John Amos Comenius, the seventeenth century realist, and Francis Wayland Parker, the nineteenth century pragmatic idealist, presented new educational theories and practices. Both men, products of their own times, through their wide learning, great imagination and sympathy with the intellectual and social climate of their day, offered to the world a new outlook on education -- an education focused on the needs and the interests of children. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 1967. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Education.

Our American forefathers, with the exception of Thomas Jefferson, had no ideal of a system of universal education. His plans were throttled by slavery, but the doctrine of universal education lived. Then at a time when the whole system of common schools was in danger of failure Horace Mann gave his life to the promotion of the interests of the Common school. In 1837, the very year Horace Mann gave up his prospect of a famous political career to become Secretary of the State Board of Education in Massachusetts, Francis Wayland Parker was born in New Hampshire, and was destined to play an important part in this movement for the welfare of the common school. He began his teaching career at the age of sixteen. In his work he made a practical application of the truism of Comenius, 'We Learn To Do By Doing,' by supplying conditions which were favorable to efficient and rational doing. Spurred on by his deep conviction that there must be a science of education with which he was not familiar, he spent several years studying in Germany. With his conviction strengthened, he returned to America to continue his work or reform in the elementary schools of, America. He pictured the school as a community and the teacher as an organizer of community life and creator of public opinion. Like Horace Mann, he instigated and promoted a great movement to free teachers as well as children. Prior to this time teachers had received appointments mainly through political influence, regardless of their lack of qualifications. Through Colonel Parker's efforts, it became necessary to appoint teachers who were equipped the guide the pupils along the path of freedom which develops self-control.1 Colonel Parker refused to accept a creed handed down from the past and so refused to impose a creed upon his followers. Thus he left no published works which do justice to his educational theory and practice. It is my purpose to show the relationship of his work to the Progressive School Movement, and the background provided by his reforms for Dr. John Dewey's contribution to the elementary school.

Francis Wayland Parker was one of the earliest American educators of national prominence to advocate what has come to be known today as progressive education. He was in total support of the common school concept, helped from the earliest, formal child study association in America, promoted the institution of kindergartens, and stressed the need for a child-centered, correlated curriculum organized around the natural and physical sciences. Through his work in the Quincy, Massachusetts, public schools and at the Cook County (Chicago) Normal School, Parker also made strong contributions to early language arts/reading instruction and methodology. Despite his influences on his contemporaries and on American education, few studies of any nature have been available to illuminate factors influencing Parker himself. There has been no historical study defining influences on Francis Wayland Parker’s philosophy of education as it relates to language arts reading instruction.

The work examines the antislavery writings of Francis Wayland (1796-1865). Wayland pastored churches in Boston and Providence, but he left his indelible mark as the fourth and twenty-eight year president of Brown University (1827-1855). The author of numerous works on moral science, economics, philosophy, education, and the Baptist denomination, his administration marked a transitional stage in the emergence of American colleges from a classically oriented curriculum to an educational philosophy based on science and modern languages. Wayland left an enduring legacy at Brown, but it was his antislavery writings that brought him the most notoriety and controversy. Developed throughout his writings, rather than systematically in a major work, his antislavery views were shaped and tested in the political and intellectual climate of the antebellum world in which he lived. First developed in The Elements of Moral Science (1835), he tested the boundaries of activism in The Limitations of Human Responsibility (1838), and publicly debated antislavery in Domestic Slavery Considered as a Scriptural Institution (1845). The political crisis from the Mexican-American War through the Kansas-Nebraska Act heightened Wayland’s activism as delineated in The Duty of Obedience to the Civil Magistrate (1847), his noncompliance with the Fugitive Slave Law, and his public address on the Kansas-Nebraska Bill (1854). In 1861 he became a committed Unionist. I argue that Francis Wayland was a mediating figure in the controversy between abolitionists and proslavery apologists and that his life was a microcosm of the transition that many individuals made from moderate antislavery to abolitionism. Wayland proved unique in that he was heavily coveted by Northern abolitionists who sought his unconditional support and yet he was respected by Southerners who appreciated his uncondemning attitude toward slaveholders even while he opposed slavery. I argue that Wayland’s transition from reluctant critic to public activist was not solely due to the political sweep of events, but that his latter activism was already marked in his earlier work. Most importantly, his life demonstrated both the limits and possibilities in the history of American antislavery.