progressive education philosophy essay

Progressive Education Philosophy: examples & criticisms

The progressive education philosophy emphasizes the development of the whole child: physical, emotional, and intellectual. Learning is based on the individual needs, abilities, and interests of the student. This leads to students being motivated and enthusiastic about learning.

Progressive philosophy further emphasizes that instruction should be centered on learning by doing, problem-based, experiential, and involve collaboration.

When these elements are included in the learning experience, then students learn practical skills, become engaged in the process, and learning will be maximized.

Progressive Education Definition

The progressive movement has its roots in the writings of philosophers such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Those postulations regarding education influenced other scholars, including Maria Montessori and John Dewey.

The premise of the progressive movement is that traditional educational practices lack relevance to students and that the memorization of facts is ineffective.

As Dewey stated in his book Experience and Education (1938),

“The traditional scheme is, in essence, one of imposition from above and from outside. It imposes adult standards, subject-matter, and methods upon those who are only growing slowly toward maturity” (p. 5-6).

As a response, progressive educators tend to emphasize hands-on, experiential methodologies that enable the construction of knowledge in the mind rather than mere memorization.

Progressive educators also advocate for student autonomy and the cultivation of democratic values and principles by empowering students to make their own decisions as much as possible.

This pedagogy is distinguished by its less authoritarian structure and more collaborative classrooms, with the teacher acting as a guide and collaborator rather than the sole knowledge holder.

Progressive Education Examples

The following pedagogies and pedagogical strategies are often considered commensurate with a progressive education philosophy:

• Project-based learning
• Problem-based learning
• Inquiry-based learning
• Service learning
• Student-centered learning
• Self-directed learning
• Place-based education
• Montessori education
• Community-based learning
• Co-operative learning
• Constructivist learning
• Authentic assessment
• Action research
• Active learning
• Experiential education
• Personalized learning

Real-Life Examples

• A third-grade teacher places cardboard boxes, paper towel tubes, tape, and scissors on a table so the students can design and construct marble mazes.
• Dr. Singh has his students work in small teams to write a program that will block a computer virus attack. The teams then take part in a class competition.  
• On the first day of school, Mrs. Jones allows her students to generate a list of classroom rules and learning principles.
• Students in this history class work in small groups to write a short play about an event of their choosing in the Civil Rights movement.
• During a leadership training workshop, the facilitator arranges for pairs of participants to engage in conflict resolution role plays.
• To build teamwork and communication skills, high school students work collaboratively to create PowerPoint presentations about what they learned instead of taking exams.
• Mr. Gonzalez has his students debate the pros and cons of political ideologies on social equality.
• Students in an early childhood education course work in small groups to develop an Action Plan for handling a contagious disease outbreak at a primary school.
• Every term, this high school awards 5 students for exemplifying leadership in the classroom.
• Students in this university Hospitality Management course visit one local 5-star hotel restaurant and conduct a customer service analysis.

Case Studies  

1. service-oriented learning: urban farming.

Progressive education can also contain elements of social reconstructionism and the goal of making the world a better place to live. Today’s version of making the world a better place to live encompasses environmental concerns.

For example, food insecurity is a matter that is not evenly distributed across all SES demographics.

Therefore, schools should help students develop a sense of responsibility and build skills that address a broad range of social issues .

The BBC reports that 900 million tons of food is wasted every year. That is more than enough to feed those in need. It is also a problem that has many possible solutions; one of them being Urban farming .

University agriculture majors can coordinate with local disadvantaged communities to implement urban farming solutions. It is possible to grow food on abandoned lots, rooftops, and on the outside walls of buildings and houses.

This is exactly the type of problem-based cooperative learning activity that progressivists support, for several reasons. The students address a pressing societal need and at the same time develop valuable practical skills.

2. Developing Practical Skills: Minecraft

Progressive education means developing practical skills, integrating technology when possible, and tapping into the interests of students. The Minecraft education package meets all of those objectives.

It offers teachers a game-based learning platform that students find very exciting and teachers find very educational. The education edition includes games that foster creativity , problem-solving skills, and cooperative learning.

Teachers in Ireland use Minecraft to demonstrate the connections between history, science, and technology. In one activity , students pretend to be Vikings. They get to build ships and go on raids to establish settlements in faraway lands.

The students learn about archeological reconstruction and how to storyboard their adventures by creating their own digital Viking saga.

As the principal explains, the kids are having great fun, but at the same time they are developing fundamental problem-solving skills , learning to cooperate with each other, and all the while expanding their knowledge base. It’s a win-win-win situation.

3. Student-Centered Learning: Provocations  

Teachers at a primary school in Australia have developed a unique student-centered approach that motivates students and allows them to explore their own interests.

The teachers write various learning tasks on cards, called Provocations, and place them on a bulletin board. Students select the tasks they find most interesting and then go to a designated place in the classroom that has been equipped with the necessary materials.

Students then work alone or individually to complete the task. When they’re finished, they write about what they did and convey their reflections in a Learning Journey book.

Afterwards, the teacher and student go through the book and discuss the student’s experience.

The teacher can highlight key learning concepts and the student can consider what they would do differently in the future.

One of the key benefits of this type of activity is that students develop a sense of responsibility for their learning outcomes.

4. Cooperative Learning: Think-Pair-Share

In traditional educational approaches, students are passive recipients of information. They receive and then recall input on exams to demonstrate learning. From a progressive philosophy, this approach fails in so many ways. It does nothing to build practical skills, the level of student motivation is low, and the level of processing is shallow.

Originally proposed by Frank Lyman (1981), Think-Pair-Share (TPS) is just the opposite. It utilizes cooperative learning to improve student engagement, allows students to process information at a much deeper level, and builds teamwork and communication skills.

The instructor presents an issue for students to reflect on individually. Next, pairs discuss their views and arrive at a mutual understanding, which is then shared with the class.  

After all pairs have taken a turn, the instructor engages the class with a broader discussion that can allow key concepts and facts to be highlighted.

TPS is a great way to get students involved and build their teamwork and communication skills.

5. Problem-Based Learning: Medical School

One of the key features of progressive education is that students develop practical skills. Problem-based learning (PBL) is often mentioned as a key instructional approach because it helps students develop practical skills and is collaborative. Some of the most respected medical schools in the world have integrated PBL into the curriculum.

Students are presented with a clinical problem. The file may consist of several binders of patient test results and other data. Students then form teams and work together to reach a diagnosis and treatment plan.

A thorough discussion of the patient’s information will reveal the team’s knowledge gaps. The team will then devise a set of learning objectives and path of study to pursue. Each member of the team is allocated specific tasks, the results of which are then shared at the next meeting.

PBL maximizes student engagement, exercises higher-order thinking , and improves collaboration and communication skills. All key goals of progressive education.

1. Practical Skills Development

Progressive education contains many features of other learning approaches such as problem-based learning and experiential learning. These approaches cultivate practical skills such as teamwork, conflict resolution, and communication.

Because students are “doing something” they develop practical skills. For example, in a marketing course, students will design a campaign. In a management course, students will practice giving performance feedback or conducting team-building activities.

These are the types of skills that students will apply later in life at work and in their careers.

2. Self-Discipline and Responsibility

Most activities in progressive education are student-centered. Students are the focus and often this means that they choose their learning goals and work autonomously .

This results in students learning that they are responsible for their learning outcomes. To accomplish tasks, the teacher is not there standing over their shoulder and coaxing them onward. Students must learn how to pace themselves and stay on-task during class. This builds self-discipline and responsibility.

3. Higher-Order Thinking

In a traditional classroom, students passively receive information transmitted from the teacher. The goal is to commit that information to rote memory so that it can be later used to answer multiple-choice questions. This limits the depth and quality of processing students must engage.

Progressive educational activities are just the opposite. Because students must engage in active learning, they process the information much deeper. Because they are required to engage in problem-solving and critical thinking, they must exercise higher-order thinking skills.

1. It Lacks Structure

Not all students flourish in a progressive classroom. Some students benefit from having well-structured lessons that are directed by the teacher. When an activity lacks these components, some students feel uncomfortable and anxious.

However, when there are clear objectives and learning tasks, they feel at ease and motivated. Without structure they can become overwhelmed with uncertainty and reluctant to get started.

2. Clashes with Teachers’ Preferences

Similar to students, not all teachers enjoy working in a progressive school. They find the lack of structure and clarity on learning outcomes difficult to grapple with.

These teachers work much better when they have a firm set of objectives they need their students to achieve; everything is clearly defined.

3. Overwhelming Work Load

The amount of work involved to create several different activities that can suit the variety of learning styles in one classroom can be overwhelming.

It takes a great deal of time just to think of so many meaningful activities, and then, one must prepare a wide assortment of materials; all for a single lesson.

Teachers in many public schools already feel overwhelmed with job demands. Many teachers casually remark that they have not one second of free time from September to June, and that includes weekends. It is hard to justify such a demanding job when taken in the context of the level of commitment required, and of course, a disappointing pay scale. 

Progressive education seeks to help students develop skills that they will need throughout their lifespan. By implementing activities that foster problem-solving, higher-order thinking, cooperation, and practical skills, students will graduate well-prepared for their future.

Although these are admirable goals, there are some drawbacks. The demands on teachers are substantial, as it takes a great deal of time to think of and prepare all of the necessary materials for a single lesson.

Moreover, not all students benefit from such an unstructured environment. Some students function better in an atmosphere with clearly defined goals and teacher guidance.

Ultimately, each parent must decide on which approach they consider best for their child and try to locate a school that subscribes to that philosophy.

Hayes, W. (2006). The progressive education movement: Is it still a factor in today’s schools? Rowman & Littlefield Education.

Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education . Toronto: Collier-MacMillan Canada Ltd.

Lyman, F. (1981). The responsive classroom discussion: The inclusion of all students. In A. Anderson (Ed.), Mainstreaming digest (pp. 109-113). University of Maryland College of Education.

Macrine, Sheila. (2005). The promise and failure of progressive education-essay review. Teachers College Record, 107 , 1532-1536. https://10.1177/016146810510700705

Wright, G. B. (2011). Student-centered learning in higher education. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 23(3), 93–94.

Dave Cornell (PhD)

Dr. Cornell has worked in education for more than 20 years. His work has involved designing teacher certification for Trinity College in London and in-service training for state governments in the United States. He has trained kindergarten teachers in 8 countries and helped businessmen and women open baby centers and kindergartens in 3 countries.

• Dave Cornell (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/dave-cornell-phd/ 25 Positive Punishment Examples
• Dave Cornell (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/dave-cornell-phd/ 25 Dissociation Examples (Psychology)
• Dave Cornell (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/dave-cornell-phd/ 15 Zone of Proximal Development Examples
• Dave Cornell (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/dave-cornell-phd/ Perception Checking: 15 Examples and Definition

Chris Drew (PhD)

This article was peer-reviewed and edited by Chris Drew (PhD). The review process on Helpful Professor involves having a PhD level expert fact check, edit, and contribute to articles. Reviewers ensure all content reflects expert academic consensus and is backed up with reference to academic studies. Dr. Drew has published over 20 academic articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education and holds a PhD in Education from ACU.

• Chris Drew (PhD) #molongui-disabled-link 25 Positive Punishment Examples
• Chris Drew (PhD) #molongui-disabled-link 25 Dissociation Examples (Psychology)
• Chris Drew (PhD) #molongui-disabled-link 15 Zone of Proximal Development Examples
• Chris Drew (PhD) #molongui-disabled-link Perception Checking: 15 Examples and Definition

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6 Chapter 6: Progressivism

Dr. Della Perez

This chapter will provide a comprehensive overview of Progressivism. This philosophy of education is rooted in the 
 philosophy of pragmatism. Unlike Perennialism, which emphasizes a universal truth, progressivism favors “human experience as the basis for knowledge rather than authority” (Johnson et. al., 2011, p. 114). By focusing on human experience as the basis for knowledge, this philosophy of education shifts the focus of educational theory from school to student.

In order to understand the implications of this shift, an overview of the key characteristics of Progressivism will be provided in section one of this chapter. Information related to the curriculum, instructional methods, the role of the teacher, and the role of the learner will be presented in section two and three. Finally, key educators within progressivism and their contributions are presented in section four.

Characteristics of Progressivim

6.1 Essential Questions

By the end of this section, the following Essential Questions will be answered:

• In which 
 school 
of thought is Perennialism rooted?
• What is the educational 
 focus of Perennialism?
• What do Perrenialists 
 believe are 
 the primary 
 goals of schooling?

Progressivism is a very student-centered philosophy of education. Rooted in pragmatism, the educational focus of progressivism is on engaging students in real-world problem- solving activities in a democratic and cooperative learning environment (Webb et. al., 2010). In order to solve these problems, students apply the scientific method. This ensures that they are actively engaged in the learning process as well as taking a practical approach to finding answers to real-world problems.

Progressivism was established in the 
 mid-1920s and continued to be one of the most 
influential philosophies of education through the mid-1950s. One of the primary reasons for this is that a main tenet of progressivism is for the school to improve society. This was sup posed to be achieved by engaging students in tasks related to real-world problem-solving. As a result, progressivism was deemed to be a working model of democracy (Webb et. al., 2010).

6.2 A Closer Look

Please read the following article for more information on progressivism: Progressive education: Why it’s hard to beat, but also hard to find. As you read the article, think about the following Questions to Consider:

• How does the author define progressive 
 education?
• What does the author say progressive 
 education is not?
• What elements of progressivism make sense, 
 according to the author?

Progressive education: Why it’s hard to beat, but also hard to find

6.3 Essential Questions

• How is a progressivist curriculum best described?
• What subjects 
 are included in 
 a progressivist curriculum?
• Do you think 
 the focus of this curriculum is beneficial for students? Why 
 or why not?

As previously stated, progressivism focuses on real-world problem-solving activities. Consequently, the progressivist curriculum is focused on providing students with real-world experiences that are meaningful and relevant to them rather than rigid subject-matter content.

Dewey (1963), who is often referred to as the “father of progressive education,” believed that all aspects of study (i.e., arithmetic, history, geography, etc.) need to be linked to materials based on students every- day life-experiences.

However, Dewey (1938) cautioned that not all experiences are equal:

The belief that all genuine education comes
 about through experience does not mean that
 all experiences are genuinely or equally 
 educative. Experience and education cannot
 be directly equated to each other. For some
 experiences are mis-educative. Any experience
 is mis-education that has the effect of arresting
 or distorting the growth or further experience 
 (p. 25).

An example of miseducation would be that of a bank robber. He or she many learn from the experience of robbing a bank, but this experience can not be equated with that of a student learning to apply a history concept to his or her real-world 
 experiences.

Features of a Progressive Curriculum

There are several key features that distinguish a progressive curriculum. According to Lerner (1962), some of the key features of a progressive curriculum include:

• A focus on the student
• A focus on peers
• An emphasis on growth
• Action centered
• Process and change centered
• Equality centered
• Community centered

To successfully apply these features, a progressive 
 curriculum would feature an open classroom environment. In this type of environment, students would “spend considerable time in direct contact with the community or cultural surroundings beyond the confines of the classroom or school” (Webb et. al., 2010, p. 74). For example, if students in Kansas were studying Brown v. Board of Education in their history class, they might visit the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site in Topeka. By visiting the National Historic Site, students are no longer just studying something from the past, they are learning about history in a way that is meaningful and relevant to them today, which is essential in a progressive curriculum.

• In what ways have you experienced elements 
 of a progressivist curriculum as a student?
• How might you implement a progressivist 
 curriculum as a future teacher?
• What challenges do you see in implementing 
 a progressivist curriculum and how might 
 you overcome them?

Instruction in the Classroom

6.4 Essential Questions

• What are the 
 main methods of instruction in a progressivist classroom?
• What is the teachers 
 role in the classroom?
• What is the students 
 role in the classroom?
• What strategies do students use in a progressivist classrooms?

Within a progressivist classroom, key instructional methods include: group work and the project method. Group work promotes the experienced-centered focus of the progressive philosophy. By giving students opportunities to work together, they not only learn critical skills related to cooperation, they are also able to engage in and develop projects that are meaningful and have relevance to their everyday lives.

Promoting the use of project work, centered around the scientific method, also helps students engage in critical thinking, problem solving, and deci- sion making (Webb et. al., 2010). More importantly, the application of the scientific method allows progressivists to verify experi ence through investigation. Unlike Perennialists and essentialists, who view the scientific method as a means of verifying the truth (Webb et. al., 2010).

Teachers Role

Progressivists view teachers as a facilitator in the classroom. As the facilitator, the teacher directs the students learning, but the students voice is just as important as that of the teacher. For this reason, progressive education is often equated with student-centered instruction.

To support students in finding their own voice, the teacher takes on the role of a guide. Since the student has such an important role in the learning, the teacher needs to guide the students in “learning how to learn” (Labaree, 2005, p. 277). In other words, they need to help students construct the skills they need to understand and process the content.

In order to do this successfully, the teacher needs to act as a collaborative partner. As a collaborative partner, the teachers works with the student to make group decisions about what will be learned, keeping in mind the ultimate out- comes that need to be obtained. The primary aim as a collaborative partner, according to progressivists, is to help students “acquire the values of the democratic system” (Webb et. al., 2010, p. 75).

Some of the key instructional methods used by progressivist teachers include:

• Promoting discovery and self-directly learning.

• Integrating socially relevant themes.
• Promoting values of community, cooperation, 
 tolerance, justice, and democratic equality.
• Encouraging the use of group activities.
• Promoting the application of projects to enhance 
 learning.
• Engaging students in critical thinking.
• Challenging students to work on their problem 
 solving skills.
• Developing decision making techniques.
• Utilizing cooperative learning strategies. (Webb et. al., 2010).

6.5 An Example in Practice

Watch the following video and see how many of the bulleted instructional methods you can identify! In addition, while watching the video, think about the following questions:

• Do you think you have the skills to be a 
 constructivist teacher? Why or why not?
• What qualities do you have that would make you 
 good at applying a progressivist approach in the 
 classroom? What would you need to improve 
upon?

Based on the instructional methods demonstrated in the video, it is clear to see that progressivist teachers, as facilitators of students learning, are encouraged to help their stu dents construct their own understanding by taking an active role in the learning process. Therefore, one of the most com- mon labels used to define this entire approach to education to- day is: constructivism .

Students Role

Students in a progressivist classroom are empowered to take a more active role in the learning process. In fact, they are encourage to actively construct their knowledge and understanding by:

• Interacting with their environment.
• Setting objectives for their own learning.
• Working together to solve problems.
• Learning by doing.
• Engaging in cooperative problem solving.
• Establishing classroom rules.
• Evaluating ideas.
• Testing ideas.

The examples provided above clearly demonstrate that in the progressive classroom, the students role is that of an 
 active learner.

6.6 An Example in Practice

Mrs. Espenoza is an 6th grade teacher at Franklin Elementary. She has 24 students in her class. Half of her students are from diverse cultural- backgrounds and are receiving free and reduced lunch. In order to actively engage her students in the learning process, Mrs. Espenoza does 
not use traditional textbooks in her classroom. Instead, she uses more real-world resources 
 and technology that goes beyond the four walls of the classroom. In order to actively engage 
 her students in the learning process, she seeks out members of the community to be guest 
 presenters in her classroom as she believes 
 this provides her students with an way to 
 interact with/learn about their community. 
 Mrs. Espenoza also believes it is important for 
 students to construct their own learning, so she emphasizes: cooperative problem solving, project-based learning, and critical thinking.

