Robert Brazil was for many years the principal at Sullivan High School in the Rogers Park neighborhood, where he gained a reputation for implementing the Socratic method of teaching and leading efforts that improved student outcomes.
“I often say that children learn more by example than they do by instruction, and here was the living example on an ongoing basis at the elementary and senior high level,” said Carl Boyd, a Kansas City-based urban educator who in the early 1970s taught at Parkside Elementary School in the South Shore neighborhood, while Brazil was Parkside’s principal. “It was remarkable just how many educators depended upon his leadership.”
Brazil, 86, died of complications from a rare type of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma on May 11 at the University of Chicago Medical Center, said his daughter, Patrice. He was a Hyde Park resident.
Born in Memphis, Brazil grew up on Chicago’s South Side and attended Raymond Elementary School before graduating from Phillips High School. He received a bachelor’s degree in physical education from Chicago Teachers College and then earned a master’s degree in education from DePaul University in 1965. In 1978, he added a doctorate in education from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Brazil’s first teaching job was at Martha Ruggles Elementary School in the Grand Crossing neighborhood on the South Side, and he later taught at Paul Cornell Elementary School in Grand Crossing and then was the assistant principal at Nikola Tesla Elementary School in the Woodlawn neighborhood on the South Side. In 1971, Brazil became the principal at Parkside Elementary School in South Shore.
“I want to make this school a place where there are activities taking place which meet the interests and needs of the children,” Brazil told the Tribune in 1971. “I want the school to be a place where the children want to come and be a part of — not something they come to because they have to.”
In 1975, Brazil was named principal of Parker High School in the Englewood neighborhood. The school had been called out in a September 1974 Tribune series titled “Inside Our Troubled Schools,” which described nodding off during class, students gambling in the cafeteria and the smell of marijuana wafting through hallways and restrooms.
Brazil led Parker, which later became Robeson High School, until being named Sullivan’s principal in 1977.
In 1984, he won a grant under the Carnegie Grants Program for High School Improvement to fund the “Paideia proposal,” an educational program developed in 1982 by philosopher Mortimer Adler and 21 other educators. The Paideia proposal was in essence a call for school reform, championing schools’ revival of the Socratic seminar and urging a rigorous academic core curriculum regardless of students’ backgrounds or levels.
Brazil implemented the Paideia approach at Sullivan, beginning with a seminar in which teachers would question students to enlarge their understanding of the world. Brazil directed students to not only read great works but to talk about them and to think instead of having a traditional teacher-driven lecture.
“The program is an outlet for children who might not be stimulated by a more traditional curriculum,” Brazil told the Tribune in 1988. “Some kids who are very bright cannot survive in our education system because it is too limiting. Some people think that Chicago Public Schools children can’t learn. I wish those people could see these kids.”
Brazil’s partner, Lynnette Fu, taught French at Sullivan and then went on to become an assistant principal at Sullivan and then eventually to a role at Chicago Public Schools’ central office.
“He not only had big ideas, but he made them work. A lot of people have ideas, but they might hand them off to someone else to implement, but he was the one who made them happen,” Fu said. “He was a fantastic principal — very innovative.”
Brazil’s work paid off, with the school’s enrollment gaining in standardized test scores each year.
“We’re getting to the point where kids are learning well, not just based on scores but on how they feel about themselves,” Brazil told the Tribune in 1990. “When they tell me they feel smart, it makes me feel good.”
In 1989, Brazil was one of 20 Chicago Public School principals awarded the first annual Whitman Award for Excellence in Education Management from the Whitman Corp.
“My father genuinely loved teaching people new things. He was a born educator, but he could have been good at anything,” Patrice Brazil said. “He loved being able to improve a school’s performance and was always talking about how well the kids at his school were doing.”
Brazil broadened his focus to oversee staff development for other schools following the Paideia program, and he founded the Paideia Institute of Hyde Park and served as the group’s executive director. For teachers, Brazil also launched a series of immersion retreats on the Paideia proposal in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, as well as a graduate institute at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, N.M. Brazil also worked with the National Board of Teacher Certification to help certify educators.
Brazil wrote several books, including “The Engineering of the Paideia Proposal” in 1988 and “A Covenant for Change: The Paideia Manual,” which the University of Illinois published in 1991. Brazil also self-published a 100-page memoir in 2005 about his upbringing, “Memoirs of Bronzeville.”
After retiring from Sullivan in 1993, Brazil continued to train teachers in the Socratic method, his daughter said.
A marriage to Marilyn Wallace-Brazil ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter and Fu, Brazil is survived by a son, Alan; two granddaughters; a sister, Vera Green.
Services were held.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.