What can we learn from progressive education?

Why should radical teachers today reflect on the progressive education movement of the early twentieth century? Conservatives like Diane Ravitch claim that in the first half of the twentieth century the progressive education movement came to dominate U.S. public schools, leading to a decline of standards, a lack of respect for authority, and a general weakening that they say laid the foundation for the current "crisis" in education. (1) Despite the dubious nature of these claims, they continue to be asserted by both politicians and policy makers. Meanwhile, those on the left often hold up the progressive education movement as providing a model for what democratic schools can achieve. How can we understand this movement and the disparate ways it has been seen?

In his classic 1961 study The Transformation of the School, Lawrence Cremin saw the progressive education movement as a profound shift in thinking about schools, a shift he places within the context of progressivism more broadly. While he refused to provide a single definition of progressive education, he identified three strands that he believed composed it: the administrative progressives, influenced by the scientific method and represented by figures such as Edward Thorndike, who argued for institutional and bureaucratic reform; the child-centered progressives, influenced by the work of G. Stanley Hall and the child study movement, who emphasized the importance of the development of the individual child but who, according to Cremin, lacked a clear social or political vision; and in the 1930s, the more politically radical figures around the short-lived journal The Social Frontier, who demanded that the schools help build a new social order. (2) In her study of the Progressive Education Association, Patricia Graham also divides the progressive education into different strands, but she ties them to broader historical events. (3) First was the early application of social progressive ideas to education in the period roughly from 1900 to the entry of the United States into Worm War I; second, the child-centered period of the 1920s; third, the social reconstructionist movement of the Depression years; and last, the depoliticized life adjustment movement of the 1940s.

Kevin Brehony has recently argued that we should look at the different phases or strands of the progressive education movement not as a linear progression, but as a series of breaks and shifts. (4) In the years before and immediately after World War I, "progressive education" in the United States was in the process of making one of these shifts, from an earlier concern with the school as the engine of social reform to a concern with the liberation of the individual child. As many historians have noted, optimism about the future marked the progressive era in the years before the U.S. entry into World War I. The belief that a new society dedicated to the common good and based on respect for all its members (at least within the limits of contemporary beliefs about race, class, and gender) was possible underlay not only the liberal progressive movement but the smaller socialist and anarchist movements as well.

Then the political world changed dramatically. The years immediately following the end of the War saw the failure of the League of Nations, the Red Scare, and the election of Warren Harding as President. Harding's election ushered in a decade of conservative dominance, not only in terms of the succeeding Republican Coolidge and Hoover administrations, but also in the cultural turn toward private consumption, business dominance, the celebration of scientific management and technology. It was also an era in which nativism and violent racism were used to dominate subordinate groups and maintain the power of elites. In this climate, the social ideas of the pre-war liberal progressives--regulation and control over the market, a socially responsible state, policies grounded in a commitment to social justice--became the concerns of a small minority of activists, radicals, and intellectuals who felt more and more alienated from mainstream U. S. society.

This period is particularly instructive for those of us working for progressive change in the first decade of the twenty first century--a conservative era following another time of optimistic social movements, the late 1960s. Like the alienated radicals of the 1920s, we live in an age of conservative dominance in which social movements for equality and justice are discredited by those in power. And like those earlier radicals, many of us look back to an earlier era of political activism for models of social change. In this essay, I explore the break between the educational ideas of pre-World War I progressives and the child-centered educators of the 1920s, as a way of raising questions about what progressive education has meant historically--and can mean in the future.