6.7 A Closer Look

For more information about progressivism, please watch the following videos. As you watch the videos, please use the “Questions to Consider” as a way to reflect on and monitor your own learnings.

• What additional insights did you gain about the 
 progressivist philosophy?

• Can you relate elements of this philosophy to 
 your own educational experiences? If so, how? 
 If not, can you think of an example?

Key Educators

6.8 Essential Questions

• Who were 
 the key educators 
 of Progressivism?
• What 
impact did 
 each of the 
 key educators 
 of Progressivism have 
 on this philosophy of education?

The father of progressive education is considered to be Francis W. Parker. Parker was the superintendent of schools in Quincy, Massachusetts, and later became the head of the Cook County Normal School in Chicago (Webb et. al., 2010). 
 John Dewey is the American educator most commonly associated with progressivism. William H. Kilpatrick also played an important role in advancing progressivism. Each of these key educators, and their contributions, will be further explored in this section.

Francis W. Parker (1837 – 1902)

Francis W. Parker was the superintendent of schools in Quincy, Massachusetts (Webb, 2010). Between 1875 – 1879, Parker developed the Quincy plan and implemented an experimental program based on “meaningful learning and active understanding of concepts” (Schugurensky, 2002, p. 1). When test results showed that students in Quincy schools outperformed the rest of the school children in Massachusetts, the progressive movement began.

Based on the popularity of his approach, Parker founded the Parker School in 1901. The Parker School

“promoted a more holistic and social 
 approach, following Francis W. Parker’s 
 beliefs that education should include the 
 complete development of an individual 
 (mental, physical, and moral) and that 
 education could develop students into 
 active, democratic citizens and lifelong learners” (Schugurensky, 2002, p. 2).

Parker’s student-centered approach was a dramatic change from the prescribed curricula that focused on rote memorization and rigid student disciple. However, the success of the Parker School could not be disregarded. Alumni of the school were applying what they learned to improve their community and promote a more democratic society.

John Dewey (1859 – 1952)

John Dewey’s approach to progressivism is best articulated in his book: The School and Society

(1915). In this book, he argued that America needed new educational systems based on “the larger whole of social life” (Dewey, 1915, p. 66). In order to achieve this, Dewey proposed actively 
 engaging students in inquiry-based learning and experimentation to promote active learning and growth among 
 students.

As a result of his work, Dewey set the foundation for 
 approaching teaching and learning from a student-driven 
 perspective. Meaningful activities and projects that actively engaging the students’ interests and backgrounds as the 
 “means” to learning were key (Tremmel, 2010, p. 126). In this way, the students could more fully develop as learning would be more meaningful to them.

6.9 A Closer Look

For more information about Dewey and his views on education, please read the following article titled: My 
 Pedagogic Creed. This article is considered Dewey’s 
 famous declaration concerning education as presented in five key articles that summarize his beliefs.

My Pedagogic Creed

William H. Kilpatrick (1871-1965)

Kilpatrick is best known for advancing progressive 
 education as a result of his focus on experience-centered 
 curriculum. Kilpatrick summarized his approach in a 1918 
 essay titled “The Project Method.” In this essay, Kilpatrick (1918) advocated for an educational approach that involves

“whole-hearted, purposeful activity proceeding in a social 
 environment” (p. 320).

As identified within The Project Method, Kilpatrick (1918) emphasized the importance of looking at students’ 
 interests as the basis for identifying curriculum and developing pedagogy. This student-centered approach was very 
 significant at the time, as it moved away from the traditional approach of a more mandated curriculum and prescribed 
 pedagogy.

Although many aspects of his student-centered approach were highly regarded, Kilpatrick was also criticized given the diminished importance of teachers in his approach in favor of the students interests and his “extreme ideas about student- centered action” (Tremmel, 2010, p. 131). Even Dewey felt that Kilpatrick did not place enough emphasis on the importance of the teacher and his or her collaborative role within the classroom.

Reflect on your learnings about Progressivism! Create a T-chart and bullet the pros and cons of 
 Progressivism. Based on your T-chart, do you 
 think you could successfully apply this 
 philosophy in your future classroom? Why 
or why not?

Chapter 6: Progressivism Copyright © 2023 by Dr. Della Perez. All Rights Reserved.

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29 Progressive Education

William J. Reese is the Carl F. Kaestle W.A.R.F. and Vilas Research Professor of educational policy studies and history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

• Published: 13 June 2019
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Progressive education emerged from a variety of reform movements, especially romanticism, in the early nineteenth century. Reflecting the idealism of contemporary political revolutions, it emphasized freedom for the child and curricular innovation. The Swiss educator Johann Pestalozzi established popular model schools in the early 1800s that emphasized teaching young children through familiar objects, such as pebbles and shells, and not from textbooks. A German romantic, Friedrich Froebel, studied with Pestalozzi and invented the kindergarten, which spread worldwide. Progressive education mostly influenced pedagogy in the early elementary school grades. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, progressive ideals survived at other levels of schooling. Innovative teaching and curricular programs appeared in different times and places in model school systems, laboratory schools on college campuses, open classrooms, and alternative high schools. The greatest barriers to student-centered instruction included the widespread use of standardized testing and the prevalence of didactic teaching methods.

“ Progressive education ” remains a familiar phrase in the lexicon of educational historians but commonly eludes a precise definition or agreement about its origins, nature, or impact upon schools. By the first half of the nineteenth century, however, a variety of educators and writers in Europe and America claimed that a “new education” would inevitably replace outmoded instructional methods and curricula. Offering a new way of thinking about the nature of children and how to teach them, men and women on both sides of the Atlantic drew inspiration from a range of sources, promising a revolution in the history of childhood. By the early twentieth century, the phrase “new education” was gradually replaced by “progressive education.” Often reduced to slogans such as “learning by doing” or “experiential learning,” progressive education found expression in many schools worldwide through curriculum reforms and new teaching practices. It often found a home in teacher training programs. Yet the cluster of ideas embraced by many progressives usually failed to transform schools as they anticipated. By the early twenty-first century, standardized testing, didactic instructional methods, and classroom competition remained common in many nations.

In a speech at Teachers College, Columbia University, in 1959, the historian Lawrence A. Cremin claimed that “the early progressives knew better what they were against than what they were for.” 1 He was referring to twentieth-century American educational reformers who more easily criticized conventional schools than agreed about how to implement “natural” pedagogical methods or to meet the needs of the “whole child.” Cremin’s insights can also be applied to many European and American activists in the early nineteenth century who complained about schools and called for a “new education.” They found existing pedagogical practices and the overall treatment of children in the larger society abhorrent, much like reformers today who still dream of greater well-being for all and more child-friendly schools where freedom for teacher and pupil takes precedence.

Throughout the Western world in the early 1800s, critics of schools and traditional childrearing practices could easily find grounds for optimism and despair. The American and French revolutions had toppled kings and promised greater equality and opportunity for more citizens. But child labor, abysmal poverty, slavery, the suppression of women’s rights, and other ancient evils endured despite growing movements for abolition, rising literacy rates and investment in schools, and an appreciation for women’s roles as mothers and teachers, part of the humanitarianism of the age. Advocates of the “new education” attacked time-honored school practices, including pupil memorization of textbooks, Bibles, and other reading materials, enforced when necessary by the rod. Influenced by political revolution, the Enlightenment, and romanticism, these reformers never formed a coherent movement, but they nevertheless shared fundamental beliefs, including a radical critique of conventional educational theories and practices. 2

Historical Roots and Nineteenth-Century Developments

In Europe and America, reformers were influenced by an array of thinkers who came before them. This ensured that advocates of the “new education” held eclectic views while calling for school improvements and greater attention to children’s welfare. While often deeply spiritual and Christian, they rejected the well-established religious claim that children were born in sin and thus evil by nature; traditionally, stubborn wills had to be broken, like horses, through physical restraint and harsh discipline. Some reformers drew upon the ideas of John Amos Comenius, a Moravian minister who wrote that young children especially learned best from familiar, age-appropriate materials, including visual sources. Even more influential, the English writer John Locke changed pedagogical theory forever by insisting that education above all—not inheritance—decisively shaped children’s development; this elevated human agency, highlighted the uniqueness of every individual, and encouraged additional speculation on effective childrearing.

More controversial but equally revolutionary were the various works of Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose political radicalism and religious views horrified the established leaders of church and state. Rousseau also fueled the growth of romanticism, which emphasized the innocence of children and the failures of adult institutions. Like Locke’s writings, Rousseau’s Emile (1762) was translated into many languages and challenged tradition; it became famous for its depiction of a pedagogically rich, imaginary world in which a male tutor raised a child through “natural” means. Advocating experiences over books, Rousseau urged adults to see the world through the eyes of a child, a revolutionary concept if taken literally, since schools had long been teacher- and textbook-, not child-centered. Rousseau’s insight—to treat children as children—seems commonsensical today but was revelatory at the time.

Criticisms of schools abounded in the nineteenth century, and the champions of the “new education” aimed to establish education and schooling on a more rational, humanitarian, child-sensitive foundation. Guidance came not only from luminaries such as Comenius, Locke, and Rousseau but also from the immediate romantic stirring of the period. In the late eighteenth century in England, the religious poet William Blake penned his Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794), which contrasted the purity and innocence of youth with their destruction by the baleful influence of church and state, including schools. Blake wrote sympathetically about the plight of chimney sweeps and the urban poor and condemned the use of corporal punishment. Like many romantics, William Wordsworth lamented the soul-destroying effects of formal education. “Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” he claimed in 1804; soon enough the “Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the Growing Boy.” In the United States, transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Unitarian minister, similarly linked childhood and innocence, and he applauded European educators and theorists who demanded more humane treatment of children, whether within families, at the workplace, or at school. The child, he wrote in Nature (1836), was a “perpetual Messiah,” calling adults back to an innocent state. 3

On both sides of the Atlantic, numerous citizens echoed the views of poets, philosophers, liberal clerics, and other advocates of the “new education.” Schools force-fed students arcane knowledge from textbooks; pupils memorized and recited lessons like parrots; teachers threatened pupils with physical punishment instead of making learning more appealing. While schools, according to many romantics, were often undesirable places, leading figures of the Enlightenment had also concluded that people could behave rationally and, contrary to orthodox Christian belief, promote progress. Individuals were not predestined to heaven or hell, and some reformers dreamed of establishing a heaven on earth. At the least they hoped to improve the lives of the most helpless individuals in society, including the young.

By the late eighteenth century, the publication of encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other means to advance learning beyond the elite classes seemed to portend an age of educational advance. “After bread, education is the first need of the people,” said the French revolutionary George Jacques Danton in 1792, and less revolutionary figures also spoke of a coming millennium of peace and prosperity. Thanks to technological innovations that reduced publishing costs by the 1820s, newspapers and magazines reached a wider readership; they often reported on the latest educational ideas. The desirability of education and school improvements thus drew sustenance from a variety of sources, including rising literacy rates in many Western nations.

It was one thing to condemn schools, another thing entirely to improve them. Some romantics, such as Blake, doubted that schools could ever play a positive role in society, but the nineteenth century became an age of institution building, including asylums, prisons, workhouses, and schools. Many of them did not advance the cause of humanity, and historians have long criticized their failings. But two European visionaries, Johann Pestalozzi and Friedrich Froebel, contributed to the hopefulness of the times and offered innovative ways to undermine hide-bound schools. Pestalozzi would forever be associated with “object teaching,” while Froebel became synonymous with his invention, the kindergarten. They became central to what contemporaries called the “new education,” a romantic, “natural” approach to teaching and learning. Reformers who called themselves progressives in the twentieth century stood upon their shoulders.

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi was born in Switzerland and was initially swept up in the fervor of the French Revolution. His life transformed after reading Emile , he established model schools that taught many orphans, the victims of the continental wars. Pestalozzi became a sainted figure, his image sketched and painted, his writings widely quoted, his schools visited by many educational pilgrims. Children, he argued, learned naturally by handling familiar objects. Pebbles could be used to teach arithmetic, and the close study of nature revealed the mysteries of science, geography, and history. As Rousseau had written, educators should see the world through children’s eyes and introduce lessons to them in a natural way, drawing upon their immediate environment. Young children learned from things, not words, as Pestalozzi’s followers often said. Books, especially textbooks, represented adult-centered understandings of the world, far removed from children’s experiences. Children, so active outside of school, were expected to sit still in classrooms and often whipped when they failed to conform to the unrealistic expectations of teachers. Pestalozzi imagined a different approach. He idealized peasant mothers, deemed superior in teaching the young compared with schoolmasters wed to textbooks and corporal punishment. Children needed a harmonious education, one where adults in all settings treated them humanely, educating the hand, the heart, and the mind through pleasant means. 4

Pestalozzi came of age in an era without extensive systems of state-financed schools. Like many famous teachers, he apparently had a charismatic personality, attracting pupils and followers alike, while few teachers anywhere enjoyed such allure. Turning ideas conceived by a charismatic individual into everyday practices in systems of education raised a serious question: Was it possible? Pestalozzians quarreled over how to interpret his writings, which they often read in translation in newspapers and magazines or heard about in lectures. This produced obvious problems in describing a genuinely Pestalozzian school, though most utilized a method called “object teaching,” which was packaged in Europe and America in training manuals and textbooks with step-by-step lesson plans in the basic subjects. In the United States they were often written by urban school superintendents far removed from the rural worlds that had shaped the great master’s schools and teaching with things, not words.

Prominent educational leaders helped popularize Pestalozzian ideals beyond Europe. For example, Horace Mann, America’s leading reformer in the late 1830s and 1840s, praised them in his writings and lectures. He and like-minded educators drew attention to the Swiss master in editorials and articles in leading periodicals, including the Common School Journal , which Mann edited. Saying schools should adopt more “natural” pedagogical methods was nevertheless easier than changing time-tested practices. While object teaching certainly became part of teacher training in the United States, historians have discovered that many pupils at the newly established normal schools had to concentrate on mastering the common school subjects before they might learn about alternative pedagogical methods. And most teachers seemed to teach as they had been taught, which meant mastering textbooks, not exploring sylvan fields.

Facing growing numbers of pupils in New York, Boston, and other cities, mainstream educators tried to bring order out of chaos, so they implemented not a flexible but a more uniform curriculum, set by administrators and approved by the local school board. Cities also built larger, better age-graded schools after midcentury. They increasingly hired women as elementary teachers, whose salaries were lower than males’ and often had classrooms with fifty to sixty pupils. Paying attention to each individual was very difficult, if not impossible, and teachers often could not model instruction on the scripted lessons in instructional manuals. More schools purchased globes and blackboards, and teachers sometimes taught subject matter with the aid of “objects” such as watches, coins, and rock collections; many schools, which were often overcrowded, nevertheless lacked the resources to buy expensive teaching aids. Reports thus circulated in Europe and America that schools remained textbook-based and teacher-, not child-centered. Traditional practices were difficult to dislodge.

Occasionally a charismatic individual carried the banner of the “new education” forward and demonstrated its practical character. Probably the best example in the United States was Colonel Francis W. Parker. Parker was a popular lecturer, writer, and administrator, the living embodiment of the “new education.” Having himself traveled to Europe to study education, he criticized rote methods of instruction, corporal punishment, and competitive written tests, the last becoming more common in urban schools after the 1850s. Between 1875 and 1880, Parker, a Civil War veteran, became nationally renowned for his achievements as school superintendent in Quincy, Massachusetts. He helped create a model public school system, where teachers apparently eschewed excessive memorization and recitation. The Quincy school board appointed teachers who shared his views on child-centered pedagogy. Forward-thinking educators and aspiring teachers flocked to Quincy, seeking guidance. But Parker’s tenure was short. Called the “father of progressive education” by none other than John Dewey, a close friend, Parker later headed a well-known teacher training college in Chicago. 5

The great question from the time of Pestalozzi and Parker to the present was whether teachers would embrace “natural” and child-centered methods when they themselves had often succeeded in old-fashioned schools and found jobs in similar types of institutions. Of course, the “new education” should not be judged only by whether it changed schools wholesale in any particular community or nation; at times, some of what Pestalozzi’s followers and other innovators had in mind made a visible dent in the system.

Indeed many urban schools lacking charismatic leadership or full support for the “new education” adopted some aspects of object teaching after the 1860s. On the edges of the curriculum, for example, “learning by doing” found expression in a range of manual training classes in many towns and cities. Nature study also became popular, supplementing textbook-based science instruction. A remarkable collection of photographs by Frances Benjamin Johnston at the turn of the twentieth century demonstrates that many white and black schools in Washington, D.C., offered classes in dancing, cooking, and manual training, sponsored field trips, and initiated laboratory courses to enliven instruction. But detailed studies of the curriculum in the post–Civil War era show that urban and rural schools nationwide mostly focused on the basic subjects of reading, writing, and arithmetic in the elementary grades, wherein most pupils were enrolled, and on core academic subjects taught in traditional ways to the smaller numbers of pupils enrolled in high school. Many books and magazine articles in the 1890s noted that, even when districts adopted object teaching or manual training, they occupied only a small part of the school day. Most classes resembled the past. Textbooks reigned supreme, and memorization, recitation, and increasingly written examinations were common. Visitors to manual training classes sometimes found teachers lecturing, testifying to the firm grip of tradition. 6

In 1900 the U.S. Commissioner of Education, William T. Harris, a staunch supporter of an academic curriculum who frequently disparaged the “new education,” said that teachers were basically conservative. Most had succeeded as students in traditional classrooms. Writing in the journal Education , Harris explained that children were typically “full of caprice and wayward impulses,” and teachers endeavored to socialize them to adult norms. Teaching, he concluded, “is the most conservative of all occupations, excepting always the ministry. For the teacher has to deal with the unformed, undeveloped human being, and educate it into the manners and customs of civilized life, and above all open it for the storehouse of the wisdom of the human race.” Such statements rattled every progressive. Harris recognized that textbooks might be boring, but he regarded them as tools of democracy; an informed citizenry, as the Founders of the nation believed, needed access to the same basic knowledge. Textbooks were even more important to the many pupils who had dull, uninspiring teachers.

Harris was no stranger to debates about what knowledge or teaching methods merited a place at school. A Connecticut Yankee, Harris had dropped out of Yale and moved west, rising up the ranks to become the much-heralded superintendent of the St. Louis public schools between 1868 and 1880. As advocates of the “new education” there as elsewhere urged schools to become more child-friendly, Harris, a Hegelian philosopher and admirer of German culture, rejected romantic claims about the value of object teaching. But he notably embraced a key innovation that had originated in Europe: kindergartens.

Kindergartens were first established in the United States in the 1850s and were often found in urban areas populated with German immigrants, who were well represented on the St. Louis school board. While Harris doubted that kindergarten methods would transform the elementary grades as many reformers desired, he built a model system that attracted visitors from around the nation. A local training school prepared hundreds of women teachers, who ultimately spread the kindergarten gospel to many communities. The “child’s garden,” Harris believed, would not usher in a paradise of learning, but it could help adjust children from the informality of the home to the stricter demands of elementary school.

