≥PARA ΩPAR@ ` ≥TEXT ` ΣParrish, Celestia Susannah1853╨1918educatorBorn on a plantation near Swansonville, Pittsylvania County, Virginia, on September 12, 1853, Celestia Parrish was orphaned during the Civil War and thereafter was reared by relatives. She received an irregular education, but her own desire for learning went far to supply the deficiency, 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 also attended the Roanoke Female Institute (now Averett College), from which she graduated in 1876. In 1884, after a year of teaching at the Roanoke Female Institute, she entered the Virginia State Normal School (now Longwood College). On her graduation in 1886 she was given an appointment as instructor in mathematics. During 1891╨1892 she studied mathematics and astronomy at the University of Michigan, and in the latter year she joined the faculty of the newly opened Randolph╨Macon Woman╒s College in Lynchburg, Virginia. Her post required her to teach mathematics, philosophy, pedagogy, and psychology, and in order to gain competence in the last field she attended summer sessions at Cornell University in 1893, 1894, and 1895. In 1896 she received her long sought college degree from Cornell. In 1893 she had 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. Having come as far as she had only by dint of extraordinary persistence, Parrish began to work to make education more easily 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, she worked to improve the quality of education available to women and to interest women in availing themselves of newly opened opportunities. In 1897, 1898, and 1899 she attended summer sessions at the University of Chicago, where she worked under 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. There over the next eight years Celestia 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 over 3800 teachers scattered among more than 2400 schools in 48 counties where education was given low priority. She remained in that post, traveling almost constantly to visit schools, organize teachers╒ institutes, and exhort public officials, until her death in Clayton, Georgia, on September 7, 1918. ╓styl `
