Progressive Education Association (PEA)

Founded as a populist organization for those who identified themselves as educational reformers, the Progressive Education Association (PEA) enjoyed initial success but experienced declining influence after World War II. The demise of the organization has been attributed to a shift in mission and identity—from an association of persons interested in education and its impact on community life to a more narrowly drawn organization of professional educators. As the practice of education became more professionalized, which was one of the tenets of the progressivist movement, the PEA lost its reason for being.

The founding force behind the PEA was Stanwood Cobb, a Dartmouth College honors graduate with an M.A. degree from Harvard Divinity School, who, after teaching in Istanbul, headed the English Department at St. John's College and taught at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Cobb was impressed by the experiments in schooling chronicled in John and Evelyn Dewey's Schools of Tomorrow. Against the backdrop of progressive political reform and the educational experimentation that the Deweys documented, Cobb sought out Marietta Pierce Johnson, founder of the Organic School. With the help of Eugene Randolph Smith, headmaster of the Park School, philanthropist Laura C. Williams, and others, the Association was born in 1919.

By the time the PEA was founded, the Progressive era in American politics already had begun to wane; the founders of the Association were not, by and large, the pioneering figures who had spearheaded thinking about educational innovation. Yet if they were self-described educational “nobodies,” they were nobodies associated with upper-middle-class roots, philanthropy, and eastern private schools. While they claimed ambitions to “reform the entire system,” their focus was typically more limited: to infuse the traditional curriculum with vigor and creativity. That Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot—long a proponent of academic curriculum over social efficiency—signed on as honorary president is an indicator of the concerns and direction of the founders.

Still, the Association's original Statement of Purpose incorporated multiple strains of reformist thought and practice—child-centered teaching practice, the scientific study of students and the scientific administration of schooling, school as an instrument of democratic social reform, and even though unstated, social efficiency—enabling many to find a home within its borders. The members of the PEA were committed to children's freedom to develop naturally; interest as the motive for all work; the teacher's role and responsibility to be a guide, not a taskmaster; scientific study of pupil development; greater attention to all that affects the child's physical development; cooperation between school and home to meet the needs of a child's life; and the progressive school as the leader in educational movements.

In its initial decade, the PEA was successful in attracting a wide audience to the cause of educational reform. This can be attributed partly to the 1924 founding of the Progressive Education Journal, edited by Gertrude Hartmann. The journal put progressive educational experiments and thought squarely in public view, expanding understanding and creating new interest in education as a public commitment. Its focus on children's “creative expression” contributed to the public perception of progressive education that still persists, but that misses capturing the broader reality of that movement.

...