Kindergartens, like manual training, engaged children in numerous activities. They provided living proof that the “new education” could enter school systems otherwise committed to teacher authority and student mastery of textbooks. Children in kindergartens sat in a circle, not in fixed rows, and in moveable chairs, not bolted-down seats. Kindergartens promoted cooperative learning, stressed the educational value of structured play, and provided a sequenced set of lessons employing objects (balls, string, and so forth) and not books as the central means of instruction. Photographs of kindergartens reveal their home-like, middle-class atmosphere, with pleasant pictures adorning the walls and plants and flowers brightening the room. Women dominated in kindergarten teaching and supervision and helped popularize the reform in articles, books, and speeches. Women’s reputation for gentle treatment of little children—especially compared with men’s treatment—made them central to this aspect of the “new education.” 7

Friedrich Froebel, the German inventor of the kindergarten, had apprenticed in one of Pestalozzi’s schools, and the “child’s garden” became one of the most popular, long-lasting innovations associated with the “new education.” Initially banned in Prussia because of its links to political radicalism, the kindergarten spread to all corners of the world, though the followers of Froebel, like those of Pestalozzi, often disagreed about specific aspects of his educational philosophy and “gifts and occupations,” his richly symbolic curricular exercises. Rival professional associations in many nations debated how to organize kindergartens. By the late nineteenth century, only a small percentage of America’s school systems had funded them, but kindergartens were also found in settlement houses, orphan asylums, and private schools. City systems faced the challenge of paying teachers and constructing new buildings for a burgeoning population. In many large cities such as New York and Chicago, thousands of children in the 1890s could not find a seat in public elementary schools, which remained overcrowded. Providing universal access to new programs in early childhood education was prohibitively expensive in many school districts and inconceivable in some. But kindergartens were here to stay, as the “new education” traveled from Europe to America and other nations.

Emphasizing activities over books led critics then and in later generations to call the movement anti-intellectual. Pestalozzi and Froebel would have found the charge puzzling, since they expressly desired a harmonious education that cultivated the head, heart, and hand. But some champions of object teaching believed it was a basis for vocational education, particularly for outcast groups such as Native Americans, African Americans, and poor whites. Native American boarding schools that formed after the Civil War as well as public schools for African Americans in different parts of the country tried to downplay academics in favor of trade training. Males at boarding schools and other institutions attended by these groups were often taught obsolete handcraft skills; women received instruction in housekeeping skills deemed suitable for future domestics. Most schools still taught academic subjects, and neither Pestalozzi nor Froebel imagined that hand-training sufficed in a well-rounded education. 8

By 1900, then, some key developments emerged related to the “new education,” which increasingly became known as “progressive education.” Theorists focused on young children, not older ones, since they were seen as more malleable. Children over the age of twelve or so were usually working or attended school sporadically in Western nations, so the focus on the very young seemed sensible. Charismatic individuals associated with the “new education” established model schools, which attracted legions of the curious, who struggled to re-create what they saw in established systems. The “new education” was also expensive, requiring teaching aids, shop and kitchen tools, and more and better trained teachers, straining school budgets. This ensured that even when reformers promoted vocational education programs, such innovations never replaced the basics, which usually continued to be taught in familiar ways.

Obstacles to adopting reform on a grand scale were many. Schools faced the wrath of taxpayers who attacked “fads and frills” during economic recessions and depressions, which happened frequently in the second half of the nineteenth century. And the notion that children—not teachers and textbooks—should occupy the center of the educational universe struck many parents, taxpayers, and teachers as utopian. Supporting an innovation, including the kindergarten, did not mean one had romantic views of children or hoped that its methods would permeate the entire system. Object teaching, kindergartens, and manual training were nevertheless clear signs that the “new education” left a discernable mark on many schools around the world.

Twentieth-Century Developments

John Dewey, America’s preeminent philosopher in the first half of the twentieth century, wrote critically about the romantics, including Rousseau, Pestalozzi, and Froebel, and in a series of articles and books consistently criticized the excesses of “child-centered” education. In the late 1890s and early decades of the new century, he frequently contrasted the “old education”—seats in a row, children reciting subject matter they did not understand, schools that emphasized order instead of the joy of learning—with a “new education” that tried to recognize children’s interests and needs and to reconstruct pedagogy and curricula accordingly. Dewey recognized, however, that otherwise intriguing proposals for reform could themselves become ossified or counterproductive, as when object teaching was reduced to formulaic prescriptions in guides to teaching and critics sneered at traditional education, which emphasized pupil mastery of academic subjects. Dewey reminded child-oriented educators that learning (as most teachers and parents believed) required considerable effort by students and that teachers erred in trying to sugarcoat the educational process. The historian Herbert M. Kliebard succinctly explains, “Dewey’s position in curriculum matters is sometimes crudely described as ‘child-centered,’ though he was actually trying to achieve a creative synthesis of the child’s spontaneous interests and tendencies on the one hand and the refined intellectual resources of the culture on the other.”

Examples of “new” or “progressive” educational practices surfaced in a variety of schools over the course of the twentieth century. Sometimes the new generation of reformers lacked much knowledge about the activists and visionaries who preceded them, which might have led to more prudence as they denounced existing schools and proclaimed the dawn of a new age. As Dewey and other observers discovered, progressive schools had diverse characteristics, though they generally stressed the importance of children’s interests and needs, more creative, pupil-friendly pedagogy, and learning activities that eschewed or downplayed textbooks, memorization, and competitive examinations. The aim was to make students active participants in their own education. Like their predecessors, early twentieth-century champions of progressivism labored to make learning inviting by tapping the curiosity of pupils, whose intellectual growth and personal development were reportedly crushed by the old-fashioned methods and curricula still found in most schools.

Over the course of the twentieth century, educational experimentation drew upon familiar sources: dissatisfaction with the status quo, a sense that the vast social changes of the day made educational change inevitable, and the assumption that progress and educational reform were inextricably linked. By the 1890s reformers often drew upon the new discipline of psychology, particularly research on child and adolescent development. As education and psychology became university-based disciplines, child study became fashionable. G. Stanley Hall, one of John Dewey’s teachers in graduate school at Johns Hopkins University, studied the “contents of children’s minds” in the 1880s through surveys, providing early inventories of knowledge. Obstetrics and the study of childhood diseases gained more attention from the medical community, and measuring pupil achievement through the latest quantitative methods became common by the early twentieth century. Research at universities expanded and some cities established their own research bureaus. Despite disagreements about what it meant to study children scientifically, researchers increasingly questioned whether schools should focus on academic subjects alone, to the exclusion of a student’s physical or psychological needs. 9

Educational experimentation flourished in the early decades of the twentieth century. Between 1896 and 1904, for example, Dewey and his wife, Alice, epitomized the trend, having established the world-renowned Laboratory School at the University of Chicago. The school had a selective student body, mostly the children of faculty members. They studied standard academic subjects but also clay modeling, raised and sheared sheep and spun wool, and constructed buildings, an echo of the “object teaching” popularized by Pestalozzi’s disciples. The lessons emphasized the connections between subject matter and everyday life, showing how occupations evolved over time. The aim was not vocational: teachers were not training future carpenters or shepherds. Teachers guided children and encouraged them to seek knowledge through their own initiative. For example, they could learn to boil an egg by consulting a cookbook, but it was far better if they experimented on their own, learning through trial and error. As Dewey explained in School and Society (1899) and other writings, textbooks were filled with abstractions, based on adult understanding of subject matter. Teachers should breathe life into the abstractions and tie them to everyday experience.

Other educational experiments were under way elsewhere. Like the Laboratory School, they became meccas for educators and interested citizens who lamented the still powerful grip of traditional theories and practices in most schools. People interested in reform read about or tried to visit Maria Montessori’s Casa dei Bambini in Italy; the platoon system of schools in many American cities, folk schools in Scandinavia, model progressive ones in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in the 1920s; private child-centered schools and public suburban systems such as in Winnetka, Illinois, that incorporated some of Dewey’s ideas, in the 1930s and 1940s; Dalton schools and Waldorf schools; infant schools established in England; and “open classrooms,” “schools without walls,” and alternative high schools in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.

As in the nineteenth century, progressives learned about innovative practices by visiting schools at home and abroad, by reading extensively, and increasingly by attending college, often earning credentials in education or in the social sciences. Upon finishing their degrees, graduate students who became professors of education often helped establish laboratory schools at their home institutions, whether they had studied at the University of Iowa or at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York City. Some reformers such as Dewey traveled extensively, gaining insights into how educational ideas developed and expressed themselves in diverse cultural settings. Ideas traveled across national borders and were reshaped to fit into new contexts. American progressives, in turn, visited schools in Mexico and other nations to gain insights on the wide range of educational subjects, from the use and abuse of intelligence tests to how to improve teaching. 10

Generalizing about such a range of schools, why they were established, and their ultimate importance in different times and places is very difficult. As Dewey and his daughter Evelyn explained in Schools of Tomorrow (1915), many aspects of innovative schools varied. Some appeared in rural settings, others in cities. Some were more libertarian than others. School founders and teachers debated how much freedom to grant to pupils and what children should study and why. Activists usually stereotyped the existing institutions most children attended as backward, too rooted in the past and disconnected from the present. Progressive schools, in contrast, usually promised greater freedom for the child, enriched curricula, and disdain for anything conventional.

Women continued to play a crucial role as progressive teachers and as the founders of prominent experimental schools. In Fairhope, Alabama, in the early twentieth century, Marietta Johnson established the Organic School, which, as the historian Joseph W. Newman explains, attracted teachers who shared her views on child-centered instruction. Caroline Pratt’s City and Country School in New York City offered an alternative to the conventional teaching methods entrenched in the public system. Over the course of the twentieth century, some progressive schools (e.g., the Dalton School in New York City) had high academic standards and evolved into selective institutions for a college-bound elite; others, such as some alternative high schools in American cities in the 1960s and 1970s, taught pupils unsuited for conventional classrooms. Some progressive leaders and their staff and students wanted a refuge from society, others to radically transform it. In the romantic language of the 1960s, many idealists, sounding like the original romantics, dreamed of allowing a thousand (or more) flowers to bloom. That seemed impossible in regular schools then and even more so in the coming decades, when many national systems joined a frantic race to raise test scores and race to the top of league tables. 11

A few examples of what many contemporaries called “progressive education” in America’s urban public schools illuminate their diversity. One fascinating experiment emerged in Gary, Indiana. Established in 1906, the city was home to U.S. Steel, the largest steel plant in the world. The local school board comprised a small elite of businessmen and professionals who generally supported the innovative ideas of the local school superintendent, William A. Wirt, who served from 1907 until his death in 1938. As Ronald D. Cohen demonstrates in his exemplary history of the Gary schools, Wirt, who became acquainted with Dewey’s ideas while studying at the University of Chicago, drew upon diverse theories. Like many contemporary reformers, he believed that schools should meet the needs and interests of the child; they did not exist simply for the adults who paid for or worked in the system. Wirt and like-minded educational leaders elsewhere thus challenged the belief that schools should focus on academics alone; modern schools should address a widened horizon of concerns of childhood, adolescence, and the local community. “Schools did not just offer curricular and extracurricular choices to pupils,” Cohen writes, “but also provided medical care, baby sitting, social welfare services, recreation for the entire family, adult programs … facilities for the handicapped, and employment opportunities, and served as an anchor for the community.” This became central to the modern vision, Cohen concludes, of “progressive education.” 12

Superintendent Wirt devised the “work-play-study” approach to schooling, popularly known as the “platoon” system, and promoted student engagement, a hallmark of progressivism. Students spent part of the day in academic study of an enriched curriculum that included the arts and music, then moved to shop and manual training classes, with time reserved for sports and physical education. Visitors described the schools as active sites for learning; some had swimming pools, extensive playing fields, and evening classes for adults. According to Wirt, work, play, and study were ideally mutually reinforcing. As children and increasingly adolescents were removed from the full-time labor force, schools also provided more social services, including meals and medical and dental inspection. Above all, Wirt wanted children to stay busy, to find something they enjoyed and in which to excel. Left-wing radicals and conservatives alike praised the system, which promised the efficiency of industrial plants as well as a more cohesive and culturally enriched community.

Dozens of urban districts in America adopted a version of the platoon system, one of the most widely discussed and debated innovations of the early twentieth century. After the stock market crash of 1929, the economic depression that followed caused business leaders to reduce financial support for the platoon system, which unraveled after Wirt’s death. But progressive practices entered many public schools in the first half of the twentieth century, irrespective of the fate of Wirt’s system. Educators often embraced the language and some of the practices of the new, or progressive education. Since the romantic era of the nineteenth century, more educators claimed that children’s needs (always difficult to define) were paramount, that traditional curricula and pedagogical methods repelled many children, and that schools should better appeal to them. While the platoon system disappeared, a full range of social services, including the expansion of programs for special needs pupils, became common in Gary and other school districts after World War II. The academic mission of schools hardly disappeared, but schools performed many social and vocational functions, as advocates of the “new education” earlier anticipated.

While a number of elite private schools in the 1920s and 1930s became famous exemplars of child-centered education, Gary’s schools demonstrated that progressivism formulated in a unique way could thrive in a largely working-class city and in a public system. Another example of how progressive ideas flourished for a time in public schools arose in Winnetka, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. According to Cohen, many of Wirt’s associates regarded him as aloof. Not so with his contemporary Carleton Washburne, Winnetka’s superintendent between 1919 and 1943. Like many leaders associated with the “new education” in the nineteenth century, Washburne was charismatic. Like Wirt, he had an unusually long tenure and until nearly the end of his career enjoyed strong support from parents and the school board.

Winnetka was a wealthy community, committed to building a first-class system when it hired Washburne. Drawing upon an array of ideas, including Dewey’s, Washburne offered yet another version of what contemporaries called progressive education. Washburne attended the progressive Parker School in Chicago and graduated from Stanford. After a stint at teaching, he joined the faculty of a normal school in San Francisco, where he was influenced by a colleague, a former student of G. Stanley Hall who emphasized the importance of individual instruction. The uniqueness of the individual, central to romanticism, remained Washburne’s abiding concern, and parents in many communities worried that their children would feel lost as schools mushroomed in size. But how could one individualize teaching in age-graded classrooms? The “Winnetka Plan,” as it became known, was reassuring to parents, since the local schools offered pupils solid training in academic subjects, which they studied in the morning. Every pupil completed assignments in workbooks, took numerous tests, and progressed at their own pace. In the afternoon, however, students had access to arts, crafts, and more innovative activities. They operated a credit union and post office and built tepees, all in the spirit of “learning by doing.” Washburne cultivated a teaching force that shared his ideas; he established a teacher training college within the system, spent considerable time with his staff, and frequently praised them. As in Gary and other districts, the Depression of the 1930s led to budget cuts, attacks on “fads and frills,” and a refocusing of the system on academics, which intensified after Washburne left office. But during its heyday Winnetka became a famous expression of progressive education. 13

Just as normal schools had tried to popularize the “new education,” so too did the new schools of education and teacher training colleges in the twentieth century. Many state universities as well as private universities with graduate schools of education established laboratory schools, as John and Alice Dewey had done in the 1890s. Here future teachers could observe master teachers and study how children best learned, which usually meant discrediting methods based on memorize-and-recall for a test. Influential schools such as Teachers College, Columbia University, hired professors who contributed to different versions of progressive education. At Teachers College, William H. Kilpatrick, a devotee of Dewey, popularized the “project method,” which challenged the separation of disciplinary knowledge; it found favor in many elementary schools nationwide. Children might work alone or together for days on problems and projects, not on memorizing facts in isolated subjects. At the Institute of Education in London, Susan Isaacs pioneered new pedagogical practices for nursery and primary schools. Similarly influential and innovative educationists taught at the leading teacher training institutions in other nations.

Progressive education was often in the professional spotlight in the first half of the twentieth century. Progressives published specialized journals that featured articles on the project method, kindergartens, manual training, arts and crafts, and numerous ways to break the strongly forged chains of educational tradition. They interacted in prominent professional groups, including the Progressive Education Association, established in 1919 in New York City, and in the New Education Fellowship, founded in Europe a year later. Members of these organizations usually wanted to tailor instruction for the individual, enhance children’s freedom, and offer students an enriched curriculum; they often lamented the glacial pace of change and realized that other educational innovations proved much more influential than theirs. Most struggled to persuade the public that child-centered instruction was compatible with high academic standards, the enhancement of which became ever more important in public policy over the course of the century. 14

While the discipline of psychology had contributed to child study, it had also shaped the modern testing movement, which became the bête noire of the progressives. Testing left an indelible mark upon actual classroom practices, far more than romantic notions of child-centered pedagogy. Moreover Dewey and other intellectuals and academics associated with progressivism were red-baited in the 1930s, accused of undermining teacher authority and weakening allegiance to capitalism. The reaction against liberalism and progressive education intensified during the cold war in the 1950s. A figure no less than President Dwight D. Eisenhower claimed that Dewey’s influence had undermined academic standards, and many observers, not only conservatives, still occasionally claim that Dewey had enormous influence upon instructional practice. It matters not that Dewey was fairly consistent in his criticisms of romantic notions of children and child-centered education. When the Soviet Union launched its satellites late in the decade, the public schools were blamed, and it was easy to find fault with the system. High school enrollments boomed, but a smaller percentage of secondary pupils than earlier in the century pursued academic courses. Biology enrollments rose while physics declined; social studies replaced many history courses; and foreign-language course enrollments dropped precipitously after World War I. There were many causes for these changes, and few could be linked to Dewey. But the boogey-man of progressivism was invoked nonetheless, since single-cause explanations for complex phenomena never lose their appeal. 15

Schools had clearly assumed many new vocational and social functions since the early twentieth century. Critics of the domestic programs of the New Deal, particularly Republicans, frequently complained that liberalism infected society and its institutions, which accounted for the presumed superiority of Russian science and technology. And, without question, a version of the welfare state existed in the public schools, which probably reinforced the notion that schools had become “soft” and without rigor. Welfare programs existed in varying degrees in the form of breakfast and lunch programs, medical and dental inspections, physical education and health courses (of widely varying quality), and counseling for jobs or college placement. Schools offered vocational training, sports programs, extracurricular activities, and other forms of hands-on learning. Usually limited to male participants before the 1970s, sports programs were often hugely popular with local communities, and many high schools were better known for their basketball or football programs than for academics. Obviously schools had not invented sports mania, whose sources lay in the larger society.Attacks on progressivism were ubiquitous in the 1950s. Prominent historians such as Arthur Bestor, a liberal, attacked schools of education for undermining excellence, since they had weak admission standards and supported more nonacademic programs in the schools. “Back to the basics” became the rallying cry, and groups such as the Council for Basic Education tried to restore standards and weaken the appeal of child-centered ideas. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the Progressive Education Association disbanded in 1955, though, like swallows returning to Capistrano, child-centered educators made an impressive comeback in the 1960s. They faced the same sort of criticisms that hounded previous generations of reformers.

When outside evaluators discovered that academic achievement was often low in Gary, Indiana’s, schools, Superintendent Wirt understandably responded that test scores were inappropriate measures of what schools contributed to pupils and to the larger community. Such a response was ridiculed in the post–World War II era, when conservatives equated progressive education with low standards and letting children do as they pleased. Critics exaggerated how many changes the progressives wrought. The historian Roy Lowe, for example, discovered that child-centered pedagogy was not commonly practiced in England. Similarly Larry Cuban found that while elementary schools in the United States were more receptive to child-sensitive pedagogy than high schools, traditional practices often ruled. Team teaching and the use of television, film strips, and other innovative technologies promised to enliven high schools. Ironically they (like work books) instead reinforced pupil passivity. The schools had added many social services and dramatically expanded their mission by 1960, compared to a few decades earlier. But many classrooms still had bolted-down desks, permitted corporal punishment (allowed by law in the majority of states), and had not become a child’s garden. Portable desks did not prevent teachers from lecturing, a common practice in high school. 16

During the civil rights movement and the Great Society of President Lyndon Baines Johnson in the 1960s, progressive educational ideas and practices nevertheless reemerged and attracted considerable publicity. A loosening of dress codes, greater informality between teachers and pupils, grade inflation, and other reforms changed the atmosphere of many public schools by the early 1970s. “Open” classrooms, alternative high schools, “schools without walls,” and other expressions of liberal values meant that change was real, though never as extensive as critics sometimes claimed. Important new federal programs such as Head Start revived the idea that early childhood education could help break the bonds of poverty by socializing the poor to middle-class norms. Soon, however, a powerful conservative movement arose in reaction to the “liberal” 1960s, ushering Richard Nixon into the presidency in 1968 on a promise of “law and order,” and conservative movements since then have often dominated policymaking. It has not been a hospitable environment for most progressives.

