"When Progressiveness Leads to Backwardness"

Amity Shlaes' op ed on the history of progressive education (posted at NYC HOLD) is the best very short piece explaining how we got here that I've seen.

Progressive education, by which I mean forsaking content for utility and a child-centered focus on creativity, also has a strong tradition in Britain. A. S. Neill, the famous progressive educator, founded Summerhill, the progressive school, in Suffolk, England, not Suffolk County, New York. But the progressive movement has not touched most British schools to anything like the degree it has penetrated in America. As Diane Ravitch, the academic and former assistant secretary of education, points out in Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, a history of progressive education, America is now a nation of Summerhills. Most American teachers and principals frown on traditional schooling. Rote learning is out, as are American and European history and demanding math. Instead educators impart things they find fun or politically appealing. The attitude has become so ingrained that anyone challenging it risks being labeled elitist, even un-American. The New World, the message is, has never liked or needed Old World–style learning.

This, as Ms. Ravitch shows, is a myth. American schools were not always anti-intellectual. As recently as 1910, half of those in high school studied Latin—even though many were immigrants who were also learning English. As recently as the 1930s, eight-year-olds in Philadelphia’s public schools routinely memorized biographies of Alfred the Great, William Tell, and Florence Nightingale. Grammar schools demanded that small children demonstrate a skill today not required of even Ivy-bound 18-year-olds—to answer questions such as “A harness was sold for three-quarters of four-fifths of what it cost. What was the percentage loss?”

Such knowledge was then deemed the best weapon to abolish class. “The famous simile of the educational ladder, with its foot in the gutter and its top in the university,” wrote one educator, “is a fact many times verified in the knowledge of every intelligent adult.”

Then, though, came the progressives, who argued that children needed living knowledge, not dead artifacts. They started small, by throwing out the Greeks and Romans, and worked from there. By the 1940s the schools in Battle Creek, Michigan, had halved the share of students enrolled in college prep classes, while introducing health studies and “basic living” courses. Schools replaced mythology and history with the more amorphous social studies.

The youth-centered 1960s gave the trend fresh life. Now old-fashioned, content-oriented education was deemed not merely useless but dangerously authoritarian. Schools sought to cater to children and offered, as one Michigan scholar wrote, “an endless list of subjects to attract and interest students, such as Girl Talk and What’s Happening.” The schools, the scholar noted, had “simply given up on any attempt to exert any moral authority relative to education.” By 1970, Neill’s book Summerhill, which promoted his experimental methods, was required reading at 600 universities, selling 200,000 copies. What had started as a tiny war against Homer and Herodotus had turned into a siege, a watering down of every part of the curriculum for all ages. Today even basic math skills such as long division and the division of fractions are under assault. Teachers explicitly dismiss them as outdated and hand out calculators to children in the first grade.

This is the key passage:

They started small, by throwing out the Greeks and Romans, and worked from there. By the 1940s the schools in Battle Creek, Michigan, had halved the share of students enrolled in college prep classes, while introducing health studies and “basic living” courses.

Labaree on the 2 progressivisms & which one won

Progressive education wasn't just one thing; it was two things.

pedagogical progressivism (Dewey)

administrative progressivism (Thorndike)

Here's Labaree:

The second thing we need to recognize about the history of this movement is that the administrative progressives trounced their pedagogical counterparts. Ellen Lagemann explains this with admirable precision: ‘I have often argued to students, only in part to be perverse, that one cannot understand the history of education in the United States during the twentieth century unless one realizes that Edward L.Thorndike won and John Dewey lost.’

I get the sense that more than a few ktm readers, writers, and commenters see high school as the release from progressive ed. The evidence? It's in high school where tracking begins.

For my district and I'm sure for others, that's wrong. Tracking was invented by the progressive ed movement, and at the district level it's not about high standards for teaching or content.

It's about tracking.

It's about selecting an elite from amongst an already self-selected group of students.

[T]he main thrust of the social efficiency curriculum, with its emphasis on core principles of the pedagogical progressives. It mandated exactly the kind of topdown curriculum that the latter abhorred, imposed on students in order to serve society’s need for particular skills and knowledge, and forcing them spend their time in schools becoming socialized for the adult social roles they will play. This puts priority on learning particular subject matter instead of learning to learn; it elevates the interests of society and of school administrators over the interests of students; it makes the classroom a preparation for adulthood rather than an exploration of childhood; and, in the name of these social benefits, it risks extinguishing the child’s engagement in learning and curiosity about the world. It was, in short, exactly the kind of curriculum that Dewey deplored, ‘externally presented material, conceived and generated in standpoints and attitudes remote from the child, and developed in motives alien to him’.

Not only did the social efficiency curriculum threaten the kind of natural learning process treasured by the pedagogical progressives, but it also threatened the values of social justice and egalitarian community that were central to their beliefs. This curriculum was radical in its challenge to traditional notions of academic education, but it was profoundly conservative in its embrace of the existing social order and in its eagerness to prepare students for predetermined positions within that order. It introduced tracking and ability grouping into American schools; it introduced ability testing and guidance as ways of sorting students into the appropriate classes; and it institutionalized the educational reproduction of social inequality by creating a system in which educational differences followed from and in turn reinforced differences in class, gender and race.

In our district what I think I see is John Dewey progressive ed K-5 replaced by Edward Thorndike progressive ed 6-12.

So far I prefer Dewey.

Jay Mathews, as it turns out, lived in Scarsdale and experienced "Westchester tracking" firsthand. More later.

spilt religion - Hirsch on progressive education & Romanticism
David Labaree on the 2 factions
Labaree on constructivism
Hirsch on Labaree
Hirsch, E.D., "Romancing the Child," Education Next, 1 (Spring 2001).
Labaree, David F., "Progressivism, Schools, and Schools of Education: An American Romance," Paedagogica Historica (Gent), 41 (Feb. 2005), 275–89. (pdf file)