top of page

Lincoln School

Lessons unlearned by public educators

Illinois Times

September 8, 1988

In the 1980s, my daily walks to and from my office in downtown Springfield took me past the grounds of Lincoln School, an elementary school on the near east side. It was an education into how public education was done in Springfield in those days.

 

I have walked by Lincoln School maybe five thousand times in the last six years. Outwardly it is a typical four-story brick schoolhouse of early twentieth-century design which stands like a piece of layer cake in the middle of a block-sized plate. The grounds are partly grass turf and partly paved and graveled play areas, the whole surrounded by a waist-high cyclone fence.

 

The lessons to be learned by the public from outside the school, I have discovered, are nearly as useful as those taught to children inside it. The main building has been well-tended; it stands in one of Springfield's poorer and blacker neighborhoods, and has been favored by administrators eager to refute the imputation of bias in the school district's allocation of facilities. Next to it, however, are two temporary classroom and storage buildings, already shabby after only a few years of use. The classroom is entered via a portable wooden step, unpainted and uneven, which speaks volumes about the difference between 1912 and 1988 in the wealth made available to house the city's young.

 

Lincoln was built to be a neighborhood school. It no longer is, since most of the kids are bused in. Neither is it a particularly neighborly presence in my part of town. Come winter, for example, the snow-clogged city sidewalks which border the school on three sides are left uncleared for two, even three days after paths are cleared for students and staff, leaving those of us who walk to seek the open street.

 

Silly, I know, to expect neighborliness from an institution, especially one run (as I am certain School District 186 is run) by people who do not have to walk anywhere. But the school is a presence in my neighborhood, even in my body. Most days when school is in session one sees smoke sneaking out of its incinerator stack. Sometimes it's gray, sometimes it's black, but it nearly always stinks. The smoke has an acrid tang which grabs at your throat. On windy days I have smelled it from as far away as five blocks.

 

Smelled it, hell, I can see it; on occasion bits of glowing papery ash can be seen settling like black snow. That snow no doubt includes the remains of trash can liners, carbon paper, and plasticized milk containers, all of which when combusted at low temperatures generate poisonous fumes. The school thus reduces its hauling costs by sending its garbage out of the smokestack and into my lungs. And not just mine; on some days, downdrafts push that smoke straight down the stack onto the school's own play area below. An informed bureaucracy would not permit such careless conduct, nor would a well-managed one. I am obliged to conclude that 186 is neither.

 

Indeed, the schoolyard these days seems an unfriendly place in most ways. The early school grounds were intended as mini-parks, but this one looks more like a prison exercise yard. Last year someone planted a few marigolds in a corner of a playground; it was a brave gesture and apparently an unappreciated one, because that once-bright corner is again home only to weeds. There is but one mature tree on the block. None grows where it might shade either playing children or the building itself, the latter an especially lamentable lack now that the school year begins, inexplicably, in mid-August. (There are three immature trees on the grounds; one has been banged up by vandals, although it should survive, and the other two frame an entrance to a parking lot—decorative in the most trivial sense.)

 

Priorities, I know. It's true that the open play spaces on the grounds don't seem to be played on much, before or after school. (The basketball court gets use, as do the swing sets. That's all.) Why then not plant banks of shrubs which might break the winter wind, offer spring color, and provide shelter and food to birds which children might observe? Why not plant vegetable gardens to be tended by the children themselves as class projects? Gardens are the text for a hundred lessons in science and math, even history. (How many four- ounce tomatoes make a pound? What did the pioneers eat?)

 

As I stroll past their barren vistas I can hear the objections to such schemes. Parents complaining about soiled clothes. Teachers making weed-pulling a collective bargaining issue. Administrators warning that such plots would be targets for vandals, never appreciating that one of the reasons kids are so eager to destroy their schools is because the schools are not theirs, and contain no part of them. Such things have been done, and in tougher places than Springfield. They can't be done anywhere, however, unless someone knows enough to try.

 

Of the human life which dwells on that block from eight to four during the school year the passerby sees little beyond the bustle which attends the unloading and loading of buses each day. ("Purple bus!" announces a voice over the school's outdoor PA system, in the barely modulated screech of the small-town Midwestern female which can peel the paint from walls.) Occasionally these voices materialize on the grounds, standing around at recess looking bored. I have never seen a Lincoln teacher organize games among the children, much less join in; they seem to speak to them only to scold them for acting like—or perhaps merely for being—kids.