The old nemesis of progressivism, testing, reared its ugly head in dramatic fashion in 2002. The Republican president, George W. Bush, and Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, the liberal lion of the Democratic Party, for different reasons helped usher in a massive federal effort to raise standards in the schools, documented by standardized testing, with the passage of No Child Left Behind. Republicans wanted to bring market forces to bear on public schools and, in the process, help privatize the system; liberal Democrats wanted to better document how well ethnic and racial minorities fared in the race to the top. Test scores are currently the gold standard in many national school systems. They are published just like those for athletic events.

By the early twenty-first century, schools in the United States had retained many of the broadened social functions accumulated over many decades. Early childhood education retained its importance, and Head Start enjoyed bipartisan congressional and public support. Teachers in elementary schools remained most amenable to child-friendly pedagogy, but the emphasis on test results ensured the survival of drill and memorization, and talk and chalk. Teaching to tests—a wide assortment of them—drew the ire of some liberals but approval from many moderates and conservatives, who wanted schools to produce better, measurable results. Schools have also borne the heavy responsibility of lifting achievement in systems that by law include virtually all students through high school, including the physically and mentally handicapped.

David L. Labaree has written that schools of education still teach a version of progressive education to future teachers, rebranded as “constructivism.” Instruction, they are told, should be based on the “needs, interests and developmental stage of the child,” should include group work and projects, and promote “discovery” methods that allow more “self-directed” learning to enable pupils to learn “how to learn.” The aim is to enhance “critical thinking” and “problem solving.” 17 The language has changed, but the old dream persists: that the schools should conform to the child, not the other way around, and that learning should be enjoyable and exciting, which is precisely what romantics said two centuries ago.

Lawrence A. Cremin, “What Was Progressive Education, What Happened to It?,” Vital Speeches of the Day 25 (September 1959): 723; William J. Reese, America’s Public Schools: From the Common School to “No Child Left Behind” (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), chapter 3 .

Reese, America’s Public Schools , chapter 3 ; Hermann Röhrs and Volker Lenhart, eds., Progressive Education across the Continents: A Handbook (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995) ; William J. Reese, “Progressive Education,” in The Routledge International Encyclopedia of Education , ed. Gary McCulloch and David Crook (London: Routledge, 2008), 461 .

Tal Gilead, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” in McCulloch and Crook, Routledge International Encyclopedia , 497–498; William J. Reese, “The Origins of Progressive Education,” History of Education Quarterly 41 (Spring 2001): 3, 6, 24 ; William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” in The Portable Romantic Poets: Blake to Poe , ed. W. H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson (London: Penguin Books, c. 1978), 199; Reese, America’s Public Schools , 80–84.

Quote is from William J. Reese, Power and the Promise of School Reform: Grassroots Movements during the Progressive Era (New York: Teachers College Press, c. 2002), 188; Reese, America’s Public Schools , 80–99.

Christine A. Ogren, The American State Normal School: “An Instrument of Great Good” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 35–38; Reese, “Origins,” 19–22; Reese, America’s Public Schools , 91–92, 112; Cremin, “What Was Progressive Education,” 722. Bettina Berch, The Woman behind the Lens: The Life and Work of Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1864–1952 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 42–46; Reese, America’s Public Schools , 116.

Berch, The Woman behind the Lens , 42–46; Reese, America’s Public Schools , 116.

Quote is from William T. Harris, “The Study of Arrested Development in Children as Produced by Injudicious School Methods,” Education 20 (April 1900): 454; Reese, America’s Public Schools , 63–65; Barbara Beatty, Preschool Education in America: The Culture of Young Children from the Colonial Era to the Present (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995).

Beatty, Preschool Education ; Norman Brosterman, Inventing Kindergarten (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), chapters 1 – 2 ; Kristen Nawrotzki, “Kindergarten,” in McCulloch and Crook, Routledge International Encyclopedia , 338–339; David W. Adams, “Federal Indian Boarding Schools,” in Historical Dictionary of American Education , ed. Richard J. Altenbaugh (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 137; Reese, America’s Public Schools , 98–108.

Herbert M. Kliebard, “John Dewey,” in Altenbaugh, Historical Dictionary , 112; Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Herbert M. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum 1893–1958 (New York: Routledge Falmer, 2004), 11–12; O. L. Davis Jr., “Child Study Movement,” in Altenbaugh, Historical Dictionary , 73.

Kliebard, Struggle , chapter 3 ; Röhrs and Lenhart, Progressive Education ; Ruben Flores, Backroads Pragmatists: Mexico’s Melting Pot and Civil Rights in the United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 3, 11, 107–115.

John Dewey and Evelyn Dewey, Schools of Tomorrow (New York: E. P. Dutton, c. 1962); Aaron R. Sadovnik and Susan F. Semel, eds., Founding Mothers and Others: Women Educational Leaders during the Progressive Era (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Joseph W. Newman, “Experimental School, Experimental Community: The Marietta Johnson School of Organic Education in Fairhope, Alabama,” 80–81, and Susan F. Semel, “The City and Country School: A Progressive Paradigm,” 121–140, in “Schools of Tomorrow,” Schools of Today: What Happened to Progressive Education , ed. Susan F. and Aaron R. Sadovnik (New York: Peter Lang, 1999); Susan F. Semel, The Dalton School: The Transformation of a Progressive School (New York: Peter Lang, 1992).

Ronald D. Cohen, Children of the Mill: Schooling and Society in Gary, Indiana, 1906–1960 (New York: Routledge Falmer, c. 2002), x, 1–2, chapter 8 ; also see Cohen’s essay, “William Albert Wirt,” in Altenbaugh, Historical Dictionary , 387–388; Arthur Zilversmit, Changing Schools: Progressive Education Theory and Practice , 1930–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) ; Arthur Zilversmit, “Carleton Wolsey Washburne,” in Altenbaugh, Historical Dictionary , 378–379.

Zilversmit, Changing Schools ; Robert A. Levin, “Laboratory Schools,” in Altenbaugh, Historical Dictionary , 206–208; Kliebard, Struggle , 135–140; Craig Kridel, “William Heard Kilpatrick,” in Altenbaugh, Historical Dictionary , 202–203; Richard Aldrich, The Institute of Education 1902–2002: A Centenary History (London: Institute of Education, University of London, 2002), 100–102; Craig Kridel, “Progressive Educational Association,” in Altenbaugh, Historical Dictionary , 303–304.

William J. Reese, “In Search of American Progressives and Teachers,” History of Education 42 (May 2013): 320–334. Also see Reese, America’s Public Schools , 203–204; Westbrook, John Dewey , 543.

Reese, America’s Public Schools , chapters 6 and 9 ; Charles E. Jenks, “Arthur Eugene Bestor, Jr.,” in Altenbaugh, Historical Dictionary , 39–40; Cohen, Children of the Mill ; Roy Lowe, The Death of Progressive Education: How Teachers Lost Control of the Classroom (London: Routledge, 2007); Larry Cuban, How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms 1890–1980 (New York: Longman, 1984) .

Jo Anne Anderson, “Accountability,” 9–10, and Donna Marie Harris, “High-Stakes Testing,” 291–292, in McCulloch and Crook, Routledge International Encyclopedia .

Anderson, “Accountability,” 9–10; Harris, “High-Stakes Testing,” 291–292; David F. Labaree, “Progressivism, Schools and Schools of Education: An American Romance,” Paedagogica Historica 41 (February 2005): 277 .

Suggested Reading

Allen, Ann Taylor . The Transatlantic Kindergarten: Education and Women’s Movements in Germany and the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017 .

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Altenbaugh, Richard J. , ed. Historical Dictionary of American Education . Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999 .

Beatty, Barbara . Preschool Education in America: The Culture of Young Children from the Colonial Era to the Present . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995 .

Brosterman, Norman . Inventing Kindergarten . New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997 .

Cohen, Ronald D.   Children of the Mill: Schooling and Society in Gary, Indiana, 1906–1960 . New York: Routledge Falmer, 2002 .

Cremin, Lawrence A.   The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education 1876–1957 . New York: Vintage Books, 1961 .

Cuban, Larry . How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms 1890–1980 . New York: Longman, 1984 .

Kliebard, Herbert M.   The Struggle for the American Curriculum 1893–1958 . New York: Routledge Falmer, 2004 .

Labaree, David F. “ Progressivism, Schools and Schools of Education: An American Romance. ” Paedagogica Historica 41 (February 2005 ): 275–288.

Lowe, Roy . The Death of Progressive Education: How Teachers Lost Control of the Classroom . London: Routledge, 2007 .

McCulloch, Gary , and David Crook , eds. The Routledge International Encyclopedia of Education . London: Routledge, 2008 .

Reese, William J. “ The Origins of Progressive Education. ” History of Education Quarterly 41 (Spring 2001 ): 1–24.

Röhrs, Hermann , and Volker Lenhart , eds. Progressive Education across the Continents: A Handbook . Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995 .

Semel, Susan F. , and Aaron R. Sadovnik , eds. “Schools of Tomorrow,” Schools of Today: What Happened to Progressive Education . New York: Peter Lang, 1999 .

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

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John Dewey: Portrait of a Progressive Thinker

His ideas altered the education of children worldwide  .

John Dewey in 1950.

—Bettmann / Getty Images

“I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.” —John Dewey  

“He was loved, honored, vilified, and mocked as perhaps no other major philosopher in American history.” —Larry Hickman

In the 1894 Pullman strike, workers fought against having their wages cut. Dewey saw the turmoil as symbolic of a rapidly changing America in need of school reform.

—Wikimedia Commons

Dewey praised the Pullman strikers’ leader Eugene V. Debs—head of the American Railway Union—and the strikers’ “fanatic sincerity and earnestness.”

—Harris & Ewing photograph, 1912 / Library of Congress

In July 1894, a train carrying a young philosopher from Ann Arbor, Michigan, pulled into Chicago Union Station. Its arrival was delayed by striking workers of the American Railway Union, who were made furious by the Pullman Company’s decision to cut their wages. The strike ended two weeks later, took the lives of thirty people, and symbolized a rapidly changing America dominated by corporations that set laborers against owners. 

The philosopher had entered a city whose population was exploding with immigrants, many of whom were illiterate; a city of half-built skyscrapers and noisome meatpacking plants; a city with a new university funded by John D. Rockefeller, the University of Chicago, whose Gothic buildings and eminent faculty would rival those of Harvard and Yale. John Dewey had arrived to chair the philosophy and pedagogy department. Once in the city, he visited the strikers, applauded their “fanatic sincerity and earnestness,” praised their leader Eugene Debs, and condemned President Cleveland’s suppression of the strike. Worried about working for a university dedicated to laissez-faire capitalism, Dewey found himself becoming more of a populist, more of a socialist, more sympathetic to the settlement house pioneered by Jane Addams, and more skeptical of his childhood Christianity. He would conclude that a changing America needed different schools.

In 1899, Dewey published the pamphlet that made him famous, The School and Society , and promulgated many key precepts of later education reforms. Dewey insisted that the old model of schooling—students sitting in rows, memorizing and reciting—was antiquated. Students should be active, not passive. They required compelling and relevant projects, not lectures. Students should become problem solvers. Interest, not fear, should be used to motivate them. They should cooperate, not compete. 

Boys in Armstrong Technical High School in Washington, D.C., construct models of airplanes in 1942 to be used by the U.S. Navy. Dewey advocated for democratized education that was relevant and practical.

—Marjory Collins / Library of Congress

The key to the new education was “manual training.” Before the factory system and the growth of cities, children handled animals, crops, and tools. They were educated by nature “with real things and materials.” Dewey lamented the disappearance of the idyllic village and the departure of children’s modesty, reverence, and implicit obedience. He was, however, no reactionary: “It is radical conditions which have changed, and only an equally radical change in education suffices.” Urban children needed to sew, cook, and work with metal and wood. Manual training should not, however, be mere vocational education or a substitute for the farm. It should be scientific and experimental, an introduction to civilization.

“You can concentrate the history of all mankind into the evolution of flax, cotton, and wool fibers into clothing,” asserted Dewey. He described a class where students handled wool and cotton. As they discovered how hard it was to separate seeds from cotton, they came to understand why their ancestors wore woolen clothing. Working in groups to make models of the spinning jenny and the power loom, they learned cooperation. Together they understood the role of water and steam, analyzed the textile mills of Lowell, and studied the distribution of the finished cloth and its impact on everyday life. They learned science, geography, and physics without textbooks or lectures. Learning by doing replaced learning by listening. 

Manual training revolved around the study of occupations to develop both the hand and the intellect. To know and to do were equally valuable. Cooperative learning encouraged a democratic classroom, which promoted a democratic society without elites, ethnic divisions, or economic inequality. Throughout his life, Dewey believed that humans were social beings inclined to be cooperative, not selfish individuals predisposed to conflict. Always he praised democracy as a way of life and scientific intelligence as the key to reform. 

America in 1900 was preoccupied with the clash between capital and labor, debating how to make the worker more than an appendage to the machine. To science, geography, and physics, Dewey added another advantage: meaning. While the typical student did not go on to high school or attend college, manual training conducted by a skilled teacher could stimulate the imagination, enlarge the sympathies, and acquaint young people with scientific intelligence. Dewey was outraged that “thousands of young ones . . . are practically ruined . . . in the Chicago schools every year.” His new education sought to encourage students to continue in school and combat the increase in juvenile delinquency. It looked to produce an inquiring student who could change America.  

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. “The simple facts of the case are that in the great majority of human beings,” he wrote, “the distinctively intellectual interest is not dominant. They have the so-called practical impulse and disposition.” With more and more Americans enrolled in schools, educators had to acknowledge this fact. Learning had to be democratized and made relevant and practical. “The school must represent present life.”

Classes modeled on Dewey’s principles emphasize cooperation over competition.

—Mauritius images GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo

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 766 articles in 151 journals. In his lifetime, he was hailed as America’s preeminent philosopher. Historian Henry Steele Commager called him “the guide, the mentor, and the conscience of the American people.” In China, he was called a “second Confucius.” 

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. The president of Johns Hopkins, Daniel Coit Gilman, encouraged Dewey to accept an offer to teach at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor but suggested that he curtail his “reclusive and bookish habits.” 

At Michigan, a newly confident Dewey published a psychology textbook and fell in love with one of his students, Alice Chipman (later described by their daughter as a woman “with a brilliant mind which cut through sham and pretense”). 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. 

One of his students in Michigan described Dewey as “a tall, dark, thin young man with long black hair, and a soft, penetrating eye, and looks like a cross between a Nihilist and a poet.” A colleague at Michigan found him “simple, modest, utterly devoid of any affectation or self-consciousness, and makes many friends and no enemies.” Later associates would corroborate this positive portrait, stressing Dewey’s ability to accept criticism, his willingness to give credit to others, and his intellectual and physical vigor. After a lunch (hosted by T. S. Eliot) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Bertrand Russell praised Dewey: “To my surprise I liked him very much. He has a large slow-moving mind, very empirical and candid . . . [he] impressed me very greatly, both as a philosopher and as a lovable man.” Self-effacing but not introspective, Dewey spoke little about himself, writing neither memoirs nor an autobiography.

Dewey, who seemed to fit the model of the quintessential reserved New Englander, was surprisingly complex. Arriving in Chicago during the strike, he mused, “I am something of an anarchist.” Slightly bohemian, he encouraged his children to go barefoot even in winter, and he and his wife walked naked around the house. He socialized with radicals in Greenwich Village. To understand prostitution, he visited Chicago’s brothels. 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. His friend Max Eastman noted, “Dewey is at his best with one child climbing up his pants leg and another fishing in his inkwell.” At the age of 58, he had a brief romance (possibly platonic) with Anzia Wezierska, who wrote novels and short stories about the immigrant experience. 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. In 1894, he wrote to Alice, “I think yesterday was the bluest day I have ever spent.” He was twice visited by catastrophe. While vacationing in Italy in the fall of 1894, 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. “I shall never understand why he was taken from the world,” wrote Dewey.

Dewey marched in a suffragette parade and campaigned for women’s right to vote. He celebrated as his mentors Ella Flagg Young, the superintendent of Chicago Public Schools, and Jane Addams, the founder of Hull House. He rejected his mother’s query, “Are you right with Jesus?,” but sprinkled his essay “My Pedagogic Creed” with religious imagery. Who were Dewey’s heroes? 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 1905 and 1914 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. Irving Edman (who became a philosopher) was initially repelled by this method, but looking over his notes, he soon realized “what had seemed so rambling . . . was of extraordinary coherence, texture and brilliance.” Dewey’s former student and later colleague, the philosopher J. H. Randall Jr., described a man who was “simple, sturdy, unpretentious, quizzical, shrewd, devoted, fearless, genuine.” Dewey had, according to biographer Jay Martin, “a general spiritedness and joviality . . . that attracted people of all ages, genders and races.”

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 1894 to 1905. Classes were small and select. Dewey drew on the expertise of Chicago’s professors to create age-appropriate curriculums, stressing discovery and cooperation and the talents of creative teachers to implement it. The Dewey school was distinctly middle class, with motivated students and supportive parents. 

Visitors came from all over America and Dewey’s vision spread, so much so that he and his daughter Evelyn co-authored the 1915 book Schools of Tomorrow , a celebration of progressive pedagogy, complete with 27 photographs of children at work and play. In these schools, students visited fire stations, post offices, and city halls. They grew their own gardens, cooked, cobbled shoes, and tutored younger students. They staged plays dramatizing historical events. Pretending to be the heroes of the Trojan War, they held battles at recess with wooden swords and barrel-cover shields. Reading, writing, spelling, and calculating would be acquired naturally in conjunction with projects: “Studying alone out of a book is an isolated and unsocial performance,” the Deweys reminded readers of Schools of Tomorrow . The schools portrayed were chiefly elementary, and it is important to remember that Dewey’s reforms were rarely extended to rapidly growing high schools and less tractable adolescents.

In the John Dewey School in Denver in 1964, eighth graders create mosaic murals to decorate school corridors and offices. The activity demonstrates the Dewey principle of manual training—active rather than passive learning, “with real things and materials.”

—Ed Maker / Denver Post via Getty Images

Following a long-simmering conflict with University of Chicago President William Rainey Harper, Dewey—now prominent—moved to Columbia University in 1905. He remained there until 1930, teaching, lecturing in schools and community centers, traveling abroad to advise foreign educators, and writing articles for learned journals and popular magazines like the New Republic . Dewey believed that a philosopher should not only reflect but also act, both to improve society and to participate in “the living struggles and issues of his age.” His tools: reason, science, pragmatism. His goal: democracy, not only in politics and the economy but also as an ethical ideal, as a way of life. 

As an activist and public intellectual, Dewey made a stunning series of contributions. He founded the American Association of University Professors and helped organize the New York City Teachers Union. He supported efforts that led to the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union. He worked in settlement houses to help assimilate immigrants, spoke out against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, defended Bertrand Russell when Russell’s morals were questioned, and sided with historian Harold Rugg when Rugg’s books were censored. In response to feelings of guilt he harbored about his support for World War I, Dewey led a crusade that culminated in the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, an influential though controversial treaty outlawing war. 

