progressive education

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Historians have debated whether a unified progressive reform movement existed during the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. While some scholars have doubted the development of a cohesive progressive project, others have argued that while Progressive Era reformers did not march in lockstep, they did draw from a common reform discourse that connected their separate agendas in spirit, if not in kind. Despite these scholarly debates, historians of education have reached a consensus on the central importance of the Progressive Era and the educational reformers who shaped it during the early twentieth century. This is not to say that historians of education do not disagree - in fact, they disagree intensely - on the legacy of Progressive educational experiments. What they do agree on is that during the Progressive Era (1890 - 1919) the philosophical, pedagogical, and administrative underpinnings of what is, in the early twenty-first century, associated with modern schooling, coalesced and transformed, for better or worse, the trajectory of twentieth-century American education.

Philosophical Foundations

The Progressive education movement was an integral part of the early twentieth-century reform impulse directed toward the reconstruction of American democracy through social, as well as cultural, uplift. When done correctly, these reformers contended, education promised to ease the tensions created by the immense social, economic, and political turmoil wrought by the forces of modernity characteristic of fin-de-siècle America. In short, the altered landscape of American life, Progressive reformers believed, provided the school with a new opportunity - indeed, a new responsibility - to play a leading role in preparing American citizens for active civic participation in a democratic society.

John Dewey (1859 - 1952), who would later be remembered as the "father of Progressive education," was the most eloquent and arguably most influential figure in educational Progressivism. A noted philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer, Dewey graduated from the University of Vermont in 1879, taught high school briefly, and then earned his doctorate in philosophy at the newly formed Johns Hopkins University in 1884. Dewey taught at the University of Michigan from 1884 to 1888, the University of Minnesota from 1888 to 1889, again at Michigan from 1889 to 1894, then at the University of Chicago from 1894 to 1904, and, finally, at Columbia University from 1904 until his retirement in 1931.

During his long and distinguished career, Dewey generated over 1,000 books and articles on topics ranging from politics to art. For all his scholarly eclecticism, however, none of his work ever strayed too far from his primary intellectual interest: education. Through such works as The School and Society (1899), The Child and the Curriculum (1902), and Democracy and Education (1916), Dewey articulated a unique, indeed revolutionary, reformulation of educational theory and practice based upon the core relationship he believed existed between democratic life and education. Namely, Dewey's vision for the school was inextricably tied to his larger vision of the good society, wherein education - as a deliberately conducted practice of investigation, of problem solving, and of both personal and community growth - was the wellspring of democracy itself. Because each classroom represented a microcosm of the human relationships that constituted the larger community, Dewey believed that the school, as a "little democracy," could create a "more lovely society."

Dewey's emphasis on the importance of democratic relationships in the classroom setting necessarily shifted the focus of educational theory from the institution of the school to the needs of the school's students. This dramatic change in American pedagogy, however, was not alone the work of John Dewey. To be sure, Dewey's attraction to child-centered educational practices was shared by other Progressive educators and researchers - such as Ella Flagg Young (1845 - 1918), Dewey's colleague and kindred spirit at the University of Chicago, and Granville Stanley Hall (1844 - 1924), the iconoclastic Clark University psychologist and avowed leader of the child study movement - who collectively derived their understanding of child-centeredness from reading and studying a diverse array of nineteenth and twentieth-century European and American philosophical schools. In general, the received philosophical traditions employed by Dewey and his fellow Progressives at once deified childhood and advanced ideas of social and intellectual interdependence. First, in their writings about childhood, Frenchman Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778) emphasized its organic and natural dimensions; while English literary romantics such as William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850) and William Blake (1757 - 1827) celebrated its innate purity and piety, a characterization later shared by American transcendentalist philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862). For these thinkers, childhood was a period of innocence, goodness, and piety that was in every way morally superior to the polluted lives led by most adults. It was the very sanctity of childhood that convinced the romantics and transcendentalists that the idea of childhood should be preserved and cultivated through educational instruction.

Second, and more important, Dewey and his fellow educational Progressives drew from the work of the German philosopher Friedrich Froebel (1782 - 1852) and Swiss educator Johann Pestalozzi (1746 - 1827). Froebel and Pestalozzi were among the first to articulate the process of educating the "whole child," wherein learning moved beyond the subject matter and ultimately rested upon the needs and interests of the child. Tending to both the pupil's head and heart, they believed, was the real business of schooling, and they searched for an empirical and rational science of education that would incorporate these foundational principles. Froebel drew upon the garden metaphor of cultivating young children toward maturity, and he provided the European foundations for the late-nineteenth-century kindergarten movement in the United States. Similarly, Pestalozzi popularized the pedagogical method of object teaching, wherein a teacher began with an object related to the child's world in order to initiate the child into the world of the educator.

Finally, Dewey drew inspiration from the ideas of philosopher and psychologist William James (1842 - 1910). Dewey's interpretation of James's philosophical pragmatism, which was similar to the ideas underpinning Pestalozzi's object teaching, joined thinking and doing as two seamlessly connected halves of the learning process. By focusing on the relationship between thinking and doing, Dewey believed his educational philosophy could equip each child with the problem-solving skills required to overcome obstacles between a given and desired set of circumstances. According to Dewey, education was not simply a means to a future life, but instead represented a full life unto itself.

