Between Home and School: Organized Parents, Clubwomen, and Urban Education in the Progressive Era

Abstract

A major concern of professional educators and urban lay people in the Progressive Era was how to define the precise relationships of parents and the public schools. Certainly the problem was not unique to the early twentieth century, since educators from the time of Horace Mann to that of John Dewey were distressed by the alienation and conflict which had historically divided home and school. While theorists agreed that teachers and parents should work in harmony for the educational welfare of the child, both sides were often veritable adversaries, suspicious of each other's motives and influence. If the problem was not unique, however, the organizational response that it generated became a striking social phenomenon in the early twentieth century.' Beginning in the early 1890s, numerous parent organizations, usually dominated by women, were preoccupied with the issue of home and school relationships on the local level. Like many educators today, urban parents and clubwomen tried to isolate the precise areas where home and school responsibilities began, overlapped, and ended. The activities of these coalitions of voluntary associations demonstrated that lay people could play a creative role in public education. By actively supporting innovative educational programs and social services in the schools, they helped break down the isolation of institutions whose increasingly professionalized and centralized nature threatened to drive them far away from the life of the average citizen. Vacation schools, playgrounds, social centers, school lunches, domes-