Francis W Parker School - Record Yearbook (Chicago, IL)

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W hen we see a vast multitude ofunthinlcing citigens hlindhf oheying the orders of a modern Qfrant, the cause is not fir to seek. Children trained to unthinlcing ohedience hecome the means hy which greedy politicians degrade democracy. T he primary gm of God to man is choiceg education should he the presentation of conditions for choice, for the exercise ofreasonf, MXN PARKER graduates are trained to thinlc. They know what the world is like and they have seen it at work--in their own locale. They know the had as well as the good and are prepared to meet either with understanding.

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students at the turn of the half century - student government, sports, art, publications, toy-shop and community service, dramatics, music, and morning ex- ercises. It can only hint at your steady growth as you have taken increasing responsibility, it can not measure your profound influence as leaders, advisers, and friends, nor evaluate the solid achievement already marked by scholarship awards from Trinity and Swarthmore, Kenyon, Princeton, Harvard, and Mil- waukee-Downer. But incomplete as your record is, it seems to us a good one. You also have asked us to supplement your review of the past fifty years with a few words of our own. We know that you, like your predecessors, are in gen- eral aware of having grown up in a school that is an educational laboratory. As Mildred McAfee Horton CParker '16J writes of herself, Even a ninth grader could feel the stimulus of an experimental approach to education. For us the outstanding fact about the school is the succession of children, parents, faculty-even visiting teachers-who, like Mrs. Horton, have been moved by what she calls participating in a program designed to test new ways of achieving age-old purposes, and who have gone on to influence education all over the world. Some of the results have been direct and immediate. More than ten influential schools were founded or headed by Parker graduates or members of Col. Parker's faculty. The Francis W. Parker School helped found the Progressive Education Association, and was one of the small group of schools that paid its initial costs. The Eight Year Experiment, generally regarded as the most important of the last fifty years in second- ary education, was also initiated by the Francis W. Parker School and a few others-and financed through its first year by Parker and three other schools. The National Registration Office, which furnishes six hun- dred colleges a basis for giving school records as much weight as examination scores, begun here and still has its main office on our mezzanine. Other current inno- vations are the Senior Symposium, Ccalled by one col- lege president a brilliant answer to the problem of senior let-down at term-end D, and the new experi- mental essay examinations of the College Entrance Examination Board, which our last two senior classes were the first in the country to take. The most important contributions of the school, however, are indirect on education and at long-range on the lives of graduates. You and we have for fifty years maintained in the heart of free America a school community in which people of both sexes, all ages, and the widest range of wealth, race, religion, national origin, and individual ability learn to work together and to respect and like people different ,from them- selves. In it, as another graduate CElliott Dunlap Smith, 'OSD writes: Our teachers were constantly seeking better ways of helping each of us to grow and to acquire the power to keep on growing. We knew that we were being taught to observe and face our prob- lems realistically, but that in doing so we were incompletely realistic if we left out of our thinking spiritual values. Above all, we knew that we were being taught to think for ourselves without bowing submissively to indoctrination from our teachers or to the standards of our colleagues, but, on the other hand, that it was up to us to U think for ourselves with careful, well-ordered thought, aware of the importance of deriving our judgments from fundamental origins in thought and in spiritual experience? The school itself has freely shared all it learned with thousands of visitors and with the whole educational world. Its graduates have far and wide used their sympathetic understanding, their independence of judgment, and their disciplined intelligence in leader- ship for the public good. We think the achievement of the Class of 1951 already indicates, that you are taking your part in this great tradition. Congratulations, and welcome to the goodly fellowship of Parker graduates! -HERBERT W. SMITH

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aculfg Mr. Herbert W. Smith, Principal