“Progressive Education assumes the world changes, and that in a universe that is not particularly concerned with ability to think straight” – Rychard Fink During the early 1900s, the Progressive Movement came to the forefront of what Herbert Kliebard has called “the struggle for the American curriculum.” Progressivism consistently challenged traditional ideals concerning the foundations upon which students’ education in schools was based. The movement was greatly influenced by the writings of John Dewey, who was inspired by such known political theorists as Vittoriano da Feltre, Campanella, Comenius, Pestalozzi, Rousseau, and Bronson Alcott. In addition to Dewey, such prominent curriculum theorists as George Counts, Theodore Bramald, and Harold Rugg also made significant contributions to Progressivism in the early half of the 20th century in the United States. The Progressive Movement promoted the idea that students be encouraged as independent thinkers, creative beings, and expressive about their feelings. This was a sharp contrast from prevalent educational approaches rooted in social efficiency in the early 1900s in the United States. Such approaches did not foster the importance of individualism and creativity, and instead emphasized classroom control, management, and a structured curriculum that focused on basic skills.
Two basic principles fostered in the Progressive Movement were continuity and interaction. Continuity is the principle that each learning experience be nurtured by the previous experience. Therefore, from a Progressive standpoint, the learning process is gradual. The organizational thought process that relates all experiential processes is something Dewey named the “Logical Organization of Subject Matter.” The second principle, interaction, denotes the concept that what was learned may possibly need revisions, adaptations, or be discarded all together because further research has claimed it to be false. Essentially, from this standpoint, assumptions need to be challenged in the continual search for absolute truth. Thus the interaction principle encouraged experimentalism, verification, and reconstruction. The Progressive Movement was at its peak in the 1930’s during the Great Depression in the United States.
The Essay on The Progressive Movement Was A Liberal Triumph
“The Progressive movement of 1900 to 1917 was a triumph of conservatism rather than a victory for liberalism.” I disagree with this statement. The basic philosophy of “conservatism” is that change is bad. The basic “historian” definition of progressivism is: a movement for social change and improvement. For this reason, it is accurate to say that this era was a ...
Previously, in 1918, the Progressive Education Association was founded. Many who supported the movement felt there should be less authoritarianism in the schools, an elimination of set standards for school curriculum, and an emphasis on teaching what the pupils desired to learn. However, the movement did have its share of critics that felt education needed a foundation of basic skills and more discipline. By the early 1940s, such concerns came to the forefront of curriculum theorizing and the Progressive Movement quickly lost its centrality in terms of influencing school practice. The Progressive Movement made a lasting impact on American education in that it challenged traditional practices in education and conceptualized the student as an individual with special interests and needs. Without question, the child-centered curriculum emerged as a result of the Progressive Movement.
It was within the tradition of Progressivism, too, that the vision of schools as sites for transforming society was maintained, laying a significant theoretical foundation for the work of critical pedagogues and radical education theorists at the close of the 20th century.
