National-Louis University encompasses three colleges: the National College of Education, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the College of Management and Business. The oldest of these is the education unit, established in 1886 by Elizabeth Harrison, a participant in the mid-nineteenth-century kindergarten movement. Harrison set out merely to provide the mothers of her kindergarten students with early-childhood teaching strategies, but her informal lessons grew into an institution: the Chicago Kindergarten College, as it was once known. From its first home in a few rooms of the Art Institute, this college came to admit more than five thousand students over the next decade, eventually offering one of the nation's first four-year bachelor of education degrees. The college moved north to Evanston in 1926. A gift from trustee Michael W. Louis transformed the by-then National College of Education into a university bearing his name in 1990.

Sarah Fenton