Taken together, then, these European and American philosophical traditions helped Progressives connect childhood and democracy with education: Children, if taught to understand the relationship between thinking and doing, would be fully equipped for active participation in a democratic society. It was for these reasons that the Progressive education movement broke from pedagogical traditionalists organized around the seemingly outmoded and antidemocratic ideas of drill, discipline, and didactic exercises.

Pedagogical Progressivism

The pedagogical Progressives who embraced this child-centered pedagogy favored education built upon an experience-based curriculum developed by both students and teachers. Teachers played a special role in the Progressive formulation for education as they merged their deep knowledge of, and affection for, children with the intellectual demands of the subject matter. Contrary to his detractors, then and now, Dewey, while admittedly antiauthoritarian, did not take child-centered curriculum and pedagogy to mean the complete abandonment of traditional subject matter or instructional guidance and control. In fact, Dewey criticized derivations of those theories that treated education as a mere source of amusement or as a justification for rotevocationalism. Rather, stirred by his desire to reaffirm American democracy, Dewey's time- and resource-exhaustive educational program depended on close student - teacher interactions that, Dewey argued, required nothing less than the utter reorganization of traditional subject matter.

Although the practice of pure Deweyism was rare, his educational ideas were implemented in private and public school systems alike. During his time as head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago (which also included the fields of psychology and pedagogy), Dewey and his wife Alice established a University Laboratory School. An institutional center for educational experimentation, the Lab School sought to make experience and hands-on learning the heart of the educational enterprise, and Dewey carved out a special place for teachers. Dewey was interested in obtaining psychological insight into the child's individual capacities and interests. Education was ultimately about growth, Dewey argued, and the school played a crucial role in creating an environment that was responsive to the child's interests and needs, and would allow the child to flourish.

Similarly, Colonel Francis W. Parker, a contemporary of Dewey and devout Emersonian, embraced an abiding respect for the beauty and wonder of nature, privileged the happiness of the individual over all else, and linked education and experience in pedagogical practice. During his time as superintendent of schools in Quincy, Massachusetts, and later as the head of the Cook Country Normal School in Chicago, Parker rejected discipline, authority, regimentation, and traditional pedagogical techniques and emphasized warmth, spontaneity, and the joy of learning. Both Dewey and Parker believed in learning by doing, arguing that genuine delight, rather than drudgery, should be the by-product of manual work. By linking the home and school, and viewing both as integral parts of a larger community, Progressive educators sought to create an educational environment wherein children could see that the hands-on work they did had some bearing on society.

While Progressive education has most often been associated with private independent schools such as Dewey's Laboratory School, Margaret Naumberg's Walden School, and Lincoln School of Teacher's College, Progressive ideas were also implemented in large school systems, the most well known being those in Winnetka, Illinois, and Gary, Indiana. Located some twenty miles north of Chicago on its affluent North Shore, the Winnetka schools, under the leadership of superintendent Carleton Washburne, rejected traditional classroom practice in favor of individualized instruction that let children learn at their own pace. Washburne and his staff in the Winnetka schools believed that all children had a right to be happy and live natural and full lives, and they yoked the needs of the individual to those of the community. They used the child's natural curiosity as the point of departure in the classroom and developed a teacher education program at the Graduate Teachers College of Winnetka to train teachers in this philosophy; in short, the Winnetka schools balanced Progressive ideals with basic skills and academic rigor.

Like the Winnetka schools, the Gary school system was another Progressive school system, led by superintendent William A. Wirt, who studied with Dewey at the University of Chicago. The Gary school system attracted national attention for its platoon and work-study-play systems, which increased the capacity of the schools at the same time that they allowed children to spend considerable time doing hands-on work in laboratories, shops, and on the playground. The schools also stayed open well into the evening hours and offered community-based adult education courses. In short, by focusing on learning-by-doing and adopting an educational program that focused on larger social and community needs, the Winnetka and Gary schools closely mirrored Dewey's own Progressive educational theories.

Administrative Progressivism

While Dewey was the most well known and influential Progressive educator and philosopher, he by no means represented all that Progressive education ultimately became. In the whirlwind of turn-of-the-century educational reform, the idea of educational Progressivism took on multiple, and often contradictory, definitions. Thus, at the same time that Dewey and his followers rejected traditional methods of instruction and developed a "new education" based on the interests and needs of the child, a new cadre of professionally trained school administrators likewise justified their own reforms in the name of Progressive education.

Administrative Progressives shared Dewey's distaste for nineteenth-century education, but they differed markedly with Dewey in their prescription for its reform: administrative Progressives wanted to overthrow "bookish" and rigid schooling by creating what they believed to be more useful, efficient, and centralized systems of public education based on vertically integrated bureaucracies, curricular differentiation, and mass testing.

