Emerson said of this "American Pestalozzi,” as he was sometimes called: "Alcott declares that a teacher is one who can assist the child in obeying his own mind. . He measures ages by leaders and reckons history by Pythagoras, Plato, Jesus and Pestalozzi. In his own school in Boston when he had made the schoolroom beautiful he looked on the work as half done."

What sort of education Alcott had in mind when he opened his school at the Masonic Temple at Boston may be seen in quotations from his diary of 1835:

In addition to the statuary and painting at the schoolroom I added today a fine cast of Silence. It will aid me in the work of discipline. . . . I have sent to England for copies of Pilgrim's Progress and Fairy Queen, since fine copies of neither could be found in Boston. Except in my own school, I know of no provision for the culture of the imagination by specific tuition anywhere in our country; I seldom hear anyone speak of the importance of cultivating it. And yet, if any fact be settled by history, it is that imagination has been the guiding impulse of society.

If Alcott had lived to attend the normal schools and teachers' institutes of the twentieth century he would have heard no lack of talk of the "importance of cultivating the imagination,” and he might

even have found schools where the child who can write a fairy story receives more commendation than an unimaginative classmate whose fancy does not soar beyond the multiplication table. But in Alcott's day repression rather than self-expression was the road to learning, and few understood his daring paradox: "The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence."

But in fitting up his school so handsomely Alcott had broken not only precedents but pocketbook. After five years the Temple School came to an end, chiefly because he had offended the community by admitting a colored girl to his class and by writing Conversations with Children on the Gospels, a Socratic dialogue which strayed too widely from the path of orthodoxy and conventionality. A distinguished Harvard professor was quoted as saying that "one-third of Mr. Alcott's book was absurd, one-third blasphemous, and onethird obscene."

Discouraged by these repeated failures, Alcott abandoned teaching in the formal sense of the word and devoted the rest of his life to lecturing, writing, and conversation. At one time he experimented with a communistic colony, "Fruitlands," where philosophic discourse might be combined with

outdoor life and a strict vegetarian diet. Lowell well summed up his friend Alcott in the lines:

For his highest conceit of a happiest state is Where they'd live upon acorns and hear him talk gratis;

And indeed, I believe, no man ever talked better.

His daughter, Louisa May Alcott, made use of these scholastic and communistic experiences in her Little Men and Transcendental Wild Oats.1

An equally radical but much more influential and practical teacher was Colonel Parker. Like many other educational reformers, Francis Wayland Parker was himself educated in a country district school and began his teaching career on the lowest rung of the educational ladder, when a lad of only sixteen, in the schools of his native State of New Hampshire. A few years later he was called to be a principal in Carrolton, Illinois, where the schools were reputed to be unusually "tough." Here he showed himself to be the very man for the place, but his career was interrupted by the outbreak of the Civil War. Parker enlisted as a private and left the army as a brevet colonel with a brilliant war record.

A. Bronson Alcott. His Life and Philosophy, by F. B. Sanborn and W. T. Harris (1895).

After the war, Colonel Parker returned to his old profession and taught in New Hampshire and in Dayton, Ohio. In 1872 he went to Germany, then the fountain-head of educational lore, and on his return he became superintendent of schools at Quincy, Massachusetts. Here he found opportunities which any school reformer might envy, for the local school board, under the leadership of Charles Francis Adams, one of the most distinguished and influential of New England statesmen, gave Parker unlimited power and unhesitating support. He dropped the speller, the reader, the grammar, and the copy-book from the schools, and had the use of the English language taught by means of ordinary books and papers. Natural history, with classes both indoors and out, he made a leading part of the school work even in the lowest grades. But Parker's most striking innovation was the encouragement which he gave to the teachers of Quincy to make experiments on their own account. Too frequently the reforming superintendent is a martinet who uses his authority to force others to carry out his plans blindly and who resents any self-assertion from the teacher as disloyalty. Superintendent Parker, however, was a welcome visitor to teacher and pupil alike when

he entered a classroom, crayon in hand, to give a demonstration lesson. He sometimes told a teacher who had ventured on school reforms that awoke resentment among the conservative: "If they get after you, they must take me first."

It was not long before Quincy became the most interesting town in the country to students of education, and for a time some six thousand visitors came every year to Quincy to study the schools and the methods of teaching. Popularity at last became too much of an interruption to the regular work, the teachers and pupils felt that they were on exhibition all day long, and the school board was obliged to limit the number of visitors. After five years in Quincy, Colonel Parker went to Boston and then to Chicago, where he was principal of the Cook County Normal School. Parker once again found himself the storm-center of a great controversy. He insisted upon excluding from entrance to the normal school persons without a good high school education and this step, though in line with the demand of the times for a higher standard in the teaching profession, was widely resented.

There were many, also, who were suspicious of the attempts to teach without the text-book in the lower grades. It was not forgotten that a principal