The historian, David Tyack, introduced the apt term, pedagogical progressives in his well known 1974 book, The One Best System. The term allows us to distinguish this type of educational progressive from the administrative progressives. Dewey was an icon for the pedagogical progressives who often claimed fealty to his theories even as they mauled and mangled them. It's as is some of these devoted acolytes never bothered to read Dewey. Yet, they built their careers on mouthing catch phrases from his work. >> Hm. Pedagogical progressivism was largely a post World War I phenomenon. It was a movement of professional educators, predominately private school teachers and administrators who formed the Progressive Education Association or PEA in 1919. And drew inspiration from Dewey whom they regarded as a prophet and elder statesman of progressive education as the historian Patricia Albert Graham has noted. Yet many of these progressive educators, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, distorted Dewey by fastening on to one aspect of his pedagogical theory with a tenacity of a Jack Russell Terrier. The child-centered component of Dewey's theory, largely ignoring the rest of it. Our online course on American education reform centers on the history of U.S. public schools. Why is it important to note a wing of the progressive education movement that was dominated by educators and lay persons associated with child centered private schools? The answer is because Dewy unwittingly, mistakenly gave his mantra to narrowly focused child-centerdness. When he falsively praised child sinner schools, in Schools of Tomorrow, a book he published with his daughter Evelyn in 1915. Dewey was widely interpreted as having advocated child-centeredness, with its emphasis on freedom, spontaneity, physical activity, self-initiative, and self-expression, as a panacea for the nation's public elementary schools. Quite simply, Dewey's educational philosophy involved much more than child-centeredness and he should have made that point clear at the outset. >> Mm-hm. Not that there weren't some very good progressive private schools. There certainly were, though these schools typically catered to an elite clientele, the children of wedded, well-educated, upper-class white parents. Freudian psychology, popular in liberal middle class circles of the 1920's, framed the climate of these schools. The aim was to give children wide latitude to pursue their natural interests free of anxiety, correction and punishment. Arts, crafts and a range of activities form the core of the curriculum. >> Probably the finest, and certainly the most famous of the progressive schools, was the Lincoln School and Teacher's College. The historian Dian Ravich calls the Lincoln school, which was established in 1917, quote, the single most influential showcase of progressive methods. The Lincoln School was a beehive of educational excellence committed to principles of child development and academic learning. In the elementary and junior high grades, teacher guided project activities were organized as units of work in which children acquired reading and writing skills. And academic content in the context of their inquiries for their projects. Subject matter was not taught in a traditional way. Rather, it was reorganized and integrated to serve the intellectual needs and interests of young learners. >> For example, first and second graders studied community life and built a play city. Third graders studied daily life on the nearby Hudson River which grew into a study of boats from past to present, with boats becoming the integrative theme for learning history, geography, arithmetic, arts, and literature. Sixth graders studied the history of books and printing from Babylonian cuneiform and clay tablets to the Rosetta stone and Egyptian hieroglyphics to illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages to the printing press and beyond. Learning along the way a great deal about ancient civilization. And its high school, the Lincoln School offered a heavily book-centered college preparatory curriculum, which included among other things, the study of Greek civilization. A sophisticated integration of social studies, literature and fine arts, with a syllabus that would do a fine liberal arts college proud. And college level studies in world literature. This was no ordinary school. >> Yet like the Dewey School at the University of Chicago, the Lincoln School model would not, could not be replicated by ordinary teachers in large, overcrowded and under-resourced public schools. >> Mm. That fact didn't stop Teachers College professor and avowed Dewey disciple William Heard Kilpatrick from espousing pedagogical progressivism as the last best hope for American education. Specifically, Professor Kilpatrick touted the virtues of what he called the project method. Briefly summarize Kilpatrick, the college's most influential professor who taught some 35,000 prospective teachers and school administrators, argued that just about any topic was fair game for the development of a pupil project. As long as it was quote, a wholehearted purposeful activity preceding in a social environment. Now that's a pretty vague prescription, playing a pinball machine with your sister fits that definition. In any event, the world famous William Heard Kilpatrick gave his misguided professorial stamp to having children explore and construct virtually anything, short of name-calling and brawling, that was of immediate interest to them, and in Dewey's name. >> Quite simply, Kirkpatrick was anti-intellectual. His persistent fulminations about the toxicity of books in classrooms suggest as much. As Lawrence Cremin observes, Kilpatrick and his disciples missed the fundamental point in Dewey's theory that the progressive organization of subject matter necessitates learning bookish content. Both as a means to solving a current problem of intellectual interest to the child, and as a reservoir of knowledge for solving future problems. The child's ability to tackle logically organized subject matter on its own terms, that is, to read and understand academic books as whole books, comes at the end of a developmental process that leads out from the child's experience and moves progressively over the course of years. Toward the ability to handle larger and larger chunks of academic knowledge on their own terms. Recall Dewey's psychological logical continuum. In our next episode, we summarize the scope of Dewey's pedagogical theory. And contrast its elements more sharply with child-centered progressivism [MUSIC] [SOUND]
