Not getting it.

I was pleased to see Lynne V. Cheney's review of Kieran Egan's Getting It Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget ("Progressively Worse," Fall 2003). Egan is one of the few writers on education who thinks outside the box.

The irony is that although Cheney has little use for the progressives, her own rather conventional ideological critique is dwarfed by the power, originality, and range of Egan's attack. It is almost as if she is reluctant to come to grips with an argument mounted on historical, intellectual, and imaginative grounds instead of one framed by political positions.

Egan's critique exposes progressivism's historical roots in the potent Darwinian metaphor of evolution-toward-progress. Developmental psychology has produced a body of theory, experimentation, and statistical analysis controlled by the assumption that a child's brain will change, evolve, and progress. The charting and understanding of that progress is the thing of interest.

But if we free ourselves of the developmental cliche, we may think of the brain as more like an eye. Since eyes don't change in dramatic ways, the eye metaphor might lead us to become less interested in whatever changes we could register inside the brain itself. We might spend more time thinking about things outside the brain that could offer the best kinds of stimulation and training to that organ, such as a demanding curriculum. By focusing on the development of the brain rather than culture and curriculum, progressives have squandered untold resources on unfruitful developmental research and theory, on stale positivism.

BRUCE E. BUXTON

Headmaster

Falmouth Academy 

Falmouth, Massachusetts