Professional school administrators relied on managerial expertise in order to efficiently supervise increasingly large public school systems. Significantly, the new administrators, borrowing the language and practice of efficiency experts like Frederick W. Taylor, attempted to rationalize disparate school districts within one hierarchically arranged system of primary, middle, and high school institutions. Powerful school boards - often comprising elite business and civic leaders - hired professionally trained school superintendents to implement policies and to oversee the day-to-day operations of these vast educational systems. The superintendent, often a male, distanced himself from the mostly female corps of teachers, not to mention the students the school was intended to serve. In the name of efficiency, superintendents relied on "scientific," if often sterile, personnel management techniques, which had been developed by and for private industry and imported to the school setting by way of business-friendly school boards and through graduate training at the newly developed schools of education.

The school's turn toward bureaucratic efficiency directly shaped curricular construction. In particular, the idea of differentiation became a new watchword in administrative Progressive circles, reflecting the burgeoning economic and status markers signified by the attainment of educational credentials. By differentiating the curriculum along academic and vocational tracks, school administrators sought to meet the needs of different classes and calibers of students, and to more tightly couple educational training with educational outcomes. While administrators justified this curricular innovation (which was most often used in the high schools) on the basis of equal opportunity for all students based on ability, it reflected a larger, more significant shift in the basic aims and objectives of American education. Where the school once provided intellectual and moral training, in the face of an increasingly diverse student population, Progressive administrators took their chief professional administrative responsibility to be the preparation of students for their future lives as workers in the American labor force.

For many contemporary observers, however, curricular differentiation was little more than a euphemism for "social control," which critics suggested curtailed liberal education in order to meet the labor demands of America's budding industrial society. While this is a cynical view of the Progressive administrative drive, there is much justification for it. Founded in 1906 by a committee of educators and business and industrial leaders, the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education (NSPIE) helped organize vocational education programs in high schools around the country during the first several decades of the twentieth century. Vocational education, which critics conveniently, if incorrectly, linked to Progressive education, was expressly designed to train students for immediate employment following, and often in lieu of, graduation.

On the other hand, administrative Progressives justified the rise of vocational tracks by pointing to the relatively miniscule college-going population and by proclaiming it as an effective means of assimilating newly arrived immigrants into American life and institutions. That these students' high school education was essentially terminated before it ever started was of little concern, for in the face of rapid social upheaval, which reformers believed eroded the traditional institutions of church and family, the school was the last best hope to inculcate immigrants with American values, while simultaneously providing industry with a consistent influx of trained workers.

The interest in the efficient management of bureaucratic school systems and students was strengthened further by developments in educational psychology and intelligence testing. Among the twentieth century's prominent educational psychologists, E. L. Thorndike (1874 - 1949) - who studied under William James at Harvard, and taught at Columbia University's Teachers College during Dewey's tenure - was undoubtedly the most influential. Presaging the rise of post - World War I mass intelligence testing by relying on intelligence tests in his own studies as early as 1903, Thorndike's research advanced a narrowly focused stimulus-response definition of intelligence that justified the spread of worker training through vocational education at the same time that his mechanistic conception of intelligence corrupted Dewey's own ideas about the organic connection between thinking and doing. Thorndike, relying on data gathered from his study of 8,564 high school students in the early 1920s, labeled his theory of intelligence psychological connectionism. Thorndike likened the mind to a "switchboard" where neural bonds (or connections) were created between stimuli and responses. He believed that students of higher intellect formed more and better bonds more quickly than students of lower intellect.

For the administrative Progressives, Thorn-dike's findings were nothing short of revolutionary: By emphasizing the preponderant role of native intelligence through the statistical analysis of mass-administered intelligence tests, Thorndike and his fellow testers - H. H. Goodard, Lewis H. Terman, and Robert M. Yerkes, among them - provided school officials and policymakers with scientifically incontrovertible evidence in favor of increased psychometric testing and pupil sorting. In comparison with Dewey's more human and material-intensive approach to education, which required individualized student attention and creative pedagogy, Thorndike's conception helped reify separate curricula and perpetuate patterns of unequal access. Precisely (if paradoxically) because of the malleability of the idea of Progressive educational reform, it was possible for both pedagogical and administrative Progressives to advance their radically different agendas in the name of democracy during the first several decades of the twentieth century.

Life-Adjustment Progressivism

Yet the internal contradictions and ideological inconsistencies of the pedagogical and administrative Progressives in many ways forecast the demise of the Progressive education movement. A system of education that championed both child-centeredness and individuated attention on the one hand, and explicit curricular differentiation through intelligence testing on the other, was perhaps destined to collapse; and with the introduction of life-adjustment education during the 1940s and 1950s, the Progressive education movement did just that.

Life-adjustment education emerged on the scene during the 1940s and witnessed its heyday during the early days of the cold war. The cause of life-adjustment education was advanced by leaders of the vocational education movement like Charles Prosser, who helped pass the monumental 1917 Smith-Hughes National Vocational Education Act, who believed that the school's main function should be to prepare students for the work world. To this end, the life adjusters borrowed generously from the pedagogical and administrative Progressive lexicon by advocating that schools should test and track students at the same time that they should improve students' physical and emotional well-being. Ultimately, the United States Office of Education's Commission on Life Adjustment Education for Youth coopted the mantel of Progressive education. Using commission reports published in 1951 and 1954 as its blueprint for action, the life adjustment movement succeeded in instituting its therapeutic curricula - geared toward the development of personal hygiene, sociability and personality, and industrious habits of mind - at thousands of schools around the country.

