For more than one hundred years, the United States has been the scene of academic warfare between traditional and progressive educators. During most of our nation's history, many Americans have assumed that the primary purpose of school is to pass on to children the information and skills necessary to survive in our society. This traditional view accepts the fact that a teacher's task is to inform children as to what they should know. Officials at the state and local level determine the content of students' education, and it is the teacher's job to ensure that the content is taught. Even before the beginning of the twentieth century, John Dewey and others introduced a different model. They believed that students learn best by doing not by being passive listeners. For progressive educators, the teacher's role was to be a facilitator of learning in classrooms where students' interest helped to provide appropriate developmental learning experience. This new approach to education has greatly affected our schools during the past century. More recently, we have seen the emergence in American education of four initiatives that have threatened the continued influence of progressive education. They include the back to basics movement, mandated state curriculum standards, high-stakes testing, and school accountability. Despite these trends, there appears to be several factors that might lead one to conclude that progressive education is remaining a viable approach in the United States. This book considers these factors as well as past, present, and possible future of the progressive education movement.
List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments 1: Progressive Education: A Definition 2: Old Wine, New Bottles 3: Progressive Schools in the 1930s 4: Progressive Education in the 1930s: The Local Perspective5: Postwar Education: The ...
Beginning with Jean Jacques Rousseau's seminal treatise Emile and closing with the Critical Pedagogy movement, this book draws on the latest scholarship to cover the key thinkers, movements and areas where schooling has been more than just ...
This book brings together a variety of connected voices which consider potential ways forward for school reform.
See also traditional schooling Addams, Jane, 41, 79 age grouping, 7, 34n3 Alcott, Louisa May, 50 American Indians, 5, 20–21, 76 “Ant Hills,” 91–92 Anthony, Susan B., 41 anti-intellectualism, 72, 74,78, 83 arithmetic, 21, 38, ...
When her younger brother disappears, sixteen-year-old Jennie McGrady is suspicious of her new neighbor and she puts herself in danger when she tries to find her brother before it is...
C. Creighton, “Vaccination: AScientificStudy,” Arena2 (September1890): 422; and John C. Burnham, ... 1919–1920 (New York: McGraw Hill, 1955); David P. Thelen, Robert M. La Follette and the Insurgent Spirit (Boston: Little, Brown, ...
This collection of readings is composed of articles originally published in Progressive Education, a journal that spanned thirty-four years from 1924 to 1957, and one that was a major organ...
This booklet on progressive education contains the profiles of three extraordinary progressive experiments in three very different types of schools. The first is the Laboratory School at the University of...
" This book examines the partial successes of history's three major educational reform movements (the Progressive Education movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Equity Reform movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and the ...
In this study the author begins with the ecological, economic and cultural dimensions of the environmental challenge in education and then applies this discussion to a critique of three philosophies of education (back-to-basic, progressive ...