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"The School I Had in Mind"
A History of Park's Early Years

Excerpted from The Park School of Baltimore, The First Seventy-Five Years (1988), by former Cross Currents editor Jean Thompson Sharpless

In the early winter of 1912, a meeting took place among Baltimore educational reformers and civic leaders that would result in the combination of progressive educational and social philosophies, thereby creating a school that served the needs of the city's children in a new way. Hans Froelicher, a former member of Baltimore's Board of School Commissioners, attended the meeting. So did Baltimore attorney Eli Frank, and journalist, educator, and director of Jewish Charities Louis H Levin. Also in attendance were the guiding spirits of progressive educators including John Dewey, Francis W. Parker, and Dean Liberty Hyde Bailey. Out of this founding evening emerged the principles for Park School. Ninety years later, the philosophies and guiding ideals remain the bedrock of today's Park community.

The meeting took place because of the community's dissatisfaction with Baltimore public schools' rigid educational practices, rote learning philosophies, and the imposition of conformity over individuality in the classroom. In addition, problems with graft and political patronage had created havoc with efforts to improve schools.

But the meeting's roots draw deeper, to the core of democratic society. Educator Horace Mann wrote in 1849, "Never will wisdom preside in the halls of legislation, and its profound utterances be recorded on the pages of the statute book, until Common Schools . . . create a more far-seeing intelligence and a purer morality than has ever existed among communities of men."1 These words tied the success of the country to universal education for all citizens.

By "Common Schools," Mann meant schools that enrolled children of all religions, classes, and ethnic backgrounds. It was his belief that through the warm associations of childhood experiences in school, children would develop a respect for one another as individuals, which would knit together adult society in a pluralist but unified democracy.

Mann's views, and those of other educational reformers, were opposed not only by political forces interested in control of the public funds, but also by traditional, classical ideas of education. In the prevailing conservative view, a major part of the teacher's role was to establish order and control in the classroom. Implicit in this approach was the assumption that children were born with base instincts that needed to be tightly controlled, lest children grow up untamed. Teachers were expected to dictate lessons which pupils committed to memory. Examination questions were designed to elicit a specific answer, and students were graded according to how many questions they answered correctly. William Torrey Harris, who was to become United States Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906, focused on order rather than upon freedom, on work rather than on play, on effort rather than on interest, on prescription rather than election, and on regularity, silence, and industry that preserve, and save, our civil order.

And yet in 1875, Francis W. Parker had begun to protest the narrow intellectualism of most schools by establishing vocational training in the schools of Quincy, Massachusetts. His Cook County Normal School outside Chicago was reported by a traveling journalist to be "one of the most progressive as well as one of the most suggestive schools" where children were being taught "nature study, art, social activities, and the three R's by an inspired, enthusiastic staff."

To a nation becoming increasingly industrialized and to dwellers in dense urban conditions, Dean Liberty Hyde Bailey of Cornell University's Agricultural School offered a purpose for the study of nature. In 1903 Bailey published "The Nature-Study Idea," an essay that encouraged active learning in shops, fields, and gardens, releasing children from the captivity of the nailed-to-the-floor classroom seat. For the next 20 years he promoted learning that was tied to the community, and preferred spontaneity over formality and breadth of curriculum over a narrowly academic one.

Educational practices such as those of Mann, Parker, and Bailey were articulated by the writings of important educational philosophers including John Dewey, professor of philosophy at Columbia University. In the early 1900s, Dewey attracted audiences and followers as a principal spokesman for progressivism in American society and education. His perceptive analysis of the special requirements of an industrial society and his insistence upon the centrality of the child in the educative process were to influence education everywhere.2

By 1911, Dewey's influence had caused a shockwave in Baltimore: School Superintendent James Van Sickle was leading curricular reform in the city's public schools. His innovations included kindergartens, playgrounds, manual training, and cooking classes. He established strict procedures for the selection and adoption of textbooks, promoted professionalization of teachers and administrators, and introduced a system of supervising teachers. He also recommended curricular reforms based on the needs of the child. His reforms were opposed by many entrenched teachers and his superintendancy became an issue in the mayoralty campaign. The Board of Commissioners was split: seven (General Lawrason Riggs, George A. Salter, Dr. J.M.T. Finney, Dr. J.H.M. Rowland, Eli Frank, Robert Rother, and Hans Froelicher) were in favor of Van Sickle; two (Thomas McCosker and Edward Rossmann) were against him. A commission headed by Dr. Elmer Ellsworth Brown, United States Commissioner of Education, was appointed to investigate the matter, but Mayor Preston was unwilling to wait for the report to be heard. He removed Frank, Finney, and Rowland; Froelicher and Riggs resigned in protest.

