Francis Wayland Parker

Francis Wayland Parker (October 9, 1837 – March 2, 1902) was a pioneer of the progressive school movement in the United States. He believed that education should include the complete development of an individual — mental, physical, and moral.

Talks on Pedagogics, (1894)
Francis Wayland Parker, Talks on Pedagogics, (New York, 1894),


 * Slowly the human beings have arise n-guided by a glimmering light — and have climbed spiritually from the earth and the clod, from the shrub and tree up the broad walls of the arched sky, to stars, and moon, and sun, and then beyond the sun, for the divinity seeldng and striving imagination stretches away to the invisible, all powerful, all-controlling, all-loving. One who permeates the universe, lives in it, and breathes His life through it, the eternal life to be taken into the human soul. The myth is the obscure image, in the child's soul, of God Himself.
 * p. 10


 * All mental and moral development is by self-activity. Education is the economizing of self-effort in the direction of all-sided development.
 * p. 25; as quoted in Sanderson Beck. Francis W. Parker's Concentration Pedagogy: Education to Free the Human Spirit, 1996


 * The science of arithmetic may be called the science of exact limitation of matter and things in space, force, and time.
 * p. 64. Reported in Robert Edouard Moritz. Memorabilia mathematica; or, The philomath's quotation-book, (1914), p. 263


 * Number was born in superstition and reared in mystery,... numbers were once made the foundation of religion and philosophy, and the tricks of figures have had a marvellous effect on a credulous people.
 * p. 64. Reported in Moritz (1914, 269)


 * Form and size constitute the foundation of all search for truth.
 * p. 72. Reported in Moritz (1914, 292)

Quotes about Francis Wayland Parker

 * John Dewey once said that the progressive education movement began during the 1870's with the work of Francis W. Parker in Quincy, Massachusetts; indeed, he called Parker the "father of progressive education."
 * , "What happened to progressive education." The Teachers College Record 61.1 (1959): 23-29.