Progressive educational reform in the period 1900-1917 was modeled on the settlement movement and was largely envisioned in terms of the public schools. (5) "Progressive," when applied to the public schools, referred to practices and programs similar to those advocated by progressive social reformers like Jane Addams to provide services and create social order for immigrants, the poor, and the working class. But as William Reese points out, the founders of the early progressive private schools also were deeply influenced by the romantic belief in the purity and creativity of childhood: ideas that "the child should be an active, not passive, learner; that the teacher should be a guide, not master; that the curriculum should adapt to a changing industrial society, not remain lodged in the past; and that something needed to be done about the many incompetent teachers who sent their pupils to nearly eternal sleep" were widely shared in the prewar period. (6)

The concerns and contradictions of pre-World War I progressive education can be seen most clearly in the works of John Dewey. Although Dewey was always concerned with education in terms of politics--how democracy could be furthered by education--his discussions of education also reflected current social and political concerns. Thus he moved from the almost messianic claims of the Chicago writings such as The Child and the Curriculum, School and Society and "My Pedagogic Creed," to the reflections on education and democratic citizenship in Democracy and Education and some of his early 1920s essays in The New Republic and The Nation, to his distancing from both the Progressive Education Association and the social reconstructionists in the 1930s. Dewey's description of his early work with the laboratory school in Chicago in School and Society and The Child and the Curriculum and his major theoretical work, Democracy and Education, are well known. In the following discussion, I turn to another, less well known text, Schools of To-morrow, a text he wrote jointly with his daughter Evelyn.

It was published in 1915, and in many ways reflects the social optimism of the turn of the century progressives. (7) The descriptive chapters were written by Evelyn Dewey, who also visited the schools. The more theoretical chapters, in particular the first and final chapters, "Education as Natural Development" and "Democracy and Education," were written by John Dewey. Dewey begins Schools of To-morrow with a discussion of the romantic view of the natural child who is somehow outside of society and vulnerable to its evils. In "Education as Natural Development," the first chapter of the book, he provides an extensive discussion of Rousseau, quoting long passages from Emile and defending Rousseau's view of the "native capacities" and "native powers" of the individual child, as here: "Rousseau said, as well as did, many foolish things. But his insistence that education be based upon the native capacities of those to be taught and upon the need of studying children in order to discover what these native powers are, sounded the key-note of all modern efforts for educational progress" (1-2).

The Deweys see the expression of these ideas in a growing number of small private schools, among them the Francis Parker School in Chicago, the Cottage School in Riverside, Illinois, the Phoebe Thorn Experimental School of Bryn Mawr, and the Little School in the Woods at Greenwich, Connecticut. Their most extensive discussion of such a school is about Marietta Johnson's Organic School in Fairhope, Alabama, one of the oldest, and the subject of the second chapter of Schools of To-morrow.

According to the Deweys, Marietta Johnson's underlying principle is "Rousseau's central idea; namely: The child is best prepared for life as an adult by experiencing in childhood what has meaning to him as a child; and, further, the child has a right to enjoy his childhood" (18). Johnson says she calls her school "organic" because it follows the "natural growth of the pupil." The Organic School was built on ideas common to the progressive schools: activity, growth, discovery, and the centrality of the child's interests. The Deweys compare education at the Organic School to the rigid procedures of the traditional school: "Instead of providing this chance for growth and discovery, the ordinary school impresses the little one into a narrow area, into a melancholy silence, into a forced attitude of mind and body, til his curiosity is dulled into surprise at the strange things happening to him" (20). Like other progressive schools, the Organic School was not in fact unstructured or without discipline. Children were expected to keep busy and to work cooperatively, but they were also expected to explore their own interests through play, a concept central a to other progressive schools.

The Organic School typifies the dominant themes of the progressive private schools the Deweys describe. One of the most important of these is its approach to each child's individuality: "Truly scientific education can never develop so long as children are treated in the lump, merely as a class. Each child has a strong individuality, and any science must take stock of all the facts in its material. Every pupil must have a chance to show what he truly is, so that the teacher can find out what he needs to make him a complete human being" (137).

Closely associated with the idea of the individual is the idea of freedom. As was typical of the rhetoric of the child-centered progressive movement in these years, the Deweys emphasize the binary of restriction and freedom: in the traditional school the innocent and naturally curious child is caught within a rigid, disciplinary institution in opposition to this is the promise of freedom in the progressive school. For the Deweys, freedom there is closely tied to freedom in a democratic society. The progressive school will teach the child the responsibilities of freedom, as opposed to "the conventional type of education which trains children to docility and obedience, to the careful performance of imposed tasks because they are imposed, regardless of where they lead," which "is suited to an autocratic society" (303).