Critics denounced the public school's shift toward an overtly custodial function as both anti-American, anti-intellectual, and, ironically, antidemocratic. In the shadow of Joseph McCarthy's communist witch hunt, the Progressive's sponsorship of international understanding through education, the perceived penchant for feel-good classroom instruction, and the alleged liberal political orientation of Progressive educators cut against the grain of 1950s conservative America. The alleged anti-intellectualism of adjustment pedagogy, however, fueled even more criticism. Among others, the historian Arthur Bestor led the charge against life adjustment's anti-intellectualism. In his Educational Wastelands (1953) and The Restoration of Learning (1955), Bestor argued that life adjustment's emphasis on vocational instruction and life management skills marginalized the place of traditional core subjects. According to Bestor, it was impossible to be a fully educated person in the absence of at least some exposure to traditional liberal studies.

In this traditional view, most similar to the nineteenth century concept of education as mental discipline, Bestor was joined by other neotraditionalist educational luminaries, including Robert Maynard Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago and advocate of the great books curriculum, and James Bryant Conant, the highly respected and influential president of Harvard University. All three men agreed on the fundamental aimlessness and futility of life adjustment education in particular, and American high school education in general. Thanks to these men's efforts, the tenor of the national conversation on education changed dramatically, as more educators and public officials came to believe that it was once again time to think anew about the direction of American education.

Not surprisingly, in the midst of intense neotraditionalist scrutiny and growing public dissatisfaction with life-adjustment education, the Progressive Education Association, the principal administrative organ of the Progressive education movement, closed its doors in 1955; two years later, following the Soviet Union's successful launch of Sputnik I, the general orientation of American education shunned life adjustment pedagogy and embraced traditional academic studies in the liberal arts, mathematics, and the hard sciences. With the communist threat looming ever larger, the neotraditionalists believed the future of American democracy depended on a return to traditional academic studies.

Progressive education did not entirely disappear, however. The fundamental tenants of Progressive education's pedagogical and administrative functions continue to inform contemporary educational debates. What is the relationship between education and democratic citizenship, between teachers and students? Are school districts too large? To what extent is the school responsible for the emotional as well as intellectual development of its pupils? Do achievement tests provide valid and reliable measures of student learning? Is the core curriculum sacrosanct or amenable to change? These are just some of the questions Progressive educators attempted to ask and answer, and they are questions that educators still wrestle with at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Bibliography

Angus, David, and Mirel, Jeffrey. 1999. The Failed Promise of the American High School, 1890 - 1995. New York: Teacher's College Press.

Callahan, Raymond E. 1962. Education and the Cult of Efficiency: A Study of the Forces That Have Shaped the Administration of Public Schools. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Cremin, Lawrence. 1961. The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education. New York: Knopf.

Dewey, John. 1899. The School and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dewey, John. 1902. The Child and the Curriculum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dewey, John. 1916. Democracy and Education. New York: Macmillan.

Filene, Peter. 1970. "An Obituary for the Progressive Movement." American Quarterly 22 (1):20 - 34.

Kliebard, Herbert. 1995. The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893 - 1958, 2nd edition. New York: Routledge.

Ravitch, Diane. 1984. The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945 - 1980. New York: Basic Books.

Ravitch, Diane. 2001. Left Back: A Century of Failed Education Reform. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Reese, William. 2001. "The Origins of Progressive Education." History of Education Quarterly 41:1 - 24.

Rogers, Daniel T. 1982. "In Search of Progressivism." Reviews in American History 10 (4):113 - 132.

Tyack, David. 1974. The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Westbrook, Robert B. 1991. John Dewey and American Democracy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Zilversmit, Arthur. 1993. Changing Schools: Progressive Education Theory and Practice, 1930 - 1960. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

— CATHERINE GAVIN LOSS, CHRISTOPHER P. LOSS

A broad movement for educational reform in the twentieth century. Progressive education is principally associated with John Dewey, but it contains many different and often conflicting ideas. In general, progressive educators view existing schools as too rigid, formal, and detached from real life. They prefer informal classroom arrangements and informal relations between pupils and teachers. They also prefer that schools teach useful subjects (including occupations) and emphasize “learning by doing” rather than instruction purely from textbooks. Some place the developing personality of the child at the center of educational thinking and insist, “teach the child, not the subject.”

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Educational progressivism is the belief that education must be based on the principle that humans are social animals who learn best in real-life activities with other people. Progressivists claimed to rely on the best available scientific theories of learning. Most progressive educators believe that children learn as if they were scientists, following a process similar to John Dewey's model of learning:

1. Become aware of the problem.
2. Define the problem.
3. Propose hypotheses to solve it.
4. Evaluate the consequences of the hypotheses from one's past experience.
5. Test the likeliest solution.

