Reenvisioning the Progressive Tradition in Curriculum

Progressive education and its expression in curriculum have been from the start cacophonous in voice and disparate in practice. While most progressive educators have extolled school reform as an engine of societal improvement, some have advocated slow, reconstructive work on the curriculum to meet changing conditions. Others have urged a more aggressive transformation in order to jump-start the process of creating a better world. Progressive educators in both camps have either lauded the merits they perceive in student-oriented pedagogy, or have articulated specific themes in subject matter that they believe should govern the content and method of pedagogy. Some progressive educators have lamented these inconsistent approaches because, it is feared, they splinter the movement's collective agency and impact on curriculum. Others who also call themselves progressive educators welcome the disagreements as an enactment of the progressive impulse itself.

This state of affairs mirrors the consequences of any revered “ism” that guides curriculum practice. To judge from the historical record and the contemporary scene, every time educators place a qualifier before the term curriculum, they unleash unpredictable, uncontainable, and sometimes incommensurable hopes and actions that nonetheless will all henceforth be associated with that qualifier. Consider, for example, the diverse and sometimes contradictory ideas and designs associated with civic education, constructivist education, democratic education, and multicultural education. There is no unified voice nor standard practice among educators who endorse one or another of these curricular outlooks.

Critics might say that this unsettled, unwieldy condition is the price people pay for dwelling in a democracy. They might argue that while the process is inefficient or wasteful, it embodies an invaluable freedom of thought that promotes intellectual and social diversity. Others might claim that the condition reflects the price democracy pays because of educators' inability or unwillingness to communicate effectively. If curriculum workers “tried hard enough,” they could foster a shared outlook that [Page 441]would accommodate differences in perspective (thereby honoring democracy) while establishing effective, consistent educational leadership.

Our purpose in this chapter is not to advance a particular position in these wide-ranging debates, whose contours seem to shift day by day (Davies, 2002; Eisner, 1992; Jackson, 1992; Kliebard, 1992,2004; Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, & Taubman, 1995). Rather, we hope to sketch a new horizon against which to assess the claims, accomplishments, and failures of progressive education as expressed in curriculum.

To undertake this task, we turn in the first section to a brief review of guiding purposes and methods in the progressive tradition. In the second section, we address the educational visions of Ralph Waldo Emerson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Jane Addams. We will suggest that their work foreshadows important progressive ideals. We then take up the educational outlook of John Dewey, the thinker most often associated with progressive education. We will attempt to unshackle his thought from the progressive tradition, in part because the tradition has variously (and notoriously) pigeonholed and misunderstood his educational ideas (Jackson, 1992; Kliebard, 1992, 2004; Schwab 1978), even as the tradition has done a much better job of working the ideas out in practice than Dewey ever sought to do (Cremin, 1961; Cuban, 1992, 1993; Dewey, MW.8;1 Semel & Sadovnik, 1999; Zilversmit, 1993). Our approach will be show how Emerson, Du Bois, and Addams provide intellectual resources for curriculum development that complement and complicate those that Dewey provides. Moreover, although all four figures were American born, we show that their vision encompasses hopes for progressive education and democratic culture wherever these might blossom. Their thought fuses international and cosmopolitan gestures while also remaining acutely attentive to local context and concern.

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