When the Deweys turn from their discussion of Rousseauian ideals and the child-centered private schools to consider the progressive public schools, the balance shifts from the individual to the social, and the issues they address are much closer to the concerns of progressive social reformers like Jane Addams. Both the Gary schools and P.S. 26 in Indianapolis were public schools serving working class children. The discussion of these schools in Schools of To-morrow certainly supports the view that "progressive" public schools in the years immediately before the First World War referred to those enacting reform ideas typical of the broader progressive movement. According to the Deweys, the organization of these schools is meant to redress some of the brutalities and inequities of industrial capitalism. Underlying the positive discussion of the Gary schools and P.S. 26 is the Deweys' belief in the United States as a "good society" and their confidence that schools can work harmoniously with the local community to meet social needs. At the same time, their discussion of these two schools makes clear their implicit acceptance of class and race, and the role of schools in preparing future workers to take up positions within this structure.

The Gary, Indiana public schools provide the best-known example of progressive school reform in working class schools before World War I. (8) The city of Gary was founded by US Steel to house its workers. In 1906 William Wirt, who had studied with Dewey in Chicago, was named superintendent of schools. Wirt, who envisioned the Gary schools as the center of a coherent, cooperative community, instituted the well-known platoon system, which was meant to free classrooms so that the school would be more economical and efficient. The schools were well funded; according to the Deweys, each school was "equipped with a gymnasium, swimming pool, and playground, and has physical directors that are in attendance for the entire eight hours" (180). To Evelyn Dewey, who visited the Gary schools in preparation for Schools of To-morrow, they are the embodiment of John Dewey's conception of schools as "small communities."

   The statement that the schools
   exist for a democratic purpose,
   for the good of citizenship,
   becomes an obvious fact and
   not a formula. A community
   which perceives what a strong
   factor its school is in civic activities,
   is quick to give support
   and assistance in return, either
   by extending the use of its own
   facilities (as happened in Gary)
   or by the direct assistance of
   labor, money, or material when
   these are needed. (206)

As well as educating students, the schools attempted to educate the wider community through such progressive programs as the "pure milk campaign" and the "anti-fly campaign."

The Deweys' discussion of School No. 26 in Indianapolis provides another example of what they saw as success, on the settlement model. This school, they say, "located in the poor, crowded colored district of the city," with "only colored pupils," should not be seen as an attempt to solve the "race question." Instead, it provides an example of practices that could be usefully applied in "any district where the children come from homes with limited resources and meager surroundings" (207). The goal of the school is to make up for gaps in the home life of the pupils, to give them opportunities to prepare for a better future, to supply healthful occupation and recreation and to improve neighborhood conditions. In practice this means "industrial" training--carpentry sewing, cooking, training in shoemaking. The similarities of this scheme to the industrial education advocated by Booker T. Washington are striking.

In his discussion of the middle-class Laboratory School in Chicago in School and Society and "The Child and the Curriculum," Dewey is careful to emphasize that manual education is not meant to be vocational, but is intended to engage children's interests through activity. He argues that the creation of vocational schools is "totally foreign to the spirit of a democracy" (315). But in the Deweys' discussion of manual training in Gary and Indianapolis, they advocate vocational education as a means of preparing children for the world of work. Boys should have shop and girls should learn to cook and sew. In describing the Gary schools, for example, the Deweys write: "The aim of the work for the girl, just as it is for the boy, is to help her find her life work, to fit herself for it mentally and morally, and to give her an intelligent attitude toward her profession and her community, using the shop experience not as an end in itself but a means to these larger ends." (286). This view of manual activities obviously did not hold for the middle class Laboratory School. It can be argued that the Deweys were simply responding to the realities of the world around them. (9) But this acceptance of the inevitability of class in a discussion of children's futures comes very close to an acceptance of schools as mechanisms of social reproduction, as Marxist critics such as Bowles and Gintis have argued. (10)

