dramatic Impulse and Its Educative Use in the Elementary and Secondary School (New York: Macmillan, 1930).

71. Helen Putnam, “Three Morning Exercises on the History of Pottery,” in The Morning Exercise as a Socializing Influence (1930 rev. ed.): 93–102, at 93.

72. Ibid., 100.

73. Fleming, “Morning Exercises,” 301.

74. See Martha Fleming, “Speech, Oral Reading, and Dramatic Art,” in Course of Study 1.10 (1901): 873–9. Online: JSTOR A&S IV, 07/01/1900 to 06/01/1901. links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1545-5890(190106)1%3A10%3C873%3ASORADA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P (accessed 29 March 2008).

75. John Holabird, my interview, 25 August 2004. Holabird was first a student and then a colleague of Sarah Greenebaum's.

76. Sarah Greenebaum, “Experimental Course of Study: Eighth Grade,” Cooke Collection Box 58, unnumbered folder, 1938–9.

77. Isabel M. Cerney, “American Literature Course,” 1–8 at 4–5. Cooke Collection Box 57, unnumbered folder, 1937–38.

78. Cerney, 5

79. Ibid.

80. Ibid.

81. Cooke Collection Box 33, Folder 22.

82. “Catalog of Parker School, 1901–08,” Francis W. Parker School Scrapbooks II, Permanent Exhibit, Pt. 2, Chicago History Museum.

83. Jay Anderson, Time Machines: The World of Living History (Nashville: American Association for State and Local History, 1984), 135–6.

84. http://www.renfaie.com/RPFI/history.html (accessed 30 March 2008).

85. Dewey and Dewey, 124–5.

86. Ibid., 125.

87. Jenny Hall, “Some Phases of Dramatic Representation in Primary Grades,” Elementary School Teacher 4.8 (1904): 566–78, at 566. Online: JSTOR A&S IV, 10/01/1902 to 06/01/1914. links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1545-5858(190404)4%3A8%3C566%3ASPODRI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-A (accessed 27 January 2008).

88. Commission on the Relation of School and College, Adventure in American Education, vol. 5 (of 5): Thirty Schools Tell Their Story (New York: Harper, 1943), 318. America's focus on WWII may have prevented this important study from receiving the attention it warranted.

89. My e-mail survey, conducted via the quite inclusive e-mailing list of my former classmates – itself a testament to class members' continuing loyalty to that community.