Progressive Movement, Education

Progressive education refers to modern pedagogical methods that extend or adjust learning to account for the child, his or her surroundings, and society as a whole. The progressive education movement is largely known for dominating U.S. curricular reform efforts during the first half of the 20th century. It revolved around the Progressive Education Association (1919–1957) and the Teachers College at Columbia University. Although the movement itself largely died out in the 1950s, many of its principles continue to influence how teachers teach.

Progressive education was part and parcel of a larger reform movement that targeted the perceived evils wrought by the industrial and demographic transformations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In their attempts to make education more relevant to modern life, progressive educators expanded the curriculum beyond what was considered a traditional academic one, a somewhat narrow focus on the so-called 3 Rs. In the process, they believed they had created a more just educational system. There is some evidence to support such a contention, but the legacy of progressive education is perplexing and remains hotly debated.

Before the progressive movement, education in the United States tended to be authoritarian. A pedagogy of original sin pervaded schools. Many Americans firmly believed that people were inherently evil, as preached by Cotton Mather, an early Puritan leader who told parents in 1640 that “your children are the children of death, and the children of hell, and the children of wrath, by nature.” Educational authoritarianism gradually loosened its grip when some of the dominant sects of Protestantism adopted the social gospel, incorporating the Enlightenment values of individualism. Sin transformed from something internal to the individual into a social problem that could be conquered. Pedagogical trends slowly but surely shifted away from authoritarian models.

Progressive education and one of its defining features, child-centeredness, arose out of this cultural transformation that inverted the origins of evil. [Page 1173]Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the emblematic philosopher of child-centeredness, argued against repressive forms of learning in his widely read Émile, since, according to him, nothing could be exacted from children by way of obedience. Rousseau believed that the best pedagogy was to leave children alone to develop according to their natural goodness.

Progressive education sought to do away with outmoded disciplinary teaching methods such as corporal punishment and rote learning. The teacher was admonished not to harshly discipline the student's body and mind. In fact, educational reformers conceptualized pedagogies of body and mind as indissoluble, a theory largely drawn from philosopher John Dewey, who, in his influential Democracy and Education (1916), made the definitive argument that educational means and ends were inseparable.

Progressive theory was closely associated with the movement's attempts to expand beyond the traditional academic curriculum—one that concentrated on the so-called traditional disciplines, such as math, science, and history. Many progressives believed the academic curriculum inconsequential for the majority, especially those poor and immigrant students newly attending high school who would likely never go to college. It has been widely noted that this practice of limiting the academic curriculum to a select few had the deleterious effect of encouraging continued stratification, negating some of the premises progressives seemed to support, such as equal opportunity. But, despite this, the ideas that grounded the progressive movement were rooted in a humanitarian belief that the traditional curriculum was improperly equipped to adjust young people to industrial society.

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