On the other hand, that the Deweys did understand the realities of class and race in the United States is suggested in their summary of the Gary schools and P.S. 26 in Indianapolis:

   The Gary schools and Mr.
   Valentine's school have effected
   an entire reorganization in
   order to meet the particular
   needs of the children of the
   community, physically, intellectually,
   and socially. Both schools
   are looking towards a larger
   social ideal; towards a community
   where the citizens will be
   prosperous and independent,
   where there will be no poverty-ridden
   population unable to
   produce good citizens. While
   changes in social conditions must
   take place before this can happen,
   these schools believe that
   such an education as they provide
   is one of the natural ways
   and perhaps the surest way of
   helping along the changes.
   Teaching people from the time
   they are children to think clearly
   and to take care of themselves
   is one of the best safeguards
   against exploitation. (226-27;
   my italics)

This acknowledgement that broader changes in society are necessary and that these students face the danger of exploitation (although racism is not directly named) distinguishes the Deweys' analysis from celebratory descriptions of Black industrial education of the time.

While the Deweys are aware of the class and race divisions of U.S. society, they also believe in the possibilities of democratic education and the positive role of the state in redressing the worst of these abuses. (11) The Deweys assume that children are growing up into a democratic society in which they can flourish:

   Liberty does not mean the
   removal of the checks which
   nature and man impose on the
   life of every individual in the
   community, so that one individual
   may indulge impulses
   which go against his own welfare
   as a member of society. But
   liberty for the child is the
   chance to test all impulses and
   tendencies on the world of
   things and people in which he
   finds himself, sufficiently to discover
   their character so that he
   may get rid of those which are
   harmful, and develop those
   which are useful to himself and
   others. (138)

As Dan Perlstein has argued in his analysis of progressive education and the African American freedom struggle, statements like these assume children live in a society that will support their "chance to test all impulses and tendencies on the world." (12) They do not take account of the societal forces of racism, sexism, and class privilege, to name the most obvious. Perlstein notes that African American educators like Horace Mann Bond, while they found progressive practices intriguing, were well aware of the barriers facing Black children in a racist society. Even if the classroom encouraged their "freedom," in the wider world these children were hardly free--in fact, powerful forces were willing to take violent action to prevent their freedom. The Deweys do not address this dilemma in their discussion of P.S. 26.

The Deweys' depiction of the Gary schools and P.S. 26 in Indianapolis is contradictory. Although they clearly accept existing structures of class (and implicitly of race) in their discussion of manual training, criticisms of U.S. society also mark their discussion. For example, they are aware of the danger that the schools could be captured by business interests (although they do not envision school children as a captive market for advertisers, as in the case in many U. S. schools today):

   There is danger that the concentrated
   interests of business
   men and their influential activity
   in public matters will segregate
   training for industry to the
   damage of both democracy and
   education. The educator must
   insist upon the primacy of educational
   values, not in their own
   behalf, but because these represent
   the more fundamental
   interests of society, especially of
   a society organized on a democratic
   basis. (312)

The contradictory discourses of individualism and collectivism operate throughout this text (and in all of John Dewey's writings on education). While at times Dewey writes of the importance of recognizing the needs of the abstract individual child, at other times he is concerned with the political and social consequences of schooling for the whole society. He sees, for example, the competitive individualism not far below the surface of much liberal educational reform discourse.

In Schools of To-morrow the Deweys place themselves in the tradition of educational reformers since Rousseau who "have been fighting against the feudal and pioneer notion that the reason for a good education was to enable your children and mine to get ahead of the rest of the community, to give individuals another weapon to use in making society contribute more to their purse and pleasure" (174). And they are aware of the cultural capital that formal education provides, noting that the education we receive in school is only a small part of what we learn, and yet "what is learned in school makes artificial distinctions in society and marks persons off from one another" (2). Schools of To-morrow is a complicated text. It juxtaposes the freedom of privileged children to learn through play with the mastery of manual skills for the working class children of Gary and Indianapolis. It acknowledges the dangers of individualism and the abuses of industrial capitalism even while it is confident of reform, that a better, more just society is both possible and probable.