 

Sometimes you can see PE teachers parade a class around one of the playgrounds. These are miserable shows—kids who at only six, seven, or eight years of age are already fat, or lack the energy to jog more than a few dozen feet at a time or pull themselves up to a bar. Most just seem resentful of the demand that they rouse their bodies of their accustomed indolence. While they wheeze and complain, you may see a truck pull up to the back door to deliver cartons of flavored whole milk or potato chips, components of the type of school lunches so laden with fats, sugars, and salt that they violate even the federal government’s lax nutrition recommendations.

 

The lessons which are learned, in short, are only occasionally the lessons which are taught. Fifteen months ago I saw a bunch of kids on their hands and knees outside one of the school doors. They were decorating the pavements with chalk drawings, presumably as part of an art class assignment.

I recalled the spray-painted graffiti which had appeared on a wall of the school not long before, and wondered whether kids were able to appreciate the difference between the drawings scribbled on public sidewalks which grown-ups called art, and the drawings scribbled on public walls, which those same grownups called vandalism.

 

Vandals are as vandals do, I guess. A sign on the east wall of the building reads, "Do not drive on school ground." You can’t miss it; it’s right above the parked cars. There are as many as twenty-five cars parked on the grounds of Lincoln School on a typical day in fact. (This morning the drivers of three of them had installed foldable cardboard sun screens in windows which faced north, away from the sun—science teachers, I assume.) A chunk of playground was graded and graveled for staff parking over the summer. This was an improvement of sorts, since teachers previously simply parked right on the grass. More than once on rainy days I watched while a driver impatient with the need to f maneuver out of a tight spot simply pulled his car out across the soaked turf to the exit, leaving the turf gashed and bleeding.

 

That parking lot is a puzzle. There are dozens of free street parking spaces within a two-minute walk of the school door. Laziness would explain the desire to park closer than that; so would the hysterical fear of muggers which afflicts most people when they venture east of Eleventh Street even in broad daylight. The fact that both impulses are real does not make them justified, however. The schoolyard was devised in large part to provide children with a refuge from the clamor and dirt of the street. Yet here the people in charge have brought the street right into the schoolyard. A few years ago, watching a play area being converted to parking would have made me ask for whom the schools are really being run these days. By now I already know. ●

SITES

OF

INTEREST

John Hallwas

Essential for anyone interested in Illinois history and literature. Hallwas deservedly won the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Illinois State Historical Society.

Lee Sandlin Author

One of Illinois’s best, and least-known, writers of his generation. Take note in particular of The Distancers and Road to Nowhere.

Chicago Architecture Center

See Home Page/Learn/

Resources for a marvelous building database, architecture dictionary, even a city planning graphic novel. Handsome, useful—every Illinois culture website should be so good.

The Encyclopedia of Chicago

 

The online version of The Encyclopedia of Chicago. Crammed with thousands of topic entries, biographical sketches, maps and images, it is a reference work unmatched in Illinois.

Illinois Great Places

The Illinois chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 2018 selected 200 Great Places in Illinois that illustrate our  shared architectural culture across the entire period of human settlement in Illinois.

McLean County Museum

of History

A nationally accredited, award-winning project of the McLean County Historical Society whose holdings include more than 20,000 objects, more than 15,000 books on local history and genealogy, and boxes and boxes of historical papers and images.

Mr. Lincoln, Route 66, and Other Highlights of Lincoln, Illinois

 

Every Illinois town ought to have a chronicler like D. Leigh Henson, Ph.D. Not only Lincoln and the Mother road—the author’s curiosity ranges from cattle baron John Dean Gillett to novelist William Maxwell. An Illinois State Historical Society "Best Web Site of the Year."

Illinois Digital Archives

 

Created in 2000, the IDA is a repository for the digital collections of the Illinois State Library and other Illinois libraries and cultural institutions. The holdings include photographs, slides, and glass negatives, oral histories, newspapers, maps, and documents from manuscripts and letters to postcards,  posters, and videos.