On June 29, 1911, Van Sickle was fired. It was clear that Mayor Preston's dismissal of Van Sickle meant an end to these reforms.

And so it was that sometime during the early winter of 1912, Professor Hans Froelicher was approached by Eli Frank, his recent colleague on the Board of School Commissioners, and Louis H. Levin. They were representing a group of civic leaders who were dissatisfied with what was happening in the public school system. Because these people were Jews, their children were totally excluded from admission to all but one of the existing private schools in Baltimore, and that school had a quota system. These parents had the idea of starting a non-sectarian school that would be open to both Jews and non-Jews. Frank and Levin wanted Froelicher's opinion as to whether such a school could attract enough students to succeed.

Hans Froelicher had moved from Zurich, Switzerland, to Baltimore in 1888 where he and his bride, Philadelphia Quaker Frances Mitchell, both began careers as professors at the Women's College in Baltimore (later known as Goucher College). Familiar with the educational theories of Swiss educators Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852) and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827), and French writer and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), Froelicher had long been convinced by their educational theories about relating learning in the classroom to children's lives.

On March 24, 1912, Froelicher was again invited to Eli Oppenheim's home where he described his educational ideas to Eli Frank, Eli Oppenheim, Siegmund Sonneborn, General Lawrason Riggs, and Judge John C. Rose:

In the school I had in mind,...The pupils were to learn because they were interested, because they loved their work, because they loved the school, because they were inspired by the highest type of teacher, because they saw the reason of things...I was convinced...that pupils educated in this type of school would meet the exigencies of college entrance examinations as incidental to the general course, not as ends in themselves,... in addition they would be infinitely more self-dependent, alert, informed; they would be intellects, eager for knowing and doing.

Moreover, the school "was to be guided by the fundamental thought that the best work could be accomplished without the customary insistence upon deadly routine for its own sake, upon coercion, repression, penalties and rewards. The teacher was expected to be a co-learner, friend, adviser of the pupils, and...by creating a vital and stirring interest in the subject to be learned by relating the individual subject to the whole of the curriculum, the best educational results would be realized with the greatest amount of happiness for both pupil and teacher."3

Froelicher was offered the headmastership of the school he had just described in vivid detail. Although tempted and honored, he declined, choosing to remain at Goucher College, but he did agree to take on the major task of presiding over the Board of Trustees for the fledgling school. From that position, he exerted considerable influence on the development and formation of school policies and educational programs until 1929, when he resigned to serve as acting president of Goucher.

While The Park School emerged from a period of controversy in the Baltimore educational system, the ideals it is based on in progressive education have a broad history and are closely connected to basic elements of American education. Park School's first headmaster, Eugene Randolph Smith, wrote:

Education has been building for thousands of years. It carries on its back loads of useless traditions and outgrown theories but there is too much vigor in it to warrant too drastic treatment. We may cut away a useless part here and there or recast one part or another, but it should be done with reverence, if without fear. In making our changes, let us not become obsessed with any one method or system. The limitations of any system, or the thought of any one man or woman, or any group of men and women are too narrow.


  1. Twelfth Annual Report of the Board of Education, together with the Twelfth Annual Report of the Secretary of the Board (Boston, 1849) quoted in Cremin, p. 84.

  2. John Fischer, president of Teachers College of Columbia University, speaking at Park's 50th Anniversary Dinner in 1963.

  3. Francis Mitchell Froelicher, "The Beginnings of Park School: The Personal Account of Hans Froelicher," Maryland Historical Magazine, Spring 1995.