Celestia Susannah Parrish

Celestia Susannah Parrish (born Sept. 12, 1853, near Swansonville, Va., U.S.—died Sept. 7, 1918, Clayton, Ga.) was an American educator who worked in the South to open higher education to women and to promote progressive education for children.

Parrish was orphaned during the Civil War and thereafter was reared by relatives. She received an irregular education but had a strong desire for learning, and in 1869 she became a teacher in rural schools of her native county. In 1874 she moved to Danville, Virginia, where she taught school and attended the Roanoke Female Institute (now Averett College), from which she graduated in 1876. She entered the Virginia State Normal School (now Longwood College) in 1884, graduating two years later. She studied mathematics and astronomy at the University of Michigan (1891–92), and in 1892 she joined the faculty of the newly opened Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia. Her post required Parrish to teach mathematics, philosophy, pedagogy, and psychology, and in order to gain competence in the last field she attended summer sessions at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (1893–95). In 1893 she established a psychology laboratory at Randolph-Macon—probably the first in the South—and in 1895 she published a paper in the American Journal of Psychology. The following year she received her long-sought college degree from Cornell.

Because of her struggle for a good education and a college degree, Parrish dedicated herself to making education more accessible to Southern women. Through articles, through her own teaching, and through the Association of Collegiate Alumnae (later the American Association of University Women), of which she was state president and national vice president, and the Southern Association of College Women, of which she was founder in 1903 and first president, Parrish worked to improve the quality of education available to women and to interest women in availing themselves of newly opened opportunities. She attended summer sessions at the University of Chicago (1897–99), where she worked with John Dewey and became imbued with his ideas of progressive education. In 1902 she left Randolph-Macon to become professor of pedagogic psychology and head of the department of pedagogy at the Georgia State Normal School (now George Peabody College of Education of the University of Georgia). She persuaded philanthropist George Foster Peabody to underwrite the building of Muscogee Elementary School, which opened in 1903 as the college’s laboratory school; over the next eight years Parrish trained hundreds of teachers in progressive methods in what was the only such program in the South and one of the few in the nation.

In 1911 Parrish was appointed state supervisor of rural schools for the North Georgia District, a task that required her to oversee the work and in-service training of more than 3,800 teachers in 48 counties. She remained in that post, traveling almost constantly to visit schools, organize teachers institutes, and exhort public officials, until her death in 1918.