Given this view of human nature, a progressivist teacher desires to provide not just reading and drill, but also real-world experiences and activities that center on the real life of the students. A typical progressivist slogan is "Learn by Doing!"

Contents 1 Philosophy 2 Development in the United States 3 Education outside of schools 4 Recent developments 5 Schools and Colleges employing the Dewey model of Progressive Education 6 Further reading 7 See also 8 References

Philosophy

Progressive education is a pedagogical movement that began in the late nineteenth century and has persisted in various forms to the present. More recently, it has been viewed as an alternative to the test-oriented instruction legislated by the No Child Left Behind educational funding act.

The term "progressive" was engaged to distinguish this education from the traditional curriculum of the 19th century, which was rooted in classical preparation for the university and strongly differentiated by socioeconomic level. By contrast, progressive education finds its roots in present experience. Most progressive education programs have these qualities in common:

• Emphasis on learning by doing – hands-on projects, experiential learning
• Integrated curriculum focused on thematic units
• Strong emphasis on problem solving and critical thinking
• Group work and development of social skills
• Understanding and action as the goals of learning as opposed to rote knowledge
• Collaborative and cooperative learning projects
• Education for social responsibility and democracy
• Integration of community service and service learning projects into the daily curriculum
• Selection of subject content by looking forward to ask what skills will be needed in future society
• De-emphasis on textbooks in favor of varied learning resources
• Emphasis on life-long learning and social skills
• Assessment by evaluation of child’s projects and productions

Development in the United States

The most famous early practitioner of progressive education was Francis Parker; its best-known spokesperson was the philosopher John Dewey.

In 1875 Francis Parker became superintendent of schools in Quincy, Massachusetts after spending two years in Germany studying emerging educational trends on the continent. Parker was opposed to rote learning, believing that there was no value in knowledge without understanding. He argued instead that schools should encourage and respect the child’s creativity. Parker’s Quincy System called for child-centered and experience-based learning. He replaced the traditional curriculum with integrated learning units based on core themes that related knowledge of different disciplines. He replaced traditional readers, spellers and grammar books with children’s own writing, literature, and teacher prepared materials. In 1883 Parker left Massachusetts to become Principal of the Cook County Normal School in Chicago, a school that also served to train teachers in Parker’s methods. In 1894 Parker’s Talks on Pedagogics, which drew heavily on the thinking of Froebel, Pestalozzi and Herbart, became one of the first American writings on education to gain international fame.

That same year, philosopher John Dewey moved from the University of Michigan to the newly established University of Chicago where he became chair of the department of philosophy, psychology and education. He and his wife enrolled their children in Parker’s school before founding their own school two years later.

Whereas Parker started with practice and then moved to theory, Dewey began with hypotheses and then devised methods and curricula to test them. By the time Dewey moved to Chicago at the age of thirty-five, he had already published two books on psychology and applied psychology. He had become dissatisfied with philosophy as pure speculation and was seeking ways to make philosophy directly relevant to practical issues. Moving away from an early interest in Hegel, Dewey proceeded to reject all forms of dualism and dichotomy in favor of a philosophy of experience as a series of unified wholes in which everything can be ultimately related.

In 1896, John Dewey opened what he called the laboratory school to test his theories and their sociological implications. With Dewey as the director and his wife as principal, the University of Chicago Laboratory school, was dedicated “to discover in administration, selection of subject-matter, methods of learning, teaching, and discipline, how a school could become a cooperative community while developing in individuals their own capacities and satisfy their own needs.” (Cremin, 136) For Dewey the two key goals of developing a cooperative community and developing individuals’ own capacities were not at odds; they were necessary to each other. This unity of purpose lies at the heart of the progressive education philosophy.

At Columbia, Dewey worked with other educators such as Charles Eliot and Abraham Flexner to help bring progressivism into the mainstream of American education. In 1917 Columbia established the Lincoln School of Teachers College “as a laboratory for the working out of an elementary and secondary curriculum which shall eliminate obsolete material and endeavor to work up in usable form material adapted to the needs of modern living.” (Cremin, 282) Based on Flexner’s demand that the modern curriculum “include nothing for which an affirmative case can not be made out” (Cremin, 281) the new school organized its activities around four fundamental fields: science, industry, aesthetics and civics. The Lincoln School built its curriculum around “units of work” that reorganized traditional subject matter into forms embracing the development of children and the changing needs of adult life. The first and second grades carried on a study of community life in which they actually built a city. A third grade project growing out of the day to day life of the nearby Hudson river became one of the most celebrated units of the school, a unit on boats, which under the guidance of its legendary teacher Miss Curtis, became an entrée into history, geography, reading, writing, arithmetic, science, art and literature. Each of the units was broadly enough conceived so that different children could concentrate on different aspects depending on their own interests and needs. Each of the units called for widely diverse student activities, and each sought to deal in depth with some critical aspect of contemporary civilization. Finally each unit engaged children working together cooperatively and also provided opportunities for individual research and exploration.