During the 1920s, Dewey’s influence became international. He traveled with Alice to Japan in 1919, where he criticized the emperor cult, and lived in China for more than two years, giving two hundred lectures. The Chinese called him “Mr. Democracy” and “Mr. Science.” His books have been translated into Mandarin, and scholars at the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University remind me that his emphasis on discovery and ethics has influenced contemporary Chinese educators trying to encourage creativity and virtue in students. Dewey went on to travel to Turkey, South Africa, and Mexico, advising governments on how to improve their educational systems. Today, in eleven countries, ranging from Italy to Argentina, that traditionally educate their students with lectures, memorization, and exams, there are Dewey centers that look to humanize education and consider the wider aspects of his philosophy. 

John Dewey’s seventieth birthday on October 20, 1929, just before the stock market crash, became a national event. He had received numerous honorary degrees, declarations from foreign nations, and a portrait bust by the famous sculptor Jacob Epstein. From all over the world came telegrams, including tributes from Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Felix Frankfurter. Twenty-five hundred notables crowded into the Astor Hotel’s Grand Ballroom to hear Dewey compared to Ben Franklin and praised by historian James Harvey Robinson as “the chief spokesman of our age and the chief thinker of our days.” 

Surrounded by children in 1949, John Dewey celebrates his ninetieth birthday at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City.

—Gado Images / Alamy Stock Photo

Not all Americans praised John Dewey. From his days at the Experimental School in Chicago until his death in 1952, he was the object of sharp criticism. Some parents in Chicago claimed that after a morning of chaotic play in the Dewey school, they had to teach their children how to read and write. Immigrants in New York City violently protested against manual training in 1915. They wanted a classical education so that their children could go to college and become professionals. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr found Dewey’s view of human nature too optimistic, his view of society utopian.

The controversy surrounding Dewey continued after his death. “The 1950s was a horrible decade for progressive educators,” notes educational historian Diane Ravitch. In Educational Wastelands: The Retreat from Learning in Our Public Schools (1953), Arthur Bestor mocked the fad of “life adjustment” and called for a return of the “academic curriculum.” Admiral Hiram Rickover, the father of the nuclear-powered submarine, attributed Russia’s achievement with Sputnik to Dewey and his followers. In Life magazine, President Eisenhower blamed America’s educational failings on “John Dewey’s teachings.”

The controversy continues today. Analytic philosophers have little use for a sage who was not interested in arcane disputes over language. The champion of cultural literacy, E. D. Hirsch, insists that the education-school professors who lionize Dewey instruct future teachers to eschew facts, completion, testing, and lectures. In 2011, Human Events , a conservative weekly, listed Democracy and Education among the most dangerous books published in the past two hundred years. 

Perhaps Dewey’s greatest liability was his style. Concerning clarity, the nineteenth-century philosopher Herbert Spencer once wrote: “To so present ideas that they may be apprehended with the least possible effort.” Dewey read Spencer but did not follow this advice. The editor of the New Republic regularly rewrote Dewey’s submissions. Defenders detect profundity beneath obscurity and argue that Dewey deliberately adopted an antirhetorical writing style. Critics demand clarity and example, maybe some rhythm and grace—missing in a philosopher who had no ear for music. I have met many contemporary teachers who have heard of John Dewey. I have not met one who has read his works, except reluctantly.

Of course, any philosopher who becomes famous can expect critiques and may become attractive to followers who will distort his or her message. The distortion will be magnified when the philosopher writes a lot, especially in an abstract and imprecise style. As a result, sweet-tempered John Dewey, who welcomed dialog and experimentation, is blamed for any change that opponents can label “progressive”: open classrooms, cooperative learning, life adjustment, language reading, the attacks on Latin and canonical books, the slighting of the gifted and talented, declining test scores. The assaults can be expanded to include social ills as well as educational shortcomings: communism, creeping socialism, juvenile delinquency, declining patriotism, a weakened military, and a less productive economy. Both Catholics and Communists reviled Dewey.

Patiently, Dewey defended himself. He reminded his educational disciples that students should not be allowed to do whatever they please, that planning and organization must accompany freedom, and that teachers should be guides as well as subject matter experts. While many forms of progressive education were spreading in America, he insisted in his 1938 book, Experience and Education , that education should not be without direction. 

What are we to make of John Dewey? His FBI file mentioned his carelessly combed gray hair, disheveled attire, and monotonous drawl. They might have added that he was agnostic in religion and radical in politics. He was a good husband and father and a generous colleague. Optimistic, hard-working, idealistic, he rejected the Lost Generation’s cynicism and Sigmund Freud’s pessimism and preoccupation with the unconscious. Biographer Alan Ryan notes, “He was uninterested in either his own or other people’s private miseries.” He did not comment on sexuality, the obsession of contemporary America. Unlike evolutionary psychologists, he believed nurture was more powerful than nature. He overcame a natural timidity to become a giant in the world of philosophy and insisted on a new role for the philosopher, combining contemplation with action. 

The words authority , discipline , deferred gratification , tradition , hierarchy , and order , were not part of his vocabulary. He favored community , equality, activity , freedom . He had no use for McGuffey Readers, designed to instill character, patriotism, and love of God. He criticized the Gilded Age, the Roaring Twenties, and the New Deal. He believed in unions, strikes, government planning, and redistribution of income. Opposed to laissez-faire capitalism, he was convinced that leaders were more dangerous than the masses. 

Rejecting the specialization of contemporary philosophers, Dewey tackled logic, ethics, aesthetics, and epistemology. He commented on war and peace, labor unions, and capitalists. Above all, he transformed schools, connecting students to real life, encouraging them to become critical thinkers and idealists.

The philosopher and educator, photographed here in 1946, wrote 37 books and published 766 articles over his lifetime.

—JHU Sheridan Libraries / Gado Images / Getty

What is Dewey’s legacy? President Lyndon Johnson (once a teacher) extolled “Dr. Johnny” and connected Dewey’s ideas to the Great Society. Southern Illinois University has created a center for Dewey studies and published 37 volumes of his writings as well as twenty-four thousand pieces of his correspondence. The former editor, Larry Hickman, tells me there has been a revival of interest in Dewey after years of neglect. He argues that Dewey’s pluralism encourages “global citizenship.” He notes that after World War II, Japanese educators turned to Dewey and adds that he has a following among millions of Japanese Buddhists. 

There is a John Dewey Society in America and John Dewey Study Centers around the world. Deborah Meier, the only elementary school teacher ever to receive a MacArthur “Genius” award, repeatedly cites Dewey’s influence on her democratic, project- and community-based schools. The Coalition for Essential Schools, whose slogan is “less is more,” is based on Dewey progressivism. Left-leaning public intellectuals and professors Cornel West and Noam Chomsky champion Dewey as an enemy of elites and founder of participatory democracy. The late Richard Rorty, an iconoclastic and controversial but prominent philosopher, rediscovered Dewey in the 1980s and praised Dewey’s pragmatism, political engagement, and vision for a democratic utopia (which Rorty says will never happen).

Echoing Dewey’s conclusion in “My Pedagogic Creed,” many contemporary psychologists insist that human beings are wired to be social, craving group activity and connections. In addition to evidence from brain imaging unavailable in Dewey’s time, they cite the ubiquity of iPhones and the power of Facebook. Communitarians who feel America’s celebration of individualism has gone too far quote Dewey.

“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” advised Robert Browning, Dewey’s favorite poet. Dewey was a radical reformer, a socialist, a secular humanist, a meliorist, even a utopian. He dreamed of an America without sexism or racism or ethnic divisions, a community that respected capitalists as well as craftspeople and that cultivated both science and art. His dense, turgid philosophical tracts are now of interest primarily to academicians; his more readable journalism remains of use to historians; his educational writings prove the most influential.

Contemporary Americans have opted for testing, standards, competition, choice, and academic curriculums. Education reports emphasize national security, jobs, and the achievement gap, not discovery, manual training, or community. Deliberately antiprogressive charter schools, such as the KIPP Schools and Success Academies, try to overcome the achievement gap and end poverty by content, competition, and discipline. They stress grit, not joy. Teachers, denied the status Dewey thought so important, still stand in front of the class and talk. Progressive schools are few and seem most effective in small schools staffed by “true believers.” 

Still, glimmers of Dewey’s dream remain. In the New Haven middle school of my thirteen-year-old grandson, the social studies teacher started the year by asking, “Why study history?” The mathematics teacher showed the movie Stand and Deliver . The language arts teacher asked each student to share with the class their thoughts about their individually selected summer reading book. My grandson chose a trilogy, The Hunger Games , not in the canon. The science teacher asked them to construct a model bridge out of one piece of paper and Scotch tape. To build community, the principal suspended classes, led the students outside, and asked each to start a conversation with someone he or she had not talked to before that morning. 

Today most K–12 teachers still believe in content, competition, evaluation, and discipline. Simultaneously, they believe in relevance, projects, group learning, and choice. The Common Core Standards, approved by most states, stress rigor but at the same time emphasize inquiry and understanding. John Dewey would be moderately pleased with a pragmatic nation that combines traditional education with the insights of progressives.

Peter Gibbon is a Senior Research Scholar at the Boston University School of Education and the author of A Call to Heroism: Renewing America’s Vision of Greatness (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2002). He has directed four Teaching American History programs and is currently the director of an NEH Summer Seminar, “Philosophers of Education: Major Thinkers from the Enlightenment to the Present.”

Funding information

NEH has awarded 19 grants, totaling $3,091,240, on John Dewey to Southern Illinois University for publication of the Collected Works, in 37 volumes, and an electronic edition of Dewey’s correspondence.

Republication statement

The text of this article is available for unedited republication, free of charge, using the following credit : “Originally published as “John Dewey: Portrait of a Progressive Thinker” in the Spring 2019 issue of  Humanities  magazine, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities.” Please notify us at  @email  if you are republishing it or have any questions.

John Dewey on Education: Selected Writings by Reginald A. Archambault, ed., University of Chicago Press, 1964. Understanding John Dewey: Nature and Cooperative Intelligence by James Campbell, Open Court, 1995. Democracy and Education by John Dewey, The Macmillan Company, 1916. Schools of Tomorrow by John Dewey and Evelyn Dewey, Grindl Press, 2016.  The Education of John Dewey: A Biography by Jay Martin, Columbia University Press, 2002. The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism by Alan Ryan, W. W. Norton & Company, 1995.

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Library Services

Progressive Education

A resource guide helping you to locate archive material related to progressive education.

Introduction

Progressive education has many definitions. One understanding is that it focuses more upon the child's learning, than upon curriculum content or a teacher's pedagogy. Two main approaches of progressive education are 'child-centred' education - which aims to give children the freedom to develop naturally in a democratic environment, and 'social-reconstuctionism' - which focuses on a curriculum highlighting social reform as the aim of education.

A brief history of progressive education

The origins of progressive education may lie in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's fictional work Emile (1762) which stressed that a child must be allowed to develop in its own manner, contrary to the early modern view of Puritans and others that all children were essentially 'wicked' and needed guidance to be 'good'. This philosophy was utilized by 19th century European educationalists including Johann Pestalozzi and Friedrich Froebel, and was further developed in the 20th century by figures such as John Dewey and Maria Montessori.

The first British 'child-centred' schools began to open from late 1800s in what was called 'The New Education Movement'. Many of these were 'experimental' privately-funded schools focusing on the needs of pupuls through tolerant discipline, encouragement of the arts and crafts, manual work as an aspect of physical education, and simplicity of living. The most celebrated British progressive schools include Abbotsholme (founded in 1889 by Cecil Reddie), Bedales (founded in 1893 by J.H Badley) and Summerhill (initially founded in 1921 by A.S. Neill). Psychologically-based schools also opened, including Susan Isaac's Malting House. Many of the promoters and head teachers of progressive schools were associated with The New Educational Fellowship, founded in 1921.

In the post-War years the Ministry of Education encouraged new teaching methods, 'open plan' school architecture, and more imaginiative use of space in all types of primary schools. Some key figures promoting child-centred methods emerged, including Molly Brearly of the Froebel Educational Institute, a member of the Plowden Inquiry into primary education in England and Wales. The 1967 'Plowden Report' commended certain 'child-centred' classroom approached, though the impact of post-Plowden progressivism upon primary classroom practice has probably been over-stated. A political backlash quickly set in, with the publication of a series of 'Black Papers' (from 1969) and unfavourable press coverage of radical teaching practices at London's William Tyndale Primary School during the mid-1970s.

The introduction of a National Curriculum by the 1988 Eduacation Reform Act saw the government to have more power over the education service, limiting the possibilities for progressive education to flourish in state schools. 'Child-centered' education was officially discouraged by the 1992 DES report Curriculum Organisation and Classrooom Practice in Primary Schools, which dismissed discovery learning and recommended more subject-based lessons and whole-class teaching.

For guidance on how to use our dedicated online catalogue to browse and search archives, manuscripts and records see the archives home page .

Archive collections

The Baines were primary school teachers who pioneered new progressive teaching methods in an open-plan environment. The collection, 1956-1993, mainly relates to their work at Eynsham County Primary School. (RefNo: BA)

Michael Duane was a teacher, headmaster and lecturer, known for his 'progressive' educational views, belief in multi-racial approach, encouragement of informal staff/student relationships and opposition to corporal punishment. His papers, 1940-1995, regard his headships of the Howe Dell, Alderman Woodrow, and Risinghill schools, and his writings on various topics including discipline, 'de-schooling', and non-authoritarian education. (RefNo: MD)

The Flysheet Camps were established in 1973. They were originallypart of the Forest School Camps (FSC) organisation. Their work led them in a different direction from FSC, and they began to run their own camps which were more focused on the inclusion of working class children and a more collective system of leadership. After several years affilication with FSC, the two organisations became distinct. This collection includes photographs, minutes, administrative documents, publicity material, and annual reports. (RefNo: FLY)

Forest School Camps is a Registered Charity whose purpose is the promotion of holidays and outdoor activities for children and young people. The FSC records, 1917-2003, contain minutes; publications; camp reports; camp diaries; photographs; interview tapes and transcripts; and guidelines for staff and camp chiefs. (RefNo: FSC)

Isabel Fry, educationist, social worker and reformer, founded experimental schools where training in farm and household duties were emphasised. Her papers, 1878-1958, contain personal diaries and notebooks, and other papers reflecting all aspects of her life and career. (RefNo: FY)

Nathan Isaacs was a metallurgist interested in theories of child development, who lectured and wrote widely on this topic. The collection, 1913-1966, contains his lectures, unpublished writings and notes, publications and correspondence concerning his psychological/philosophical work. (RefNo: NI)

Susan Isaacs, teacher and psychoanalyst, was Head of Malting House School, an experimental school which fostered the individual development of children. In 1933 she became the first Head of the Department of Child Development at the IOE. Her papers,1928-1979, contain personalia; correspondence; writings; and press cuttings concerning her role as the agony aunt 'Ursula Wise'. (RefNo:SI)

David and Mary Medd worked for Hertfordshire County Council Architect's Department after WW2 and joined the Architects and Building Branch in 1949. They designed educational buildings, furniture and equipment for the schools with child centred learning in mind. Their papers cover their work, 1940s-1990s, including project files; architectural plans and drawings; writings; photographs and slides; reports, pamphlets and publications; and press cuttings. (RefNo: ME)

Eileen Molony, television producer, was involved in the production of a wide range of programmes. The collection contains material relating to her BBC television series 'The Expanding Classroom' (1969) which was intended to provide an insight into schools implementing some of the recommendations of the ‘Plowden’ Report. (RefNo: EM)

Lady Plowden was Chair of the Central Advisory Council for Education, 1963-1966. Her papers mainly relate to her work on the Committee of Enquiry into Primary Education who produced the influential report, Children and Their Primary Schools (also known as the ‘Plowden’ report), published in 1967. (RefNo: PL)

Louis Christian Schiller, the first Staff Inspector for Primary Education from 1945, was a promoter of progressive ideals and child-centred teaching in primary education. He also ran a course for primary head at the IOE. His collection, 1909-1986, includes papers regarding his educational ideas including notebooks, working notes, writings and scripts of his lectures; correspondence; material relating to courses for teachers; personalia; printed material, and, photographs. (RefNo: CS)

Robin Tanner was a teacher who became one of the HM Inspectors of Schools in primary education in 1935. He believed that the study of natural things and the exploration of arts and crafts, music and poetry were essential for the development of teachers and children. His papers, 1920s-1988, primarily relate to his work in education. (RefNo: BTA)

The papers of three female generations of the White family including papers regarding Lucy Winifred (Winnie) Nicholls who founded The Garden School around 1916, which was based on principles of love, freedom, brotherhood, cooperation and service. The collection includes Winnie’s diary and note books 1885-1962; photograph albums; The Garden School Bulletins; correspondence; and papers regarding Winnie’s lecture tours and school engagements. (RefNo: WF)

Founded in 1921 as the New Education Fellowship, this organisation grew into an international organisation, and was re-named the World Education Fellowship in 1966. The fellowship’s central focus has been on child-centred education, social reform through education, democracy, world citizenship, international understanding and the promulgation of world peace. The collection, 1920s-1988, comprises the central administration records of the Fellowship. (RefNo: WEF)

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Philosophy of Education

Philosophy of education is the branch of applied or practical philosophy concerned with the nature and aims of education and the philosophical problems arising from educational theory and practice. Because that practice is ubiquitous in and across human societies, its social and individual manifestations so varied, and its influence so profound, the subject is wide-ranging, involving issues in ethics and social/political philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and language, and other areas of philosophy. Because it looks both inward to the parent discipline and outward to educational practice and the social, legal, and institutional contexts in which it takes place, philosophy of education concerns itself with both sides of the traditional theory/practice divide. Its subject matter includes both basic philosophical issues (e.g., the nature of the knowledge worth teaching, the character of educational equality and justice, etc.) and problems concerning specific educational policies and practices (e.g., the desirability of standardized curricula and testing, the social, economic, legal and moral dimensions of specific funding arrangements, the justification of curriculum decisions, etc.). In all this the philosopher of education prizes conceptual clarity, argumentative rigor, the fair-minded consideration of the interests of all involved in or affected by educational efforts and arrangements, and informed and well-reasoned valuation of educational aims and interventions.

Philosophy of education has a long and distinguished history in the Western philosophical tradition, from Socrates’ battles with the sophists to the present day. Many of the most distinguished figures in that tradition incorporated educational concerns into their broader philosophical agendas (Curren 2000, 2018; Rorty 1998). While that history is not the focus here, it is worth noting that the ideals of reasoned inquiry championed by Socrates and his descendants have long informed the view that education should foster in all students, to the extent possible, the disposition to seek reasons and the ability to evaluate them cogently, and to be guided by their evaluations in matters of belief, action and judgment. This view, that education centrally involves the fostering of reason or rationality, has with varying articulations and qualifications been embraced by most of those historical figures; it continues to be defended by contemporary philosophers of education as well (Scheffler 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988, 1997, 2007, 2017). As with any philosophical thesis it is controversial; some dimensions of the controversy are explored below.

This entry is a selective survey of important contemporary work in Anglophone philosophy of education; it does not treat in detail recent scholarship outside that context.

1. Problems in Delineating the Field

2. analytic philosophy of education and its influence, 3.1 the content of the curriculum and the aims and functions of schooling, 3.2 social, political and moral philosophy, 3.3 social epistemology, virtue epistemology, and the epistemology of education, 3.4 philosophical disputes concerning empirical education research, 4. concluding remarks, other internet resources, related entries.