The Illinois State Museum

 

The people's museum is a treasure house of science and the arts. A research institution of national reputation, the museum maintains four facilities across the state. Their collections in anthropology, fine and decorative arts, botany, zoology, geology, and  history are described here. A few museum publications can be obtained here.

Chronicling Illinois

“Chronicling Illinois” showcases some of the collections—mostly some 6,000 photographs—from the Illinois history holdings of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library.

Chicagology

I will leave it to the authors of this interesting site to describe it. "Chicagology is a study of Chicago history with a focus on the period prior to the Second World War. The purpose of the site is to document common and not so common stories about the City of Chicago as they are discovered." 

Illinois Labor History Society

The Illinois Labor History Society seeks to encourage the preservation and study of labor history materials of the Illinois region, and to arouse public interest in the profound significance of the past to the present. Offers books reviews, podcasts, research guides, and the like. 

Illinois Migration History 1850-2017

The University of Washington’s America’s Great Migrations Project has compiled migration histories  (mostly from the published and unpublished work by UW Professor of History James Gregory) for several states, including Illinois. The site also includes maps and charts and essays about the Great Migration of African Americans to the north, in which Illinois figured importantly. 

History on the Fox

An interesting resource about the history of one of Illinois’s more interesting places, the Fox Valley of Kendall County. History on the Fox is the work of Roger Matile, an amateur historian of the best sort. Matile’s site is a couple of cuts above the typical buff’s blog. (An entry on the French attempt to cash in on the trade in bison pelts runs more than

2,000 words.)

BOOKS

 OF INTEREST

SIUPromoCoverPic.jpg

Southern Illinois University Press 2017

A work of solid history, entertainingly told.

Michael Burlingame,

author of Abraham 

Lincoln: A Life 

One of the ten best books on Illinois history I have read in a decade.

Superior Achievement Award citation, ISHS Awards, 2018

A lively and engaging study . . .  an enthralling narrative.

James Edstrom

The Annals of Iowa

A book that merits the attention of all Illinois historians

as well as local historians generally.

John Hoffman

Journal of Illinois HIstory

A model for the kind of detailed and honest history other states and regions could use.

Harold Henderson 

Midwestern Microhistory

A fine example of a resurgence of Midwest historical scholarship.

Greg Hall

Journal of the Illinois

State Historical Society

Click  here 

to read about

the book 

Click  here 

to buy the book 

DeviceTransparent

Southern Illinois University Press

SIU Press is one of the four major university publishing houses in Illinois. Its catalog offers much of local interest, including biographies of Illinois political figures, the history (human and natural) and folklore of southern Illinois, the Civil War and Lincoln, and quality reprints in the Shawnee Classics series.

University of

Illinois Press

The U of I Press was founded in 1918. A search of the online catalog  (Books/Browse by subject/Illinois) will reveal more than 150 Illinois titles, books on history mostly but also butteflies, nature , painting, poetry and fiction, and more.  Of particular note are its Prairie State Books,  quality new paperback editions of worthy titles about all parts of Illinois, augmented with scholarly introductions.

University of

Chicago Press

The U of C publishing operation is the oldest (1891) and largest university press in Illinois. Its reach is international, but it has not neglected its own neighborhood. Any good Illinois library will include dozens of titles about Chicago and Illinois from Fort Dearborn to

Vivian Maier.

Northern Illinois University Press

The newest (1965) and the smallest of the university presses with an interest in Illinois, Northern Illinois University Press gave us important titles such as the standard one-volume history of the state (Biles' Illinois:
A History of the Land and Its People) and contributions to the history of Chicago, Illinois transportation, and the Civil War. Now an imprint of Cornell University Press.

DeviceTransparent

Reviews and significant mentions by James Krohe Jr. of more than 50 Illinois books, arranged in alphabetical order

by book title. 

DeviceTransparent

Illinois Center for the Book

Run by the Illinois State Library, The Center promotes reading, writing and author programs meant to honor the state's rich literary heritage. An affiliate of the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book, the site offers award competitions, a directory of Illinois authors, literary landmarks, and reading programs.

imageedit_3_Flipped_edited_edited.png
bottom of page