From 1919 to 1955 the Progressive Education Association founded by Stanwood Cobb and others worked to promote a more student-centered approach to education. During the Great Depression the organization conducted an Eight Year study evaluating the effects of progressive programs. More than 1500 students over four years were compared to an equal number of carefully matched students at conventional schools. When they reached college, the experimental students were found to equal or surpass traditionally educated students on all outcomes: grades, extracurricular participation, dropout rates, intellectual curiosity, and resourcefulness. Moreover, the study found that the more the school departed from the traditional college preparatory program, the better was the record of the graduates. (Kohn, Schools, 232)

By mid-century many public school programs had also adopted elements of progressive curriculum. At mid-century Dewey believed that progressive education had “not really penetrated and permeated the foundations of the educational institution.”(Kohn, Schools, 6,7) As the influence of progressive pedagogy grew broader and more diffuse, practitioners began to vary their application of progressive principles. As varying interpretations and practices made evaluation of progressive reforms more difficult to assess, critics began to propose alternative approaches.

The seeds of the debate over progressive education can be seen in the differences of Parker and Dewey. These have to do with how much and by whom curriculum should be worked out from grade to grade, how much the child’s emerging interests should determine classroom activities, the importance of child-centered vs. societal–centered learning, the relationship of community building to individual growth, and especially the relationship between emotion, thought and experience.

In 1955 the publication of Why Johnny Can’t Read leveled criticism of reading programs at the progressive emphasis on reading in context. The conservative McCarthy era raised questions about the liberal ideas at the roots of the progressive reforms. The launching of Sputnik in 1958 at the height of the cold war gave rise to number of intellectually competitive approaches to disciplinary knowledge, such as BSCS biology PSSC physics, led by university professors such as Jerome Bruner and Jerrold Zacharias.

Interestingly, some of the cold war reforms incorporated elements of progressivism. For example, the work of Zacharias and Bruner was based in the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget and incorporated many of Dewey’s ideas of experiential education. Bruner’s analysis of developmental psychology became the core of a pedagogical movement known as constructivism, which argues that that the child is an active participant in making meaning and must be engaged in the progress of education for learning to be effective. This psychological approach has deep connections to the work of both Parker and Dewey and led to a resurgence of their ideas in second half of the century.

In 1963 President Johnson inaugurated the Great Society and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act suffused public school programs with funds for sweeping education reforms. At the same time the influx of federal funding also gave rise to demands for accountability and the behavioral objectives approach of Mager and others foreshadowed the No Child Left Behind Act passed in 2002. Against these critics eloquent spokespersons stepped forward in defense of the progressive tradition. The Open Classroom movement, led by Herb Kohl and George Dennison, recalled many of Parker's child centered reforms. More recently Alfie Kohn has been an outspoken critic of the No Child Left Behind Act and a passionate defender of the progressive tradition. ^{[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]}

Taxpayer revolts, leading to cuts in funding for public education in many states, have led to the founding of an unprecedented number of independent schools, many of which have progressive philosophies. The charter school movement has also spawned an increase in progressive programs. Most recently, public outcry against No Child Left Behind testing and teaching to the test has brought progressive education again into the limelight. Despite the variations that still exist among the progressive programs throughout the country, most progressive schools today are vitalized by these common practices:

• The curriculum is more flexible and is influenced by student interest
• Teachers are facilitators of learning who encourage students to use a wide variety of activities to learn
• Progressive teachers use a wider variety of materials allowing for individual and group research.
• Progressive teachers encourage students to learn by discovery
• Progressive education programs often include the use of community resources and encourage service-learning projects.

Education outside of schools

Organizations like the Boy Scouts of America arose amidst concerns of the progressive movement in the United States from people who sought to promote the social welfare of young men through education. After decades of growing interest in and development of experiential education and scouting (not Scouting) in the United States, and the emergence of the Scout Movement in 1907, in 1910 Boy Scouts of America was founded in the merger of three older Scouting organizations: Boy Scouts of the United States, the National Scouts of America and the Peace Scouts of California.^[6] Its founder, Chicago publisher W. D. Boyce was visiting London, in 1909, when he met the Unknown Scout and learned of the Scouting movement.^[7] Soon after his return to the U.S., Boyce incorporated the Boy Scouts of America on February 8, 1910.^[8] Edgar M. Robinson and Lee F. Hanmer became interested in the nascent BSA program and convinced Boyce to turn the program over to the YMCA for development.^[9][10] Robinson enlisted Ernest Thompson Seton, Daniel Carter Beard and other prominent leaders in the early youth movements. After initial development, Robinson turned the movement over to James E. West who became the first Chief Scout Executive and the Scouting movement began to expand in the U.S.^[10][11] As BSA grew, it absorbed other Scouting organizations.

See also: History of the Boy Scouts of America

See also: Girl Scouts of the USA

See also: Camp Fire Girls

Recent developments

Changes in educational establishments came about as Americans and Europeans felt they had fallen behind the Soviet Union technologically after the success of Sputnik in October, 1957. A rethinking of education theory followed that, together with the prevailing conservative political climate, helped to cause progressivism to fall from favor.

However, today many schools use progressive education methods, such as hands on activities and science experiments in Junior High Schools. Numerous schools also self-identify as progressive in educational philosophy.