The inward/outward looking nature of the field of philosophy of education alluded to above makes the task of delineating the field, of giving an over-all picture of the intellectual landscape, somewhat complicated (for a detailed account of this topography, see Phillips 1985, 2010). Suffice it to say that some philosophers, as well as focusing inward on the abstract philosophical issues that concern them, are drawn outwards to discuss or comment on issues that are more commonly regarded as falling within the purview of professional educators, educational researchers, policy-makers and the like. (An example is Michael Scriven, who in his early career was a prominent philosopher of science; later he became a central figure in the development of the field of evaluation of educational and social programs. See Scriven 1991a, 1991b.) At the same time, there are professionals in the educational or closely related spheres who are drawn to discuss one or another of the philosophical issues that they encounter in the course of their work. (An example here is the behaviorist psychologist B.F. Skinner, the central figure in the development of operant conditioning and programmed learning, who in works such as Walden Two (1948) and Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1972) grappled—albeit controversially—with major philosophical issues that were related to his work.)

What makes the field even more amorphous is the existence of works on educational topics, written by well-regarded philosophers who have made major contributions to their discipline; these educational reflections have little or no philosophical content, illustrating the truth that philosophers do not always write philosophy. However, despite this, works in this genre have often been treated as contributions to philosophy of education. (Examples include John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education [1693] and Bertrand Russell’s rollicking pieces written primarily to raise funds to support a progressive school he ran with his wife. (See Park 1965.)

Finally, as indicated earlier, the domain of education is vast, the issues it raises are almost overwhelmingly numerous and are of great complexity, and the social significance of the field is second to none. These features make the phenomena and problems of education of great interest to a wide range of socially-concerned intellectuals, who bring with them their own favored conceptual frameworks—concepts, theories and ideologies, methods of analysis and argumentation, metaphysical and other assumptions, and the like. It is not surprising that scholars who work in this broad genre also find a home in the field of philosophy of education.

As a result of these various factors, the significant intellectual and social trends of the past few centuries, together with the significant developments in philosophy, all have had an impact on the content of arguments and methods of argumentation in philosophy of education—Marxism, psycho-analysis, existentialism, phenomenology, positivism, post-modernism, pragmatism, neo-liberalism, the several waves of feminism, analytic philosophy in both its ordinary language and more formal guises, are merely the tip of the iceberg.

Conceptual analysis, careful assessment of arguments, the rooting out of ambiguity, the drawing of clarifying distinctions—all of which are at least part of the philosophical toolkit—have been respected activities within philosophy from the dawn of the field. No doubt it somewhat over-simplifies the complex path of intellectual history to suggest that what happened in the twentieth century—early on, in the home discipline itself, and with a lag of a decade or more in philosophy of education—is that philosophical analysis came to be viewed by some scholars as being the major philosophical activity (or set of activities), or even as being the only viable or reputable activity. In any case, as they gained prominence and for a time hegemonic influence during the rise of analytic philosophy early in the twentieth century analytic techniques came to dominate philosophy of education in the middle third of that century (Curren, Robertson, & Hager 2003).

The pioneering work in the modern period entirely in an analytic mode was the short monograph by C.D. Hardie, Truth and Fallacy in Educational Theory (1941; reissued in 1962). In his Introduction, Hardie (who had studied with C.D. Broad and I.A. Richards) made it clear that he was putting all his eggs into the ordinary-language-analysis basket:

The Cambridge analytical school, led by Moore, Broad and Wittgenstein, has attempted so to analyse propositions that it will always be apparent whether the disagreement between philosophers is one concerning matters of fact, or is one concerning the use of words, or is, as is frequently the case, a purely emotive one. It is time, I think, that a similar attitude became common in the field of educational theory. (Hardie 1962: xix)

About a decade after the end of the Second World War the floodgates opened and a stream of work in the analytic mode appeared; the following is merely a sample. D. J. O’Connor published An Introduction to Philosophy of Education (1957) in which, among other things, he argued that the word “theory” as it is used in educational contexts is merely a courtesy title, for educational theories are nothing like what bear this title in the natural sciences. Israel Scheffler, who became the paramount philosopher of education in North America, produced a number of important works including The Language of Education (1960), which contained clarifying and influential analyses of definitions (he distinguished reportive, stipulative, and programmatic types) and the logic of slogans (often these are literally meaningless, and, he argued, should be seen as truncated arguments), Conditions of Knowledge (1965), still the best introduction to the epistemological side of philosophy of education, and Reason and Teaching (1973 [1989]), which in a wide-ranging and influential series of essays makes the case for regarding the fostering of rationality/critical thinking as a fundamental educational ideal (cf. Siegel 2016). B. O. Smith and R. H. Ennis edited the volume Language and Concepts in Education (1961); and R.D. Archambault edited Philosophical Analysis and Education (1965), consisting of essays by a number of prominent British writers, most notably R. S. Peters (whose status in Britain paralleled that of Scheffler in the United States), Paul Hirst, and John Wilson. Topics covered in the Archambault volume were typical of those that became the “bread and butter” of analytic philosophy of education (APE) throughout the English-speaking world—education as a process of initiation, liberal education, the nature of knowledge, types of teaching, and instruction versus indoctrination.

Among the most influential products of APE was the analysis developed by Hirst and Peters (1970) and Peters (1973) of the concept of education itself. Using as a touchstone “normal English usage,” it was concluded that a person who has been educated (rather than instructed or indoctrinated) has been (i) changed for the better; (ii) this change has involved the acquisition of knowledge and intellectual skills and the development of understanding; and (iii) the person has come to care for, or be committed to, the domains of knowledge and skill into which he or she has been initiated. The method used by Hirst and Peters comes across clearly in their handling of the analogy with the concept of “reform”, one they sometimes drew upon for expository purposes. A criminal who has been reformed has changed for the better, and has developed a commitment to the new mode of life (if one or other of these conditions does not hold, a speaker of standard English would not say the criminal has been reformed). Clearly the analogy with reform breaks down with respect to the knowledge and understanding conditions. Elsewhere Peters developed the fruitful notion of “education as initiation”.

The concept of indoctrination was also of great interest to analytic philosophers of education, for, it was argued, getting clear about precisely what constitutes indoctrination also would serve to clarify the border that demarcates it from acceptable educational processes. Thus, whether or not an instructional episode was a case of indoctrination was determined by the content taught, the intention of the instructor, the methods of instruction used, the outcomes of the instruction, or by some combination of these. Adherents of the different analyses used the same general type of argument to make their case, namely, appeal to normal and aberrant usage. Unfortunately, ordinary language analysis did not lead to unanimity of opinion about where this border was located, and rival analyses of the concept were put forward (Snook 1972). The danger of restricting analysis to ordinary language (“normal English usage”) was recognized early on by Scheffler, whose preferred view of analysis emphasized

first, its greater sophistication as regards language, and the interpenetration of language and inquiry, second, its attempt to follow the modern example of the sciences in empirical spirit, in rigor, in attention to detail, in respect for alternatives, and in objectivity of method, and third, its use of techniques of symbolic logic brought to full development only in the last fifty years… It is…this union of scientific spirit and logical method applied toward the clarification of basic ideas that characterizes current analytic philosophy [and that ought to characterize analytic philosophy of education]. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 9–10])

After a period of dominance, for a number of important reasons the influence of APE went into decline. First, there were growing criticisms that the work of analytic philosophers of education had become focused upon minutiae and in the main was bereft of practical import. (It is worth noting that a 1966 article in Time , reprinted in Lucas 1969, had put forward the same criticism of mainstream philosophy.) Second, in the early 1970’s radical students in Britain accused Peters’ brand of linguistic analysis of conservatism, and of tacitly giving support to “traditional values”—they raised the issue of whose English usage was being analyzed?

Third, criticisms of language analysis in mainstream philosophy had been mounting for some time, and finally after a lag of many years were reaching the attention of philosophers of education; there even had been a surprising degree of interest on the part of the general reading public in the United Kingdom as early as 1959, when Gilbert Ryle, editor of the journal Mind , refused to commission a review of Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things (1959)—a detailed and quite acerbic critique of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and its espousal of ordinary language analysis. (Ryle argued that Gellner’s book was too insulting, a view that drew Bertrand Russell into the fray on Gellner’s side—in the daily press, no less; Russell produced a list of insulting remarks drawn from the work of great philosophers of the past. See Mehta 1963.)

Richard Peters had been given warning that all was not well with APE at a conference in Canada in 1966; after delivering a paper on “The aims of education: A conceptual inquiry” that was based on ordinary language analysis, a philosopher in the audience (William Dray) asked Peters “ whose concepts do we analyze?” Dray went on to suggest that different people, and different groups within society, have different concepts of education. Five years before the radical students raised the same issue, Dray pointed to the possibility that what Peters had presented under the guise of a “logical analysis” was nothing but the favored usage of a certain class of persons—a class that Peters happened to identify with (see Peters 1973, where to the editor’s credit the interaction with Dray is reprinted).

Fourth, during the decade of the seventies when these various critiques of analytic philosophy were in the process of eroding its luster, a spate of translations from the Continent stimulated some philosophers of education in Britain and North America to set out in new directions, and to adopt a new style of writing and argumentation. Key works by Gadamer, Foucault and Derrida appeared in English, and these were followed in 1984 by Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition . The classic works of Heidegger and Husserl also found new admirers; and feminist philosophers of education were finding their voices—Maxine Greene published a number of pieces in the 1970s and 1980s, including The Dialectic of Freedom (1988); the influential book by Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education , appeared the same year as the work by Lyotard, followed a year later by Jane Roland Martin’s Reclaiming a Conversation . In more recent years all these trends have continued. APE was and is no longer the center of interest, although, as indicated below, it still retains its voice.

3. Areas of Contemporary Activity

As was stressed at the outset, the field of education is huge and contains within it a virtually inexhaustible number of issues that are of philosophical interest. To attempt comprehensive coverage of how philosophers of education have been working within this thicket would be a quixotic task for a large single volume and is out of the question for a solitary encyclopedia entry. Nevertheless, a valiant attempt to give an overview was made in A Companion to the Philosophy of Education (Curren 2003), which contains more than six-hundred pages divided into forty-five chapters each of which surveys a subfield of work. The following random selection of chapter topics gives a sense of the enormous scope of the field: Sex education, special education, science education, aesthetic education, theories of teaching and learning, religious education, knowledge, truth and learning, cultivating reason, the measurement of learning, multicultural education, education and the politics of identity, education and standards of living, motivation and classroom management, feminism, critical theory, postmodernism, romanticism, the purposes of universities, affirmative action in higher education, and professional education. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education (Siegel 2009) contains a similarly broad range of articles on (among other things) the epistemic and moral aims of education, liberal education and its imminent demise, thinking and reasoning, fallibilism and fallibility, indoctrination, authenticity, the development of rationality, Socratic teaching, educating the imagination, caring and empathy in moral education, the limits of moral education, the cultivation of character, values education, curriculum and the value of knowledge, education and democracy, art and education, science education and religious toleration, constructivism and scientific methods, multicultural education, prejudice, authority and the interests of children, and on pragmatist, feminist, and postmodernist approaches to philosophy of education.

Given this enormous range, there is no non-arbitrary way to select a small number of topics for further discussion, nor can the topics that are chosen be pursued in great depth. The choice of those below has been made with an eye to highlighting contemporary work that makes solid contact with and contributes to important discussions in general philosophy and/or the academic educational and educational research communities.

The issue of what should be taught to students at all levels of education—the issue of curriculum content—obviously is a fundamental one, and it is an extraordinarily difficult one with which to grapple. In tackling it, care needs to be taken to distinguish between education and schooling—for although education can occur in schools, so can mis-education, and many other things can take place there that are educationally orthogonal (such as the provision of free or subsidized lunches and the development of social networks); and it also must be recognized that education can occur in the home, in libraries and museums, in churches and clubs, in solitary interaction with the public media, and the like.

In developing a curriculum (whether in a specific subject area, or more broadly as the whole range of offerings in an educational institution or system), a number of difficult decisions need to be made. Issues such as the proper ordering or sequencing of topics in the chosen subject, the time to be allocated to each topic, the lab work or excursions or projects that are appropriate for particular topics, can all be regarded as technical issues best resolved either by educationists who have a depth of experience with the target age group or by experts in the psychology of learning and the like. But there are deeper issues, ones concerning the validity of the justifications that have been given for including/excluding particular subjects or topics in the offerings of formal educational institutions. (Why should evolution or creation “science” be included, or excluded, as a topic within the standard high school subject Biology? Is the justification that is given for teaching Economics in some schools coherent and convincing? Do the justifications for including/excluding materials on birth control, patriotism, the Holocaust or wartime atrocities in the curriculum in some school districts stand up to critical scrutiny?)

The different justifications for particular items of curriculum content that have been put forward by philosophers and others since Plato’s pioneering efforts all draw, explicitly or implicitly, upon the positions that the respective theorists hold about at least three sets of issues.

First, what are the aims and/or functions of education (aims and functions are not necessarily the same)? Many aims have been proposed; a short list includes the production of knowledge and knowledgeable students, the fostering of curiosity and inquisitiveness, the enhancement of understanding, the enlargement of the imagination, the civilizing of students, the fostering of rationality and/or autonomy, and the development in students of care, concern and associated dispositions and attitudes (see Siegel 2007 for a longer list). The justifications offered for all such aims have been controversial, and alternative justifications of a single proposed aim can provoke philosophical controversy. Consider the aim of autonomy. Aristotle asked, what constitutes the good life and/or human flourishing, such that education should foster these (Curren 2013)? These two formulations are related, for it is arguable that our educational institutions should aim to equip individuals to pursue this good life—although this is not obvious, both because it is not clear that there is one conception of the good or flourishing life that is the good or flourishing life for everyone, and it is not clear that this is a question that should be settled in advance rather than determined by students for themselves. Thus, for example, if our view of human flourishing includes the capacity to think and act autonomously, then the case can be made that educational institutions—and their curricula—should aim to prepare, or help to prepare, autonomous individuals. A rival justification of the aim of autonomy, associated with Kant, champions the educational fostering of autonomy not on the basis of its contribution to human flourishing, but rather the obligation to treat students with respect as persons (Scheffler 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988). Still others urge the fostering of autonomy on the basis of students’ fundamental interests, in ways that draw upon both Aristotelian and Kantian conceptual resources (Brighouse 2005, 2009). It is also possible to reject the fostering of autonomy as an educational aim (Hand 2006).

Assuming that the aim can be justified, how students should be helped to become autonomous or develop a conception of the good life and pursue it is of course not immediately obvious, and much philosophical ink has been spilled on the general question of how best to determine curriculum content. One influential line of argument was developed by Paul Hirst, who argued that knowledge is essential for developing and then pursuing a conception of the good life, and because logical analysis shows, he argued, that there are seven basic forms of knowledge, the case can be made that the function of the curriculum is to introduce students to each of these forms (Hirst 1965; see Phillips 1987: ch. 11). Another, suggested by Scheffler, is that curriculum content should be selected so as “to help the learner attain maximum self-sufficiency as economically as possible.” The relevant sorts of economy include those of resources, teacher effort, student effort, and the generalizability or transfer value of content, while the self-sufficiency in question includes

self-awareness, imaginative weighing of alternative courses of action, understanding of other people’s choices and ways of life, decisiveness without rigidity, emancipation from stereotyped ways of thinking and perceiving…empathy… intuition, criticism and independent judgment. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 123–5])

Both impose important constraints on the curricular content to be taught.

Second, is it justifiable to treat the curriculum of an educational institution as a vehicle for furthering the socio-political interests and goals of a dominant group, or any particular group, including one’s own; and relatedly, is it justifiable to design the curriculum so that it serves as an instrument of control or of social engineering? In the closing decades of the twentieth century there were numerous discussions of curriculum theory, particularly from Marxist and postmodern perspectives, that offered the sobering analysis that in many educational systems, including those in Western democracies, the curriculum did indeed reflect and serve the interests of powerful cultural elites. What to do about this situation (if it is indeed the situation of contemporary educational institutions) is far from clear and is the focus of much work at the interface of philosophy of education and social/political philosophy, some of which is discussed in the next section. A closely related question is this: ought educational institutions be designed to further pre-determined social ends, or rather to enable students to competently evaluate all such ends? Scheffler argued that we should opt for the latter: we must

surrender the idea of shaping or molding the mind of the pupil. The function of education…is rather to liberate the mind, strengthen its critical powers, [and] inform it with knowledge and the capacity for independent inquiry. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 139])

Third, should educational programs at the elementary and secondary levels be made up of a number of disparate offerings, so that individuals with different interests and abilities and affinities for learning can pursue curricula that are suitable? Or should every student pursue the same curriculum as far as each is able?—a curriculum, it should be noted, that in past cases nearly always was based on the needs or interests of those students who were academically inclined or were destined for elite social roles. Mortimer Adler and others in the late twentieth century sometimes used the aphorism “the best education for the best is the best education for all.”

The thinking here can be explicated in terms of the analogy of an out-of-control virulent disease, for which there is only one type of medicine available; taking a large dose of this medicine is extremely beneficial, and the hope is that taking only a little—while less effective—is better than taking none at all. Medically, this is dubious, while the educational version—forcing students to work, until they exit the system, on topics that do not interest them and for which they have no facility or motivation—has even less merit. (For a critique of Adler and his Paideia Proposal , see Noddings 2015.) It is interesting to compare the modern “one curriculum track for all” position with Plato’s system outlined in the Republic , according to which all students—and importantly this included girls—set out on the same course of study. Over time, as they moved up the educational ladder it would become obvious that some had reached the limit imposed upon them by nature, and they would be directed off into appropriate social roles in which they would find fulfillment, for their abilities would match the demands of these roles. Those who continued on with their education would eventually become members of the ruling class of Guardians.

The publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971 was the most notable event in the history of political philosophy over the last century. The book spurred a period of ferment in political philosophy that included, among other things, new research on educationally fundamental themes. The principles of justice in educational distribution have perhaps been the dominant theme in this literature, and Rawls’s influence on its development has been pervasive.

Rawls’s theory of justice made so-called “fair equality of opportunity” one of its constitutive principles. Fair equality of opportunity entailed that the distribution of education would not put the children of those who currently occupied coveted social positions at any competitive advantage over other, equally talented and motivated children seeking the qualifications for those positions (Rawls 1971: 72–75). Its purpose was to prevent socio-economic differences from hardening into social castes that were perpetuated across generations. One obvious criticism of fair equality of opportunity is that it does not prohibit an educational distribution that lavished resources on the most talented children while offering minimal opportunities to others. So long as untalented students from wealthy families were assigned opportunities no better than those available to their untalented peers among the poor, no breach of the principle would occur. Even the most moderate egalitarians might find such a distributive regime to be intuitively repugnant.

Repugnance might be mitigated somewhat by the ways in which the overall structure of Rawls’s conception of justice protects the interests of those who fare badly in educational competition. All citizens must enjoy the same basic liberties, and equal liberty always has moral priority over equal opportunity: the former can never be compromised to advance the latter. Further, inequality in the distribution of income and wealth are permitted only to the degree that it serves the interests of the least advantaged group in society. But even with these qualifications, fair equality of opportunity is arguably less than really fair to anyone. The fact that their education should secure ends other than access to the most selective social positions—ends such as artistic appreciation, the kind of self-knowledge that humanistic study can furnish, or civic virtue—is deemed irrelevant according to Rawls’s principle. But surely it is relevant, given that a principle of educational justice must be responsive to the full range of educationally important goods.

