The leader of what was called progressive education

A major research endeavor, the "eight-year study," demonstrated that students from progressive high schools were capable, adaptable learners and excelled even in the finest universities. Nevertheless, in the s, during a time of cold war anxiety and cultural conservatism, progressive education was widely repudiated, and it disintegrated as an identifiable movement. However, in the years since, various groups of educators have rediscovered the ideas of Dewey and his associates, and revised them to address the changing needs of schools, children, and society in the late twentieth century.

Open classrooms, schools without walls, cooperative learning, multiage approaches, whole language, the social curriculum, experiential education, and numerous forms of alternative schools all have important philosophical roots in progressive education. John Goodlad's notion of "nongraded" schools introduced in the late s , Theodore Sizer's network of "essential" schools, Elliott Wigginton's Foxfire project , and Deborah Meier's student-centered Central Park East schools are some well known examples of progressive reforms in public education; in the s, critics like Paul Goodman and George Dennison took Dewey's ideas in a more radical direction, helping give rise to the free school movement.

In recent years, activist educators in inner cities have advocated greater equity, justice, diversity and other democratic values through the publication Rethinking Schools and the National Coalition of Education Activists. Today, scholars, educators and activists are rediscovering Dewey's work and exploring its relevance to a "postmodern" age, an age of global capitalism and breathtaking cultural change, and an age in which the ecological health of the planet itself is seriously threatened. 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 s and s, the Progressive education movement did just that.

Life-adjustment education emerged on the scene during the s 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 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.

Using commission reports published in and 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 s 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 and The Restoration of Learning , 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 ; 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.

New York: Teacher's College Press. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. New York: Knopf. The School and Society. The Child and the Curriculum. Democracy and Education. New York: Macmillan. The Struggle for the American Curriculum, —, 2nd edition.

Running through The School and Society is a suspicion of the intellectual who wants to monopolize knowledge and keep it abstract. Dewey opposed the academic curriculum revolving around classical languages and high culture, which he believed suited an aristocracy, not a democracy. They have the so-called practical impulse and disposition.

Learning had to be democratized and made relevant and practical. Who was this philosopher who believed that children are curious and good, who would introduce them to civilization through wool and cotton, who would create cooperative classrooms that would end divisions between managers and workers and democratize America?

Dewey lived from the Civil War to the Cold War, wrote 37 books, and published articles in journals. John Dewey grew up in Burlington, Vermont, the son of a pious, high-minded mother and a well-read grocer father. Shy and withdrawn, the young Dewey read voraciously and graduated from the University of Vermont.

Uncertain about a career, he moved to Oil City, Pennsylvania, to teach Latin and algebra at the local high school. An average teacher but an ambitious intellectual, he decided to become a philosopher and fought to gain admission to Johns Hopkins University, which was dedicated to original research. He graduated with a PhD in philosophy. Influenced by Alice, Dewey paid more attention to social problems.

They started a family and, observing his children, he applied his psychological insights to their upbringing, becoming increasingly more interested in education, so that his children might escape what he felt were the shortcomings of the schools he attended as a child.

After a lunch hosted by T. He has a large slow-moving mind, very empirical and candid. Dewey, who seemed to fit the model of the quintessential reserved New Englander, was surprisingly complex.

He socialized with radicals in Greenwich Village. He wrote passionate love letters to his wife and rhapsodized over the endearing qualities of his children. Once reclusive, he happily worked on philosophic tracts as his children crawled around his desk. He wrote poems to her and for himself about the anxiety of philosophizing, poems without literary flair that he never expected would be published.

Away from his family, Dewey could slip into melancholy. While vacationing in Italy in the fall of , his youngest son, Morris, died of diphtheria at age two and a half, a loss from which he and Alice never fully recovered.

Ten years later, during his second European trip, his eight-year-old son, Gordon, contracted typhoid fever and died in Ireland.

Thomas Jefferson and Walt Whitman, the apostles of democracy; William James, the founder of pragmatism; and Eugene Debs, the champion of radical reform. Suspicious of capitalism, this philosopher, the father of six children, had to deal with money. He demanded raises from college presidents, taught extra classes, and moved from apartment to apartment nine times between and in a gentrified New York. A workaholic, he pounded away at his typewriter and stopped reading for six months because of eyestrain.

Why were students drawn to Dewey? He was not a mesmerizing lecturer, sitting at a table in front of the class with a single piece of paper and thinking aloud. Randall Jr. After leaving Ann Arbor and following his dramatic entrance into Chicago during the Pullman Strike, Dewey spent ten years at the University of Chicago, becoming more radical and more famous. Before he published his groundbreaking essay, Dewey had to test his half-formed ideas in a real school, thus he and his wife ran the Lab School at the University of Chicago from to Classes were small and select.

The Dewey school was distinctly middle class, with motivated students and supportive parents. In these schools, students visited fire stations, post offices, and city halls.

They grew their own gardens, cooked, cobbled shoes, and tutored younger students. The development of this is natural.

Education is the most fundamental method of social reconstruction for progress and reform. Finally, as schools become a means for social reconstruction, our educations must be given the proper equipment to help perform this task and guide their students.

Dewey, John. My pedagogical creed. School Journal. William Heard Kilpatrick — was a pupil of Dewey and one of the most effective practitioner of the concept as well as the more adept at proliferating the progressive education movement and spreading word of the works of Dewey. This developed the progressive education notion that students were to be engaged and taught so that their knowledge may be directed to society for a socially useful need. Like Dewey he also felt that students should be actively engaged in their learning rather than actively disengaged with the simple reading and regurgitation of material.

Knoll, Michael Kilpatrick and the Project Method. In: Teachers College Record February , no. The most famous early practitioner of progressive education was Francis Parker ; its best-known spokesperson was the philosopher John Dewey.

In 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 replaced the traditional curriculum with integrated learning units based on core themes related to the knowledge of different disciplines. 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.

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 , John Dewey opened what he called the laboratory school to test his theories and their sociological implications.

This unity of purpose lies at the heart of the progressive education philosophy. These schools operate to this day within a similar progressive approach. At Columbia, Dewey worked with other educators such as Charles Eliot and Abraham Flexner to help bring progressivism into the mainstream of American education. The first and second grades carried on a study of community life in which they actually built a city. 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 to 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.