Schools and Colleges employing the Dewey model of Progressive Education

• The City and Country School - A progressive independent school (ages 2–13) founded in 1914 by Caroline Pratt.
• City Neighbors Charter School - A Progressive public charter school (K–12) with two campuses in urban Baltimore inspired by the Reggio Emilia philosophy.
• Bank Street College of Education - A Progressive Children's School and College of Education in New York, New York, founded in 1916.
• Stevens Cooperative School - A progressive elementary school and parent cooperative with two campuses in Hoboken and Jersey City,NJ, founded in 1949.
• Queen Anne Community School - A progressive, independent Pre-K to Fifth Grade School in Seattle, Washington.
• The Crefeld School - A Progressive secondary school serving approximately 100 students in Grades 7-12 in the greater Philadelphia area.
• Westland School - A Progressive elementary school in Los Angeles, California, founded in 1949.
• Our Community School - A Progressive elementary charter school in North Hills, California, founded in 2005.
• The Park School of Buffalo - A Progressive school for grades K-12 in Snyder, New York, founded in 1912.
• Ann Arbor Open - A progressive, public school for grades K - 8 in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
• Park Day School - A Progressive elementary school in Oakland, California
• Windrush School - A progressive Kindergarten to Eighth Grade School in El Cerrito, California
• Christa McAuliffe School - A progressive K-8 school in the Cupertino Union School District in California
• The Peninsula School - A Progressive elementary school in Menlo Park, California
• Friends School of Minnesota - A Progressive K-8 Quaker school in St. Paul, Minnesota.
• Ethical Culture Fieldston School - An independent Progressive K-12 school in Riverdale, New York.
• Friends Community School - A Progressive K-8 school in College Park, Maryland
• The Children's School of Oak Park - A Progressive Education elementary school in Oak Park, Illinois
• The Children's Community School - A progressive elementary school in Los Angeles, California
• The Manhattan Country School - A progressive elementary school in New York, New York
• The Little Red Schoolhouse and Elisabeth Irwin High School - A progressive K-12 school in New York, New York
• Wingra School - A progressive school for 5 to 14 year olds in Madison, Wisconsin
• Oakwood School - A progressive junior high to high school in North Hollywood, California
• Sequoyah School - A child-centered/progressive school for 5 to 14 year olds in Pasadena, California
• The Little School - A Progressive school for ages 3-12 in Bellevue, Washington, founded in 1959
• The Park School of Baltimore - A Progressive school for grades K-12 in Pikesville, Maryland, founded in 1912.
• The Philadelphia School - A Progressive elementary school in Philadelphia, PA
• Greenwood Friends School-A progressive PK-8 school in Millville, PA
• Buxton School A Progressive coed boarding/day school for grade 9-12 in Williamstown, MA, founded in 1928.
• The Putney School - A Progressive coed boarding/day school for grades 9-12 in Putney, VT, founded in 1935
• San Roque School - A progressive K-12 school in Santa Barbara, California
• St. Francis School - A progressive K-8 school in Goshen, Kentucky
• Summers-Knoll School - A progressive K-5 independent school in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
• The Dragon Academy - A progressive museum based middle and high school in Toronto, Canada
• The School in Rose Valley - A progressive preschool through sixth grade near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Oak Lane Day School - A progressive preschool through sixth grade near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, founded in 1916
• Presidio Hill School - A progressive K-8 school in San Francisco, California, founded in 1918
• The Miquon School - A progressive PK-6 school founded in 1932 near Philadelphia PA
• Foundations School Community - A Progressive K-8 school in Los Angeles, California, unique as the only kindergarten, elementary and middle progressive school in the San Fernando Valley.
• Chatsworth Hills Academy - Preschool through 8th grade located in Chatsworth, California (San Fernando Valley)
• Walden Center & School - A progressive K-6 School in Berkeley, California

Colleges

• Bank Street College of Education - Founded in 1916, Bank Street is known for its progressive educational approach. Combining current scholarship on child-centered education, psychological development, and practical experience, the College offers three program areas: The Graduate School of Education, Children's Programs, and the Division of Continuing Education. The Bank Street Bookstore specializes in children's books and educational materials for children and educators, and is considered one of the best children's bookstores in New York City.
• Goddard College - A progressive college founded on the ideals and work of John Dewey. Goddard offers BA, MA and MFA low residency programs in Writing, Education, Psychology, Health Arts, Interdisciplinary Arts and Individually designed programs for working adults. Eight day residencies in Plainfield, Vermont and Port Townsend, Washington
• Soka University of America - A four year college founded in 2001 in Aliso Viejo, California.
• Antioch University - A six-campus American university with campuses with campuses in Los Angeles, Seattle, Santa Barbara, Ohio, and New England. It is founded on principles of rigorous liberal arts education, innovative experiential learning and socially engaged citizenship. Antioch College is the result of American educator Horace Mann's dream to establish a college comparable to Harvard but with some notable differences. This college was to be completely non-sectarian and co-educational, and with a curriculum that would not only include the traditional treatment of the classics, but would emphasize science and the scientific method, history and modern literature of
• Sarah Lawrence College- a private, independent, co-educational liberal arts college founded on the principles of John Dewy. Its unique pedagogy, emphasizing students' individual development through tutorials ("conferencing") and personal mentoring of students by faculty ("donning"), together with an emphasis on writing, an open curriculum and education of the "whole person"produces engaged students in fields that range from the the arts to medicine; from public service to law.
• Union Institute & University [1] BA program in Montpelier and Brattleboro, Vermont, offering Bachelor of Arts in low-residency and online programs, a leader in progressive student-centered higher education for working adults. Offering Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies with concentrations in Women's and Gender Studies, Literature and Writing, Psychology, Education, Historical,Social and Cultural Studies, the Arts, Religious, Spiritual and Holitistic Studies, Environmental Studies, and a Teacher Licensure Program. The low-residency M.Ed. in Montpelier, Vermont is designed for working adults and uses a progressive, student-centered model.

