Young, Ella Flagg

Ella Flagg Young (1845–1918), who served as superintendent of the Chicago Schools from 1909 to 1915, arguably was one of the greatest public school educators in U.S. history. From 1862, when she began teaching, until 1915, when she retired at the age of 70, Young amassed formidable public education experience. She became the first woman to lead a major school district in the United States when she assumed the Chicago superintendency. During her years in office, the school system faced severe city budget shortfalls, political corruption, rapid enrollment growth, a range of social problems, and a new teacher union movement. She addressed these withering challenges with a series of innovative programs that district employees enthusiastically adopted and educators around the country emulated. A year into her superintendency, she also became the first woman elected to the presidency of the powerful National Education Association, a role that placed her squarely in the national spotlight. For two decades, she served [Page 1085]as well on the Illinois State Board of Education, where she influenced the direction of tax-supported schooling in the state.

After earning her PhD under the direction of John Dewey, Young briefly served as an immensely popular professor at the University of Chicago. She authored five volumes describing her educational theories, including perhaps her most important work, Isolation in the School, in 1901. In this volume, she described how industrialism typically filtered into schools, resulting in rigid compartmentalization that alienated students and school workers alike. This segmentation accompanied an overall mechanization of schooling, which included clear differentiation among categories of students and divisions of responsibilities among workers, clock-driven scheduling, and vertically increasing hierarchies. She argued that this mechanization robbed persons of their humanity, creativity, and intelligence because it made no room for it. Instead, such qualities were reserved for those better placed within the hierarchy. An unfortunate and necessary consequence of this system, she argued, was that those vested with power also were those most removed from the situations over which their judgment was directed, thereby minimizing the possibility of responsible decision making. Ultimately, this system thrived on isolation or division between people as well as between thinking and doing.

Young's views expressed in Isolation ran contrary to those of most school administrators of the time, who instead valued adopting industrial practices to improve efficiency in schools. While many administrators argued that they needed more power to run schools, Young contended that power needed to be distributed among all members of school communities, especially school workers and students. Such individuals only develop skillful decision making when they are required to make meaningful decisions. Her belief that teachers needed more power was controversial among administrators at a time when teachers had begun organizing in Chicago. However, she held that if teachers were imbued with the authority to create and implement their own ideas, then the profession would attract a highly talented pool of candidates while simultaneously discouraging those more disposed toward dry, rote, and punishment-driven pedagogies. Young also strongly believed that teachers needed time within the school day and space for engaging in the intellectual, legislative, and logistical functions of running their schools. Essentially, Young articulated in Isolation the general principles by which schools truly could function as democratic institutions in an increasingly industrialized, segmented, and alienated society.

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