page_title: Avery Coonley School
section_title: Founding and Cottage School (1906–1916)
hierarchical_section_title: Avery Coonley School / History / Founding and Cottage School (1906–1916)
caption_attribution_description: The Coonley Playhouse, Downers Grove, Ilinois. Early home of The Avery Coonley School. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
context_page_description: The Avery Coonley School, commonly called Avery Coonley, is an independent, coeducational day school serving academically gifted students in preschool through eighth grade, and is located in Downers Grove, DuPage County, Illinois. The school was founded in 1906 to promote the progressive educational theories developed by John Dewey and other turn-of-the-20th-century philosophers, and was a nationally recognized model for progressive education well into the 1940s. From 1943 to 1965, Avery Coonley was part of the National College of Education, serving as a living laboratory for teacher training and educational research. In the 1960s, ACS became a regional research center and a leadership hub for independent schools, and began to focus on the education of the gifted.
  The school has occupied several structures in its history, including a small cottage on the Coonley Estate in Riverside, Illinois, and another building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
context_section_description: In 1906, Queene Ferry Coonley, wife of wealthy Riverside industrialist and publisher Avery Coonley, decided to start a kindergarten program to allow children younger than five years old to attend. Queene Coonley was trained as a social worker and kindergarten teacher at the Detroit Normal School (now Wayne State University) and was impressed by the theories of Friedrich Fröbel, who believed children's early education should be an extension of their lives at home. Fröbel's theories captured the three main principles of what John Dewey would later call the "kindergarten attitude", which applied not just to kindergartners but to children of all ages. Dewey wrote that the primary role of the school is to train children in cooperative living, the root of all learning is the activity of the child and not external material, and directing children's spontaneous impulses towards maintaining the collective life of the school is how they become prepared for adult life. Convinced of these principles, Coonley sought to enroll her four-year-old daughter in the Riverside School, one of the few public kindergartens in the area, but was disappointed when the child was not eligible because she had not yet turned five.
  Coonley persuaded the director of the Riverside program, Lucia Burton Morse, and her assistant, Charlotte Krum, to help launch a new school. Morse and Krum had attended Elizabeth Harrison's Kindergarten College, which "championed the concept of kindergarten teaching in America and was one of the first teacher's colleges in the country to offer a four-year program culminating in the bachelor of education degree". There they had studied the educational theories of John Dewey and others, who stood opposed to the more traditional pedagogical practices of the day, which saw education as the business of transmitting long-standing bodies of information to new generations and inculcating moral training based on rules and standards of conduct. Their new progressive views of education emphasized an individualized approach to education and an integrated curriculum where children learned from experience and social interaction. According to Dewey, "it is a cardinal precept of the newer school of education that the beginning of instruction shall be made with the experience learners already have; that this experience and the capacities that have been developed during its course provide the starting point for all further learning." These ideas laid the foundations of what would become the "progressive movement" in education. Coonley, Morse, and Krum brought these ideas with them to the new school, which Coonley described as "a Children's Community. Its purpose was not so much to teach what others had thought or grown-ups had done, but for the children themselves to do something."
  A small cottage on the Coonley estate served as the first school building, reflected by its original name, the Cottage School.  The designer was Charles Whittlesey, who had apprenticed under Louis Sullivan.  The estate's main building, the Avery Coonley House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, is now a National Historic Landmark. Over the years, many of the estate's buildings would be pressed into use as classrooms and residences for teachers. As new grades were added the school grew, and in 1911 Coonley commissioned Wright to design a larger space for the students. The new building was completed in 1912 and became known as the Coonley Playhouse, and featured dozens of brightly colored art glass windows, evoking flags, balloons, and confetti in what Wright referred to as a "kinder-symphony". "Their bright primary colors and lively geometric designs make them some of Wright's most famous windows."
  Two years of kindergarten were offered, beginning at age four, and students progressed through to first grade with other students their age. The Cottage School was free to all students, and was supported both by Coonley's own resources and funds raised by the Kindergarten Education Association. The Association, of which Coonley was president, promoted new educational ideas a
caption: The Coonley Playhouse, with its signature "kinder-symphony" windows, was built by Frank Lloyd Wright to house the Cottage School in 1912. It has been nominated as a National Historic Landmark.[18]
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