Further reading

• Bernstein, Richard J. “John Dewey,” Encyclopedia of Philosophy, New York: Macmillan, 1967, 380-385
• Kevin J. Brehony, What's Left of Progressive Primary Education. Rethinking Radical Education. A. Rattansi and D. Reeder. London, Lawrence and Wishart: 1992: 196-221.
• Kevin J. Brehony. "An ‘undeniable’ and ‘disastrous’ Influence? John Dewey and English Education (1895-1939)." Oxford Review of Education 23(4) 1997: 427-445.
• Kevin J. Brehony "From the particular to the general, the continuous to the discontinuous: progressive education revisited." History of Education 30(5) 2001: 413-432.
• Bruner, Jerome. The Process of Education. New York: Random House, 1960
• Bruner, Jerome. The Relevance of Education. New York: Norton, 1971.
• Cappel, Constance, "Utopion Colleges," Peter Lang, 1999.
• Cremin, Lawrence. The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957. New York: Knopf, 1962
• Dewey, John. Experience and Education. New York: Kappa Delta Pi 1938
• Dewey, John. Dewey on Education, edited by Martin Dworkin. New York: Teachers college Press, 1959
• Dewey, John. Democracy and Education. New York: Free Press, 1944.
• Dewey, John. Experience and Nature. New York: Dover, 1958.
• Harms, William and De Pencier, Ida. Experiencing Education: 100 Years of Learning at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, 1996
• Hayes, William, The Progressive Education Movement: Is it Still a Factor in Today’s’ Schools? New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006
• Flesch, Rudolf, Why Johnny Can’t Read, New York: Harper and Row, 1955
• Holt, John, How Children Fail, New York: Pitman, 1964
• Kohn, Alfie. The Case Against Standardized Testing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000
• Kohn, Alfie. The Schools Our Children Deserve. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999
• Kozol, Jonathon. Free Schools, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972
• Kohl, Herb. The Discipline of Hope, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998
• Kohl, Herb. Teaching the Unteachable, New York Review of Books, 1967.
• Mager, Robert F. Preparing Behavioral Objectives, Atlanta, Georgia, Center for Effective Instruction, 1969
• Noddings, Nel. “What Does it Mean to Educate the Whole Child?” Educational Leadership, September 2005, volume 63, no 1
• Progressive Education Network. www.progressiveed.org
• Ravitch, Dianne. Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform. New York, Simon and Schuster, 2000.

See also

• Constructionist learning (Seymour Papert)
• Student voice
• Experiential education
• Educational philosophies
• Education reform
• Humanistic education
• Laboratory school
• Learning by teaching (LdL)
• Teaching for social justice
• Minnesota State University, Mankato Masters Degree in Experiential Education

References

1. ^ Barrow Street Nursery School--A private progressive nursery school in the West Village of Manhattan. New York, NY 10014
2. ^ World Book 2004
3. ^ /A Brief Overview of Progressive Education
4. ^ / International Journal of Progressive Education
5. ^ / Progressive Education: Contrasting Methodologies by Steven Nelson
6. ^ Peterson, Robert W. (1984). The Boy Scouts: An American Adventure. American Heritage. ISBN 0-8281-1173-1. 
7. ^ Peterson, Robert (2001). "The Man Who Got Lost in the Fog". Scouting (Boy Scouts of America). http://www.scoutingmagazine.org/issues/0110/d-wwas.html. Retrieved 2008-06-24. 
8. ^ Rowan, Edward L (2005). To Do My Best: James E. West and the History of the Boy Scouts of America. Las Vegas International Scouting Museum. ISBN 0-9746479-1-8. 
9. ^ "Lee F. Hanmer, 89, A Social Worker". The New York Times. 1961-04-28. http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=2&res=F20F14FE3B5912738DDDA10A94DC405B818AF1D3. Retrieved 2008-07-06. 
10. ^ ^{a b} Peterson, Robert (1998). "The BSA's 'forgotten' founding father". Scouting Magazine. Boy Scouts of America. http://www.scoutingmagazine.org/issues/9810/d-wwas.html. Retrieved 2006-03-10. 
11. ^ Macleod, David L. (1983). Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA and Their Forerunners, 1870–1920. University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 0-299-09400-6. 

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