Progressive Education

Educational Reform in the Progressive Era

The Progressive era in American politics and social life was an embedded response to the corporate capitalism that followed fast on the heels of three well-documented features of life in mid-19th-century United States: immigration, industrialization, and urbanization. Any attempts to ameliorate social conditions, improving the economic and social lot of the poor, the worker, and even the middle class, can be understood as progressive.

Progressive education in this sense is the educational phase of American progressivism writ large. Not all progressive educational thought and action were associated with schooling, and much of the impetus for efforts at educational change came from concerns that were political, social, cultural, and communal—not strictly speaking pedagogical—in character. Liberal progressive Jane Addams's Hull House is probably the best example of an institution for adults and children created to improve social and economic conditions through the creation of educational community.

Not all educational reformers of the era shared Addams's liberalism. Conservative progressives sought not social justice (through equality and economic opportunity), but social order, an order that would ensure a worthy American community without altering the dominance of the economic status quo. Still, the quality of an American community was a common focus. In a time when laissez-faire individualism dominated the economic scene and when the fact of cultural diversity required acknowledgment of actual and potential conflict, schooling presented itself as a powerful tool to combat social decay.

Both strains of the progressive temper spread to the newly developed and rapidly expanding system [Page 736]of public schools throughout the United States. Educators were responding to schools whose enrollments were growing exponentially, to educational institutions that seemed modeled after dehumanizing factories, to obvious conditions of educational inequity, and to a school curriculum that was perceived as academically exclusive. If individual students had diverse talents, testing could identify aptitudes and then differentiated curricula, enacted by child-centered teachers, would develop them. And all of this would occur in scientifically managed schools whose graduates could, as some desired, “build a new social order.” Clearly, this educational worldview was not without its tensions.

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