Education: Progressively Progressive

By 1938, John Dewey was worriedly deploring the excesses of progressive education. He was right. Yet the best of his ideas survive and thrive—not in the few U.S. schools that still seem to be straight out of Auntie Mame, but in such well-ordered citadels of learning as Chicago's private Francis W. Parker School.

One measure of Parker's vitality is that last fall its 50-year-old plant was condemned as a firetrap—and last month it proudly opened a handsome new $2,500,000 building on the same North Side site. Vital were the $750 loans by Parker parents,...