Suppose we revise our account of the goods included in educational distribution so that aesthetic appreciation, say, and the necessary understanding and virtue for conscientious citizenship count for just as much as job-related skills. An interesting implication of doing so is that the rationale for requiring equality under any just distribution becomes decreasingly clear. That is because job-related skills are positional whereas the other educational goods are not (Hollis 1982). If you and I both aspire to a career in business management for which we are equally qualified, any increase in your job-related skills is a corresponding disadvantage to me unless I can catch up. Positional goods have a competitive structure by definition, though the ends of civic or aesthetic education do not fit that structure. If you and I aspire to be good citizens and are equal in civic understanding and virtue, an advance in your civic education is no disadvantage to me. On the contrary, it is easier to be a good citizen the better other citizens learn to be. At the very least, so far as non-positional goods figure in our conception of what counts as a good education, the moral stakes of inequality are thereby lowered.

In fact, an emerging alternative to fair equality of opportunity is a principle that stipulates some benchmark of adequacy in achievement or opportunity as the relevant standard of distribution. But it is misleading to represent this as a contrast between egalitarian and sufficientarian conceptions. Philosophically serious interpretations of adequacy derive from the ideal of equal citizenship (Satz 2007; Anderson 2007). Then again, fair equality of opportunity in Rawls’s theory is derived from a more fundamental ideal of equality among citizens. This was arguably true in A Theory of Justice but it is certainly true in his later work (Dworkin 1977: 150–183; Rawls 1993). So, both Rawls’s principle and the emerging alternative share an egalitarian foundation. The debate between adherents of equal opportunity and those misnamed as sufficientarians is certainly not over (e.g., Brighouse & Swift 2009; Jacobs 2010; Warnick 2015). Further progress will likely hinge on explicating the most compelling conception of the egalitarian foundation from which distributive principles are to be inferred. Another Rawls-inspired alternative is that a “prioritarian” distribution of achievement or opportunity might turn out to be the best principle we can come up with—i.e., one that favors the interests of the least advantaged students (Schouten 2012).

The publication of Rawls’s Political Liberalism in 1993 signaled a decisive turning point in his thinking about justice. In his earlier book, the theory of justice had been presented as if it were universally valid. But Rawls had come to think that any theory of justice presented as such was open to reasonable rejection. A more circumspect approach to justification would seek grounds for justice as fairness in an overlapping consensus between the many reasonable values and doctrines that thrive in a democratic political culture. Rawls argued that such a culture is informed by a shared ideal of free and equal citizenship that provided a new, distinctively democratic framework for justifying a conception of justice. The shift to political liberalism involved little revision on Rawls’s part to the content of the principles he favored. But the salience it gave to questions about citizenship in the fabric of liberal political theory had important educational implications. How was the ideal of free and equal citizenship to be instantiated in education in a way that accommodated the range of reasonable values and doctrines encompassed in an overlapping consensus? Political Liberalism has inspired a range of answers to that question (cf. Callan 1997; Clayton 2006; Bull 2008).

Other philosophers besides Rawls in the 1990s took up a cluster of questions about civic education, and not always from a liberal perspective. Alasdair Macintyre’s After Virtue (1984) strongly influenced the development of communitarian political theory which, as its very name might suggest, argued that the cultivation of community could preempt many of the problems with conflicting individual rights at the core of liberalism. As a full-standing alternative to liberalism, communitarianism might have little to recommend it. But it was a spur for liberal philosophers to think about how communities could be built and sustained to support the more familiar projects of liberal politics (e.g., Strike 2010). Furthermore, its arguments often converged with those advanced by feminist exponents of the ethic of care (Noddings 1984; Gilligan 1982). Noddings’ work is particularly notable because she inferred a cogent and radical agenda for the reform of schools from her conception of care (Noddings 1992).

One persistent controversy in citizenship theory has been about whether patriotism is correctly deemed a virtue, given our obligations to those who are not our fellow citizens in an increasingly interdependent world and the sordid history of xenophobia with which modern nation states are associated. The controversy is partly about what we should teach in our schools and is commonly discussed by philosophers in that context (Galston 1991; Ben-Porath 2006; Callan 2006; Miller 2007; Curren & Dorn 2018). The controversy is related to a deeper and more pervasive question about how morally or intellectually taxing the best conception of our citizenship should be. The more taxing it is, the more constraining its derivative conception of civic education will be. Contemporary political philosophers offer divergent arguments about these matters. For example, Gutmann and Thompson claim that citizens of diverse democracies need to “understand the diverse ways of life of their fellow citizens” (Gutmann & Thompson 1996: 66). The need arises from the obligation of reciprocity which they (like Rawls) believe to be integral to citizenship. Because I must seek to cooperate with others politically on terms that make sense from their moral perspective as well as my own, I must be ready to enter that perspective imaginatively so as to grasp its distinctive content. Many such perspectives prosper in liberal democracies, and so the task of reciprocal understanding is necessarily onerous. Still, our actions qua deliberative citizen must be grounded in such reciprocity if political cooperation on terms acceptable to us as (diversely) morally motivated citizens is to be possible at all. This is tantamount to an imperative to think autonomously inside the role of citizen because I cannot close-mindedly resist critical consideration of moral views alien to my own without flouting my responsibilities as a deliberative citizen.

Civic education does not exhaust the domain of moral education, even though the more robust conceptions of equal citizenship have far-reaching implications for just relations in civil society and the family. The study of moral education has traditionally taken its bearings from normative ethics rather than political philosophy, and this is largely true of work undertaken in recent decades. The major development here has been the revival of virtue ethics as an alternative to the deontological and consequentialist theories that dominated discussion for much of the twentieth century.

The defining idea of virtue ethics is that our criterion of moral right and wrong must derive from a conception of how the ideally virtuous agent would distinguish between the two. Virtue ethics is thus an alternative to both consequentialism and deontology which locate the relevant criterion in producing good consequences or meeting the requirements of moral duty respectively. The debate about the comparative merits of these theories is not resolved, but from an educational perspective that may be less important than it has sometimes seemed to antagonists in the debate. To be sure, adjudicating between rival theories in normative ethics might shed light on how best to construe the process of moral education, and philosophical reflection on the process might help us to adjudicate between the theories. There has been extensive work on habituation and virtue, largely inspired by Aristotle (Burnyeat 1980; Peters 1981). But whether this does anything to establish the superiority of virtue ethics over its competitors is far from obvious. Other aspects of moral education—in particular, the paired processes of role-modelling and identification—deserve much more scrutiny than they have received (Audi 2017; Kristjánsson 2015, 2017).

Related to the issues concerning the aims and functions of education and schooling rehearsed above are those involving the specifically epistemic aims of education and attendant issues treated by social and virtue epistemologists. (The papers collected in Kotzee 2013 and Baehr 2016 highlight the current and growing interactions among social epistemologists, virtue epistemologists, and philosophers of education.)

There is, first, a lively debate concerning putative epistemic aims. Alvin Goldman argues that truth (or knowledge understood in the “weak” sense of true belief) is the fundamental epistemic aim of education (Goldman 1999). Others, including the majority of historically significant philosophers of education, hold that critical thinking or rationality and rational belief (or knowledge in the “strong” sense that includes justification) is the basic epistemic educational aim (Bailin & Siegel 2003; Scheffler 1965, 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988, 1997, 2005, 2017). Catherine Z. Elgin (1999a,b) and Duncan Pritchard (2013, 2016; Carter & Pritchard 2017) have independently urged that understanding is the basic aim. Pritchard’s view combines understanding with intellectual virtue ; Jason Baehr (2011) systematically defends the fostering of the intellectual virtues as the fundamental epistemic aim of education. This cluster of views continues to engender ongoing discussion and debate. (Its complex literature is collected in Carter and Kotzee 2015, summarized in Siegel 2018, and helpfully analyzed in Watson 2016.)

A further controversy concerns the places of testimony and trust in the classroom: In what circumstances if any ought students to trust their teachers’ pronouncements, and why? Here the epistemology of education is informed by social epistemology, specifically the epistemology of testimony; the familiar reductionism/anti-reductionism controversy there is applicable to students and teachers. Anti-reductionists, who regard testimony as a basic source of justification, may with equanimity approve of students’ taking their teachers’ word at face value and believing what they say; reductionists may balk. Does teacher testimony itself constitute good reason for student belief?

The correct answer here seems clearly enough to be “it depends”. For very young children who have yet to acquire or develop the ability to subject teacher declarations to critical scrutiny, there seems to be little alternative to accepting what their teachers tell them. For older and more cognitively sophisticated students there seem to be more options: they can assess them for plausibility, compare them with other opinions, assess the teachers’ proffered reasons, subject them to independent evaluation, etc. Regarding “the teacher says that p ” as itself a good reason to believe it appears moreover to contravene the widely shared conviction that an important educational aim is helping students to become able to evaluate candidate beliefs for themselves and believe accordingly. That said, all sides agree that sometimes believers, including students, have good reasons simply to trust what others tell them. There is thus more work to do here by both social epistemologists and philosophers of education (for further discussion see Goldberg 2013; Siegel 2005, 2018).

A further cluster of questions, of long-standing interest to philosophers of education, concerns indoctrination : How if at all does it differ from legitimate teaching? Is it inevitable, and if so is it not always necessarily bad? First, what is it? As we saw earlier, extant analyses focus on the aims or intentions of the indoctrinator, the methods employed, or the content transmitted. If the indoctrination is successful, all have the result that students/victims either don’t, won’t, or can’t subject the indoctrinated material to proper epistemic evaluation. In this way it produces both belief that is evidentially unsupported or contravened and uncritical dispositions to believe. It might seem obvious that indoctrination, so understood, is educationally undesirable. But it equally seems that very young children, at least, have no alternative but to believe sans evidence; they have yet to acquire the dispositions to seek and evaluate evidence, or the abilities to recognize evidence or evaluate it. Thus we seem driven to the views that indoctrination is both unavoidable and yet bad and to be avoided. It is not obvious how this conundrum is best handled. One option is to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable indoctrination. Another is to distinguish between indoctrination (which is always bad) and non-indoctrinating belief inculcation, the latter being such that students are taught some things without reasons (the alphabet, the numbers, how to read and count, etc.), but in such a way that critical evaluation of all such material (and everything else) is prized and fostered (Siegel 1988: ch. 5). In the end the distinctions required by the two options might be extensionally equivalent (Siegel 2018).

Education, it is generally granted, fosters belief : in the typical propositional case, Smith teaches Jones that p , and if all goes well Jones learns it and comes to believe it. Education also has the task of fostering open-mindedness and an appreciation of our fallibility : All the theorists mentioned thus far, especially those in the critical thinking and intellectual virtue camps, urge their importance. But these two might seem at odds. If Jones (fully) believes that p , can she also be open-minded about it? Can she believe, for example, that earthquakes are caused by the movements of tectonic plates, while also believing that perhaps they aren’t? This cluster of italicized notions requires careful handling; it is helpfully discussed by Jonathan Adler (2002, 2003), who recommends regarding the latter two as meta-attitudes concerning one’s first-order beliefs rather than lessened degrees of belief or commitments to those beliefs.

Other traditional epistemological worries that impinge upon the epistemology of education concern (a) absolutism , pluralism and relativism with respect to knowledge, truth and justification as these relate to what is taught, (b) the character and status of group epistemologies and the prospects for understanding such epistemic goods “universalistically” in the face of “particularist” challenges, (c) the relation between “knowledge-how” and “knowledge-that” and their respective places in the curriculum, (d) concerns raised by multiculturalism and the inclusion/exclusion of marginalized perspectives in curriculum content and the classroom, and (e) further issues concerning teaching and learning. (There is more here than can be briefly summarized; for more references and systematic treatment cf. Bailin & Siegel 2003; Carter & Kotzee 2015; Cleverley & Phillips 1986; Robertson 2009; Siegel 2004, 2017; and Watson 2016.)

The educational research enterprise has been criticized for a century or more by politicians, policymakers, administrators, curriculum developers, teachers, philosophers of education, and by researchers themselves—but the criticisms have been contradictory. Charges of being “too ivory tower and theory-oriented” are found alongside “too focused on practice and too atheoretical”; but in light of the views of John Dewey and William James that the function of theory is to guide intelligent practice and problem-solving, it is becoming more fashionable to hold that the “theory v. practice” dichotomy is a false one. (For an illuminating account of the historical development of educational research and its tribulations, see Lagemann 2000.)

A similar trend can be discerned with respect to the long warfare between two rival groups of research methods—on one hand quantitative/statistical approaches to research, and on the other hand the qualitative/ethnographic family. (The choice of labels here is not entirely risk-free, for they have been contested; furthermore the first approach is quite often associated with “experimental” studies, and the latter with “case studies”, but this is an over-simplification.) For several decades these two rival methodological camps were treated by researchers and a few philosophers of education as being rival paradigms (Kuhn’s ideas, albeit in a very loose form, have been influential in the field of educational research), and the dispute between them was commonly referred to as “the paradigm wars”. In essence the issue at stake was epistemological: members of the quantitative/experimental camp believed that only their methods could lead to well-warranted knowledge claims, especially about the causal factors at play in educational phenomena, and on the whole they regarded qualitative methods as lacking in rigor; on the other hand the adherents of qualitative/ethnographic approaches held that the other camp was too “positivistic” and was operating with an inadequate view of causation in human affairs—one that ignored the role of motives and reasons, possession of relevant background knowledge, awareness of cultural norms, and the like. Few if any commentators in the “paradigm wars” suggested that there was anything prohibiting the use of both approaches in the one research program—provided that if both were used, they were used only sequentially or in parallel, for they were underwritten by different epistemologies and hence could not be blended together. But recently the trend has been towards rapprochement, towards the view that the two methodological families are, in fact, compatible and are not at all like paradigms in the Kuhnian sense(s) of the term; the melding of the two approaches is often called “mixed methods research”, and it is growing in popularity. (For more detailed discussion of these “wars” see Howe 2003 and Phillips 2009.)

The most lively contemporary debates about education research, however, were set in motion around the turn of the millennium when the US Federal Government moved in the direction of funding only rigorously scientific educational research—the kind that could establish causal factors which could then guide the development of practically effective policies. (It was held that such a causal knowledge base was available for medical decision-making.) The definition of “rigorously scientific”, however, was decided by politicians and not by the research community, and it was given in terms of the use of a specific research method—the net effect being that the only research projects to receive Federal funding were those that carried out randomized controlled experiments or field trials (RFTs). It has become common over the last decade to refer to the RFT as the “gold standard” methodology.

The National Research Council (NRC)—an arm of the US National Academies of Science—issued a report, influenced by postpostivistic philosophy of science (NRC 2002), that argued that this criterion was far too narrow. Numerous essays have appeared subsequently that point out how the “gold standard” account of scientific rigor distorts the history of science, how the complex nature of the relation between evidence and policy-making has been distorted and made to appear overly simple (for instance the role of value-judgments in linking empirical findings to policy directives is often overlooked), and qualitative researchers have insisted upon the scientific nature of their work. Nevertheless, and possibly because it tried to be balanced and supported the use of RFTs in some research contexts, the NRC report has been the subject of symposia in four journals, where it has been supported by a few and attacked from a variety of philosophical fronts: Its authors were positivists, they erroneously believed that educational inquiry could be value neutral and that it could ignore the ways in which the exercise of power constrains the research process, they misunderstood the nature of educational phenomena, and so on. This cluster of issues continues to be debated by educational researchers and by philosophers of education and of science, and often involves basic topics in philosophy of science: the constitution of warranting evidence, the nature of theories and of confirmation and explanation, etc. Nancy Cartwright’s important recent work on causation, evidence, and evidence-based policy adds layers of both philosophical sophistication and real world practical analysis to the central issues just discussed (Cartwright & Hardie 2012, Cartwright 2013; cf. Kvernbekk 2015 for an overview of the controversies regarding evidence in the education and philosophy of education literatures).

As stressed earlier, it is impossible to do justice to the whole field of philosophy of education in a single encyclopedia entry. Different countries around the world have their own intellectual traditions and their own ways of institutionalizing philosophy of education in the academic universe, and no discussion of any of this appears in the present essay. But even in the Anglo-American world there is such a diversity of approaches that any author attempting to produce a synoptic account will quickly run into the borders of his or her competence. Clearly this has happened in the present case.

Fortunately, in the last thirty years or so resources have become available that significantly alleviate these problems. There has been a flood of encyclopedia entries, both on the field as a whole and also on many specific topics not well-covered in the present essay (see, as a sample, Burbules 1994; Chambliss 1996b; Curren 1998, 2018; Phillips 1985, 2010; Siegel 2007; Smeyers 1994), two “Encyclopedias” (Chambliss 1996a; Phillips 2014), a “Guide” (Blake, Smeyers, Smith, & Standish 2003), a “Companion” (Curren 2003), two “Handbooks” (Siegel 2009; Bailey, Barrow, Carr, & McCarthy 2010), a comprehensive anthology (Curren 2007), a dictionary of key concepts in the field (Winch & Gingell 1999), and a good textbook or two (Carr 2003; Noddings 2015). In addition there are numerous volumes both of reprinted selections and of specially commissioned essays on specific topics, some of which were given short shrift here (for another sampling see A. Rorty 1998, Stone 1994), and several international journals, including Theory and Research in Education , Journal of Philosophy of Education , Educational Theory , Studies in Philosophy and Education , and Educational Philosophy and Theory . Thus there is more than enough material available to keep the interested reader busy.

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autonomy: personal | Dewey, John | feminist philosophy, interventions: ethics | feminist philosophy, interventions: liberal feminism | feminist philosophy, interventions: political philosophy | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on autonomy | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on disability | Foucault, Michel | Gadamer, Hans-Georg | liberalism | Locke, John | Lyotard, Jean François | -->ordinary language --> | Plato | postmodernism | Rawls, John | rights: of children | Rousseau, Jean Jacques

Acknowledgments

The authors and editors would like to thank Randall Curren for sending a number of constructive suggestions for the Summer 2018 update of this entry.

Copyright © 2018 by Harvey Siegel D.C. Phillips Eamonn Callan

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The Progressive Teacher's Role in the Classroom

What active adult involvement does and doesn't entail..

Posted May 3, 2021 | Reviewed by Davia Sills

According to Michael Harrington and many other scholars, a careful reading of Marx's work makes it clear that he "regarded democracy as the essence of socialism." Soviet-style Communism, by contrast, corrupted socialism "by equating it with a totalitarian denial of freedom." 1 But, as Noam Chomsky has often pointed out, it served the interests of both the U.S.S.R. and the United States to pretend otherwise—that is, to equate the Soviet system with socialism, as if it represented the very apotheosis of Marx's vision rather than a cynical misuse of it. The Soviets wanted to bask in the glory of Marx's vision of bottom-up control and liberation from oppression, while the Americans wanted to make capitalism seem more appealing by linking the alternative of socialism to the tyranny of Lenin and Stalin.

I was fascinated by this paradox when I first encountered it—the idea that two diametrically opposed belief systems might embrace the same (faulty) conclusion for entirely different reasons. And I recognized it again years later when I saw something similar playing out in the field of education .

Traditional versus alternative education

Traditionalists believe that teachers should have absolute control over a classroom: Adults know more than children do and therefore ought to make all the important decisions—setting and enforcing the rules, managing students' behavior, planning the curriculum, dispensing knowledge, and so on. Groovy alternative educators, meanwhile, believe that children can be trusted to learn and grow and solve their problems essentially on their own, without outside interference.

