For a moment at least, Ed Zwick is no longer 38, a man at the top of his game, the creator and coexecutive producer of the television drama thirtysomething. He is Eddie Zwick, a kid in the late 50s and early 60s at grammar school in Winnetka. “My first memory of Crow Island is of the physical plant. It was an extraordinary setting–the woods, the hills surrounding the playground, and the field out past some of the classrooms. It was a magical world of open space, a spectacular place to be a kid. I played chess there. I read books and acted in my first play, Huckleberry Finn. No, I’m wrong–it was Tom Sawyer.”
Crow Island and its surroundings bespeak Washburne’s idiosyncratic vision. Yet if the school has succeeded, it owes less to the building and the curriculum than to the spirit with which Washburne endowed a seemingly conservative Winnetka. “I was eager to go to school every day, and happy to return the next day,” says Ed Zwick. “I don’t know exactly what it was, but the love I had of school came from Crow Island.”
Marion Washburne lectured on philosophy, public affairs, and religion, and came to know both John Dewey, the University of Chicago professor who founded its laboratory school, and Francis Parker, a raspy-voiced educator who was principal of Cook County Normal School in Englewood and lent his name and ethos to the north-side school that reflected his beliefs. Parker was convinced that learning comes best through activity rather than memorization, and that children, even young ones, should be encouraged to think for themselves, with the teacher as guide, not taskmaster. Parker also thought that parents should be intimately involved in their offspring’s schooling.
In 1914 Burk hired Washburne, who had corresponded with him and was then director of an Oakland city playground. At the Normal School Washburne toiled on a project that examined phenomena common to preadolescents (and later served as the basis of his PhD thesis at Berkeley). He also administered intelligence tests on the side. Washburne was born again. “For the first time I saw education as a science, a technique, an art, and a philosophy, all in one.”
Washburne began with certain subjects that he classified as the “common essentials”–arithmetic, reading, writing, punctuation, capitalization, grammar, history, and geography. A young Winnetkan would master these basics using the techniques of self-instruction.
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Some subjects required different methods. In spelling, tests were used to determine how good a speller a student was, followed by study, dictation, and more tests.
Reading was the one area that lacked a self-instruction workbook or even an anthology. A child was expected to complete between 20 and 30 books a year from a list of approved titles. Everything else had its self-instruction text. “I remember the brown arithmetic books,” sighs retired teacher Marion Stern, a 75-year-old veteran of Crow Island. “They were the most didactic things you ever saw.” In 1925 the Winnetka Educational Press, a subsidiary of the Winnetka schools, began publishing self-instruction editions for sale to other school systems.
