5.5) The Pedagogical Progressives

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American Education Reform: History, Policy, Practice

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Discover what shapes how we talk about schools today by exploring the history of U.S. education reform. Engage with the main actors, key decisions, and major turning points in this history. See how social forces drive reform. Learn about how the critical tensions embedded in U.S. education policy and practice apply to schools nationally, globally— and where you live.

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John Dewey and the Pedagogical Progressives

This module takes up the major characteristics of Dewey’s Laboratory School at the University of Chicago, 1896–1904; the role of reflective thinking in Dewey’s theory of knowledge; Dewey’s conception of the school as a social center; Dewey’s disengagement from public schools after 1904; William Heard Kilpatrick and the pedagogical progressives’ distortion of Dewey’s theory; and the cornerstones of Dewey’s educational philosophy.

5.1) The Laboratory School of the University of Chicago7:51

5.2) Dewey’s Theory of Knowledge 5:10

5.3) Dewey’s Idea of the School as a Social Center4:17

5.4) Dewey: Missing in Action 6:00

5.5) The Pedagogical Progressives7:13

5.6) A Neo-Deweyan Critique of the Pedagogical Progressives8:02

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Dr. John L. Puckett
Professor of Education
Graduate School of Education
Dr. Michael Charles Johanek
Senior Fellow
Graduate School of Education

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

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