To conclude: In the early 1920s, child-centered progressive education was celebrated in a number of popular books written in an accessible and entertaining style. It was also taken up in liberal and left-wing popular magazines, in particular in The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, and The New Republic. (13) In comparison with Schools of To-morrow, these popular accounts seldom address broader social questions. Instead, they emphasize the idea that creativity and originality exist within each child and will emerge if only the shackles of routine, standardized texts, and rigid classroom practices are lifted. Unlike the Deweys', most popular celebrations of progressive education of the 1920s do not address differences among schools, and children themselves are not located according to class, race, or gender. Both children and schools somehow exist outside of society or politics. What has become most important is the development of the individual child.

The 1920s saw the increased dominance of corporate capitalism, which, despite the claims of free market ideology, meant the growth of bureaucracies of all kinds. In this world, the figure of "the individual" was highly charged. Individual freedom was seen as primary. But in a world increasingly dominated by large industries and in a bureaucratic public school system which viewed children as a mass to be measured and controlled through testing, what did "the individual" signify? It is striking that in a period when testing, measurement, and bureaucratic practices modeled on business were embraced by public schools, the child-centered discourse of progressive education continued to grow in popularity in private schools and among university professors. In the child-centered private schools, the child's individuality was celebrated. It can certainly be argued that the figure of the child, standing for innocence and potentiality; becomes highly charged for parents in times when their own lives are increasingly shaped by large forces outside their control. The natural child seems both fragile and vulnerable but also a possible source of salvation and regeneration. It was the middle-class child, freed by the new education, who would build the new society.

Of course it is also possible to argue that child-centered progressive education, by encouraging freedom of choice and celebrating the middle-class child's individuality, helps produce a class of self-directed managers. This view has been powerfully argued by Valerie Walkerdine, who deconstructs what she calls "the romantic promise of progressivism in education," viewing the development of progressive education as a project of bourgeois liberalism and its desire to create and control the social world in its own interests. Thus, she calls into question the progressive claims of freedom and empowerment:

   The concepts of power and liberation
   are intimately connected
   to the radical bourgeois project,
   the formation of the modern
   state and the modern concept
   of democratic government.
   I shall argue that the forms of
   pedagogy necessary to the
   maintenance of order, the regulation
   of populations, demand a
   self-regulating individual and a
   notion of freedom as freedom
   from overt control. And yet
   such a notion of freedom is a
   sham. (14)

In this view, progressive reform can serve the ends of those who control and benefit from existing arrangements of society by teaching middle-class children to be self-directed, to prepare them for future dam positions, and to encourage them to believe in the goodness of their society rather than be critical and questioning.

By analyzing the presentation of ideas of progressive education at specific historical moments, we can see how conceptions of the child and the school reflected underlying social anxieties and political desires. This is not to deny that real schools existed, populated with real children, not metaphorical ones, nor to suggest that it is not important to try to know as much as we can of these lives and institutions. And I am certainly sympathetic to a materialist analysis of the struggles over resources and politics that shaped and continue to shape the lives of children and adults. But by seeing the ways ideas about children and schools underlay proposals for progressive reform in the past, we may also become more conscious of the way such conceptions function in our hopes for the future. John Dewey's commitment to democracy and his respect for the capabilities of children is unquestioned. But by envisioning children of different class, race, and gender locations through different lenses, his vision of educational change was compromised from the outset.