Their prescriptions are utterly opposed. But both sides—direct-instruction behaviorists and Our Lady of the Fiercely Snapping Ruler, on the one hand; unschoolers and proponents of "free" schools like Summerhill and Sudbury Valley, on the other—share a key premise: Adult authority is necessarily autocratic and power-based. Their disagreement is about whether that’s a good thing.

A progressive education

Progressive education—the tradition of Dewey, Piaget et al.—challenges that premise and, with it, the underlying false dichotomy concerning the role of the adult. In just about any dispute, the assumption that there are only two options often serves the interests of both sides. If I convince you to view a situation in binary terms and then succeed in painting the other one as scary, you're left with whatever I'm selling.

Consider advice for raising children. One side says, "Look at those permissive parents, letting their spoiled kids get away with murder. It's scandalous! We need to assert our authority and impose some good old-fashioned discipline." And the other side says, "Look at those brutal authoritarians, cracking down on kids just for being kids. It's appalling! We need to trust children to do what's right and stop bossing them around." The specter of permissiveness is invoked by those who favor being punitive... and vice versa. Each side rallies support by reducing the number of possibilities to two. 2

Back in the world of education, traditionalists love to conflate all varieties of progressive pedagogy (and constructivist models of learning) with Rousseauvian romanticism. If you're not imposing a prefabricated curriculum and a set of rules on students—or if you're raising objections to practices such as grades, tests, lectures, worksheets, and homework—well, then, you obviously endorse a touchy-feely, loosey-goosey, fuzzy, fluffy, undemanding version of hippie idealism. 3 Conversely, the very same arguments and scenarios offered by progressives can lead free schoolers to summon the bogeyman of authoritarian education just because the adult plays an integral role.

In reality, the progressive approach will play out somewhat differently, depending on the ages being taught, the subject matter, and the needs of the individual students, some of whom may benefit from more structure and adult involvement than others (although no one benefits from being controlled). But there are some truths that apply across populations and circumstances, beginning with the fact that children are active meaning makers. They're not empty receptacles into which knowledge or skills are poured, nor are they beasts that need to be tamed and trained.

However, our determination to avoid controlling children or treating them as passive objects doesn't obligate us to stay at the periphery of the picture most of the time. Those who insist on a purely reactive or observational role for the teacher lest we impede their freedom (or learning, self-expression, or growth) remind me of people who have lately denounced any mask requirements or social-distancing restrictions during a deadly pandemic as assaults on their liberty.

The role of the progressive educator

The progressive educator says to the libertarian educator: Active adult involvement can foster children's intellectual growth. Yes, their needs and interests should be the "center of gravity" in the classroom (as Dewey put it). But the process of understanding ideas is facilitated by being gently challenged to reevaluate one's assumptions.

The teacher offers new possibilities for students to consider, to integrate, perhaps to rebel against. This prompts additional questions and opens up new avenues of discovery. The teacher also prepares the groundwork for students to more effectively learn with and from their peers than if they were left to their own devices, helping them to construct a caring cooperative community, providing guidance, and, when necessary, teaching the skills that promote constructive collaboration .

"But," the progressive educator adds, turning now to the traditionalist, "note how radically different this kind of active adult involvement is from what you're defending—and, indeed, from the coercion that so often takes place in classrooms." (Because of that, I want to be clear that the two options I'm rejecting do not trouble me equally. There is far more to be feared from traditional education than from what is offered in the name of alternative education.) 4

Eleanor Duckworth likes to say that great teachers know when and how to throw a monkey wrench into the gears, artfully complicating what kids have come up with, pushing them to think harder and better, rather than just supplying them with, or reinforcing, right answers. 5 In the Reggio Emilia model, meanwhile, “children are involved right from the start in defining questions to be explored,” 6 but teachers then help to clarify, amend, and reformulate those questions, sometimes combining one child’s query with another’s. Reggio educators sometimes use the metaphor of having a teacher catch a ball thrown to them by the children (their original question) and then toss it back (after having helped to sharpen that question).

This general conception of the adult's role is actually much more challenging for teachers, both pedagogically and psychologically, than either a traditional didactic approach or a laissez-faire approach. It's harder to provide the conditions for learning, to devise challenges and, if necessary, help to illuminate what’s interesting about those challenges. Teachers need to figure out on the fly when to offer guidance and criticism, directions and suggestions—and when to keep their mouths shut. Sometimes they reflect back to a student what she just said, perhaps subtly reframing her idea, using different words to bring out the underlying issues. In short, they are providing kids with what they need to take charge of their own learning—or, as a high school math teacher explained while I was visiting his class, the teacher is "in control of putting the students in control."

As I say, none of this is easy to do, much less to do well. And this way of conceptualizing the teacher's task asks us to rethink the conventional wisdom about a range of issues: which (and whose) questions will drive the curriculum, who gets to (or is required to) participate in class , whether (and to what end) students' understanding is scaffolded , whether educational technology has a role to play, whether learning is "lost" when students are out of school for extended periods, and how we ought to judge the effectiveness of what has taken place.

But the central point to keep in mind is the importance of an active role for the teacher in helping students to think deeply—a role that's neither autocratic nor focused just on issuing instructions and supplying information.

1. Michael Harrington, Socialism (Bantam, 1972), pp. 42, 187.

2. For more about this false dichotomy—along with other ways to think about these issues—please see my book Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason (Atria, 2005).

3. One specific example of this sort of bad-faith, straw-man argument is the assertion that anyone who criticizes the overuse of explicit phonics instruction must believe that all kids just pick up reading spontaneously... followed by vociferous denunciations of that belief rather than a defense of explicit phonics instruction for every child as the core of a reading curriculum.

4. Because the traditional, teacher-centered approach is more prevalent than laissez-faire education by orders of magnitude—and also, I believe, much more damaging than erring on the side of giving kids too much freedom—I have devoted much of my career to challenging traditionalism rather than to inveighing against the excesses of some forms of alternative education. Likewise for parenting: I'm not a fan of permissive child-rearing any more than I am of hands-off teaching, but, as I've argued elsewhere, the dominant problem with parenting in our society isn't permissiveness; it's the fear of permissiveness that leads adults to overcontrol children.

5. Carolyn Edwards et al., eds., The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Approach to Early Childhood Education (Ablex, 1993), p. 193.

6. Eleanor Duckworth, "The Having of Wonderful Ideas" and Other Essays on Teaching and Learning (Teachers College Press, 1987), p. 133.

Alfie Kohn writes about behavior and education. His books include Feel-Bad Education , The Homework Myth , and What Does It Mean To Be Well Educated?

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Progressive Education is the Opium of the Educators

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• Published: 30 March 2021
• Volume 56 , pages 829–862, ( 2022 )

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• Eugene Matusov   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7587-2266 1  

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Progressive Education, with its pedagogical desire to engage students in a taught curriculum in a meaningful way, is often viewed in opposition to Conventional Education. In this conceptual paper, I argue that despite and even because of this opposition, Progressive Education contributes to the stability of Conventional Education by making Conventional Education bearable for its teachers. I claim that despite its institutional rarity, Progressive Education remains hegemonic among educators because of its promise of meaningful learning for all their students that can be achieved in and out of the conventional school settings. I provide a critique of Progressive Education from the Critical Dialogue Education and Democratic Education perspectives.

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The praxis of ethics and justice in human rights learning: examining the limits of progressive education

For the Purpose of a Better Future Society: Advancing Progressive Philosophy and Pedagogy in Today’s World

Curriculum History and Progressive Education in Australia: A Prolegomenon

Unfortunately, I forgot her name.

In the Soviet Union, the failing grade was a 2 (an F in the US) and the highest was a 5 (an A in the US).

The highest grade level in the Soviet high school.

We also wanted to “learnification” of the students’ life – totalized transformation – totalized reduction – of the students’ everyday experiences into learning (cf., Biesta, 2013 , 2017 ).

Historians of education distinguished pedagogical vs. administrative Progressive Education. The latter involved the “scientific” efficiency in organizing educational institutions and processes. Although these two movements had some synergy and emerged within the political Progressive movement at the beginning of the twentieth century in the US, they also have tensions, disagreements, and incompatibilities with each other (Labaree, 2010 ; Tyack, 1974 ). Here, I focus on pedagogical Progressive Education.

It looks like that the administrative and pedagogical progressivism overlap in the first part of the nineteenth century in the USA.

Kant’s education is instrumental to serve autonomy rather than intrinsic having its worth in itself (Matusov & Marjanovic-Shane, 2019 ).

In this sense, Kant’s position fits progressive education (LaVaque-Manty, 2006 ).

This tension between “hard” and “soft” progressivism played an important role in the evolution of the MACOS educational project (“Man: A Course of Study”, the mid 1960s to the beginning of the 1970s), when Bruner, a co-founder of MACOS, seemed to be forced to move away from the “hard” progressivism of teaching preset big ideas and the preset abstract structures of knowledge to the “soft” progressivism of the emergent curriculum in an open-ended dialogue with the students leading the participants to unexpected ideas within predefined curricular themes (Dow, 1991 ).

“Pseudo-private organizations of students and staff [focused on promoting particular long-term interests of the participants], chartered by School Meeting to manage specialized equipment, space, and activities. Examples: Art Corporation, Cooking Corporation, Games Corporation, Gardening Corporation, Music Corporation, Science Corporation, Skate Park Corporation, Sports Corporation. Making their respective domains available to all students and staff, corporations develop and administer certification procedures for personal safety and to ensure proper use of equipment and supplies. Each corporation has its own bylaws [including a clause about self-dissolving] and officers. Some fundraise to support activities” (Rietmulder, 2019 , p. 138).

See a special issue, 50 (2012), of Journal of Russian and Eastern European Psychology dedicated to work by Russian educator and psychologist Alexander Lobok.

In my view, Jim Rietmulder argues against a soft version of Progressive Education recently articulated by Gert Biesta, who defined education through “teacherly gesture” that “tries to say no more than ‘look, there is something there that I believe might be good, important, worthwhile for you to pay attention to’ (see Biesta, 2017 ). And this gesture not just focuses the attention on the world ‘out there’ but in one and the same ‘move’ brings the ‘I’ of the student into play” (Biesta, 2020 , p. 2).

The Greek word “school” literally means ‘leisure” (Arendt, 1958 ).

“Negative liberty” is defined by the assumption that a person has full freedom until it becomes limited by an authority. Positive liberty is aimed at channeling people to the outcome desired by the authority. In contrast, negative liberty is aimed at preventing people from the outcome undesired by the authority.

John Dewey highly regarded Rousseau’s Emile praising Rousseau’s pedagogical framework as the “keynote of all modern efforts for educational progress” (Dewey & Dewey, 1962 , pp. 1–2).

https://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/education-statistics/index.html

Here is a list of private progressive schools by state: https://www.k12academics.com/national-directories/progressive-schools

Here is an incomplete list of public progressive schools http://augusttojune.com/resources/the-whole-child-model/ . There are about 4,000 Montessori schools, http://montessori.edu/FAQMontessori.html ; 150 Waldorf schools https://waldorfanswers.org/WaldorfFAQ.htm . It is difficult to assess how many individual classrooms can be run as progressive inside of schools that are otherwise characterized by conventional, transmission of knowledge, pedagogy.

“…progressivism has tended to be broadly antithetical to the ideas of testing and measurement and progressive advocates of all hues have repeatedly refused to characterize knowledge and its importance in such crudely hierarchical and quantifiable terms” (Howlett, 2013 , p. 104).

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Matusov, E. Progressive Education is the Opium of the Educators. Integr. psych. behav. 56 , 829–862 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-021-09610-2

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Educational Philosophy: Progressive or Traditionalist?

Introduction, traditional style of education, progressive style of education, personal educational philosophy, works cited.

These days, education presents a pressing concern, as a perspective on this regard has changed dramatically. Some people are opposed to the traditional system, claiming that it restricts students’ individuality and prevents from developing their interest. They believe that such an approach cannot provide children with relevant knowledge and skills. Students should be encouraged to communicate with peers and form critical thinking, which will help them to orient in the world ( Essentialism: E. D. Hirsch , 2016). Others have particular prejudices against a progressive style of education and are convinced of its ineffectiveness. They highlight that the positive outcomes of traditionalism have been proved for many centuries, and for this reason, children should be educated in this way ( Essentialism: E. D. Hirsch , 2016). Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to describe the two approaches to education and present my personal educational philosophy on its basis.

A traditional style of education appears to be relatively widespread, and it implies the following scheme: studying, repeating, control, and result. Such an educational approach is frequently used in secondary school. The major objective of traditionalism is to teach students the skills and transmit the information and social conduct, which adults regard as helpful for the future life of the younger generation. Children and adolescents are expected to be obedient and adhere to the answers told them by more experienced people ( Essentialism: E. D. Hirsch , 2016). A character from Dicken’s novel Hard Times, Thomas Gradgrind, appears to be a precise illustration of this educational approach. He claims that it is essential to teach students only facts, as they become the foundation for reasoning.

In general, the traditional system of education is realized in practice in the following way. All the activities and tasks within the curriculum have teacher-centered instruction. The educational program is formed in a way, which helps to receive high scores and grades. Students are divided into several classes on the principle of age, and in some schools, their ability to learn may be another criterion for making a group. Traditional education implies giving schoolchildren direct instructions and delivering lectures, and the learning process involves seatwork in general ( Essentialism: E. D. Hirsch , 2016). Consequently, students are expected to receive new knowledge via listening to teachers and observing the given material. Techers’ professional activity is based on textbooks and lectures, which is the major material within the traditional system.

Students are required to do a range of individual written assignments: tests, essays, research papers, reports, and others, which are intended to check how students have memorized facts. They are provided with objective information, and in general, correct knowledge is perceived to be primary and fundamental in all subjects (Sahin, 2018). A traditional system does not concentrate on social aspects of learning and social development to a large extent ( Our mission , n. d.). Students are not allowed to communicate with each other during classes, and socializing is only possible after lessons or in the process of doing the tasks, which require teamwork.

Despite the fact that these days, a variety of approaches to education exist, there is a significant number of protagonists of a traditional system. The main argument for this type of learning regards its age, as it has provided evident results for many generations. ( Essentialism: E. D. Hirsch , 2016) In addition, it appears to be clear and easy for teachers and instructors, as they have no questions on implementation coursework and curriculum. Furthermore, today, an overwhelming majority of schools adhere to a traditional framework, which makes the transitions between different stages of education convenient. The last advantage of such a system regards the fact that it encourages students to stick to organization and order. Therefore, a traditional system is based on the assumption that in order to become mature and wise, students should acquire vast knowledge about different spheres of life and science. In addition, in combination with discipline, obedience, and organization, it is considered to provide students an opportunity to achieve success in society (Sahin, 2018). Instead of elaborating new ways, children are expected to follow the trodden path, which guarantees prosperity.

A progressive style of education presents an opposite approach to traditionalism. It implies a pedagogical movement, which started at the end of the 19 th century, and now, a variety of types of progressive education exists. This methodology is based on modern experience and promotes another perspective on the issue of education ( Essentialism: E. D. Hirsch , 2016). One of the characters of “Dead Poets Society”, John Keating, was a proponent of a progressive approach. Being an English teacher, he encouraged revealing individuality in students.

Comparing to a traditional framework, this approach is featured with student-centered character. It concentrates on acquiring only valuable knowledge and skills and retention them. The classrooms are formed on the basis of schoolchildren’s interests and ability to perform various projects and learn subjects. Learning groups may unite people of different ages, and there is a practice of open classrooms. The major teaching methods activities, which involve a significant amount of practice ( Essentialism: E. D. Hirsch , 2016). In addition, students are offered to conduct discoveries by themselves and perform some tasks in teams.

Progressive education involves applying a variety of materials, which may make the process of understanding and memorizing easier. The instruction implies conducting projects, and it is possible to use the Internet, library, and other available options. This approach is intended to help students to understand the facts and applying them to practice. They are encouraged to conduct an analysis, evaluate the provided information, and elaborate on innovations. Comparing to traditionalism, critical thinking is the key element of education ( Our mission , n. d.). Therefore, a progressive framework stimulates schoolchildren to reveal their individuality and apply it for creating new approaches to fulfilling tasks. Consequently, students of progressive educational settings are offered a variety of assignments. They may be required to do individual work in a written form, though a significant number of the learning process involves teamwork in projects and discussions (Sahin, 2018). In general, social development is the focus of this framework, and for this reason, there is a significant number of teamwork and interpersonal relationships.

As it is evident from the description of progressive education, its major benefit implies motivating students to use and develop their creativity and particular interests. The protagonist of this methodology pays considerable attention to this fact, as they consider that it is not effective simply teaching irrelevant information and expecting to memorize it ( Essentialism: E. D. Hirsch , 2016). They believe that it is vital to prompt communication with peers in order to explore the subjects, which students are passionate about. Therefore, children are expected to develop a love for education and become adaptive to the changing world. They should use critical thinking to evaluate things around them, discover their unique talents and interests, and use their individuality for elaborating new approaches to various tasks (Sahin, 2018). In addition, it is helpful for creating their own opinion on events in the world and hot-button topics.

In the context of present-day developments, people are offered a variety of approaches for receiving education, which may adapt to their unique needs. In these circumstances, it is possible to elaborate personal perspective teaching methods, using methods of different styles. As for me, I believe that a traditional framework with the addition of a progressive style will provide the best possible outcomes. I am convinced that the most effective approach implies finding the correct balance between obedience and individuality.

I am convinced that learning facts are crucial for an in-depth understanding of the world. It is impossible to adhere to critical thinking without having comprehensive knowledge about different spheres of life and events in the world. It presents an essential base for further objective evaluation. Moreover, I find writing individual assignments important for prompting students to estimate the material explored during classes, revise and rethink it. However, teamwork-based tasks and projects are also essential for learning how to communicate with peers and achieve a common aim. By adding such tasks to the curriculum, it is possible to compensate for the major weakness of a traditional system.

Furthermore, from my perspective, students should get acquainted with a variety of subjects, though in high schools they should pay attention to developing their interests and talents. It will be helpful for finding the best suitable for the job in the future. In addition, it will stimulate them to reveal their individuality. However, before it, they should explore a range of subjects and sciences in order to form a solid base for further development.

Direct instruction should also be an element of the educational framework, as it is useful to teach students to perform tasks in accordance with precise guidelines. They will be motivated to stick to organization and order, and this will become the essential base for their independent research. In high school, students should be offered projects, which they are required to conduct on their own, and this will be helpful for sticking to self-dependence.

Therefore, I believe that a correct combination of different elements of traditionalism and a progressive system will provide students with comprehensive education. Such an approach will allow to deeply understand the events in the world and form a solid base for further development. In addition, people will be stimulated to reveal different traits of their character and interest in various fields. Consequently, a balance between traditional and progressive styles of education may be a sufficient and comprehensive methodology.

These days, a variety of approaches to the education process are offered. There are supporters of traditionalism, who believe in its effectiveness through centuries. However, some people promote the necessity to adhere to reforms, which encourage students to develop their individuality and explore their interests. Both of the methodologies have their weak and strong points, and therefore, the most effective approach would be a combination of traditional and progressive systems. It will allow students to receive comprehensive knowledge about the world, which will include both awareness of different spheres of lives and adherence to individuality and critical thinking.

Essentialism: E. D. Hirsch . (2016). Prezi. Web.

Sahin, M. (2018). Essentialism in philosophy, psychology, education, social and scientific scopes. Journal of Innovation in Psychology, 22 (2), 193-204.

Our mission . (n. d.). Core Knowledge. Web.

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