It is easy to see how progressive educators like Dewey failed to recognize their own privilege, to criticize them for failing to provide an economic and social analysis of the underlying structures of racism and industrial capitalism that profoundly affected the choices and work individuals were going to be asked (or forced) to do. The progressives sought to create an education that would encourage individual expression and growth for children who were going to grow up in a society that already foresaw their futures according to their class, race, and gender; that was going to compartmentalize their work from their pleasure; that was going to control and discipline them; and that increasingly would see them as consumers whose desires could be manipulated. The early progressive educators in large part failed to address the deep inequalities of their society. When "progressive methods" fail to address structural issues such as these, they may only help maintain an unequal system by providing an illusion of freedom. The use of progressive curriculum in Japanese-American internment camps during the war is one good example of the absurdities that can occur if the wider political context is ignored; reform of curricular practices while accepting inequitable segregated schooling and the denial of civil rights is another. In these cases, broader political and social movements may be much more significant than what goes on in individual classrooms.

Focusing on the individual child or reform of individual schools, progressive educators did not address the realities of the world children were to enter as adults, the brutalities and inequities of this world, the racism, exploitation of workers, political and business corruption, effects of imperialism and colonialism. And yet, despite the limitations of their vision, many of the early progressive educators, like the Deweys, were utopian in the best sense of deeply desiring a more just and worthy society. Surely their ideals--respect for each student, confidence in every child's ability to know, a belief that learning should be joyous and creative--are admirable. They tried hard to navigate the contradictions of liberalism and radicalism, in ways forgotten by child-centered popularizers of the conservative 1920s. We who live in a similar conservative moment can learn by reviewing how the Deweys and their allies struggled with issues that are still crucial, and still unresolved.

NOTES

(1) Diane Ravitch, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000) is the most recent of these polemics.

(2) Cremin argued in The Transformation of the School (New York: Knopf, 1961) that progressive education, however difficult to define, did in fact transform public schools. Conservative polemicists like Diane Ravitch agree, but go on to argue not only that progressive education existed as a coherent movement, but that it has dominated U.S. schools and is the source of their assumed failures. Others, most persuasively Larry Cuban in How Teachers Taught (New York: Teachers College Press, 1993) have argued that in practice classrooms have been relatively unaffected by the ideas of the progressive educators.

(3) Graham, Patricia. Progressive Education: From Arcady to Academe (New York: Teachers College Press, 1967).

(4) Kevin Brehony; "From the Particular to the General, the Continuous to the Discontinuous: Progressive Education Revisited." History of Education, 30:5 (2001) 413-432.

(5) Patricia Graham, Progressive Education: From Arcady to Academe, (New York: Teachers College Press, 1967).

(6) William Reese, "The Origins of Progressive Education." History of Education Quarterly, 411 (Spring, 2001), 23.

(7) John Dewey and Evelyn Dewey; Schools of To-morrow (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1915). Page references appear in parentheses in the text.

(8) See the discussion of the Gary schools and P.S. 26 in Walter Feinberg, Reason and Rhetoric: The Intellectual Foundations of Twentieth Century Liberal Educational Policy (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1975). See also Ronald Cohen and Raymond Mohl, The Paradox of Progressive Education: The Gary Plan and Urban Schooling (New York: Kennikat Press, 1979), and Ronald Cohen, Children of the Mill: Schooling and Society in Gary, Indiana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).

(9) As the Deweys argued, "If schools are to recognize the needs of all classes of pupils, and give pupils a training that will insure their becoming successful and valuable citizens, they must give work that will not only make the pupils strong physically and morally and give them the right attitude towards the state and their neighbors, but that will as well give them enough control over their material environment to enable them to be economically independent. Preparation for the professions has always been taken care of; it is, as we have seen, the future of the worker in industry which has been neglected," Schools of To-morrow, 308.

(10) Samuel Bowles and Herb Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, (New York: Basic Books, 1976).

(11) Dewey was an early member of the NAACP; his rejection of racism and support of social change should be acknowledged.

(12) Daniel Perlstein, "Minds Stayed on Freedom: Politics and Pedagogy in the African American Freedom Struggle." American Educational Research Journal: 39 (2002, 249-77). A shorter version appears in this issue of Radical Teacher.

(13) See James Wallace, Liberal Journalism and American Education 1914-1941, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991) for a survey of articles on education published in The New Republic and The Nation.

(14) Valerie Walkerdine, Schoolgirl Fictions, (London: Verso, 1990), 19.