How Progressive Education Gets It Wrong
http://www.hoover.org/publications/hoover-digest/article/6408 (Hoover Institution
Standford Univ.)
by Williamson M. Evers
John Dewey invented progressive education a hundred years ago. It was wrong then and hasn’t gotten
better. By Hoover fellow Williamson M. Evers.
School reformers today are still trying to put into effect the turn-of-the-century
progressive education ideas of John Dewey and others. These ideas were largely
misguided a hundred years ago, and they are largely misguided now.
Public acceptance of progressive education has had its ups and downs. But
progressive education has never gone away. It received widespread attention in the
1920s, when it was concentrated in private rather than public schools. By the 1940s
it became standard fare in schools of education and for public school curriculum
planners. Progressive education went briefly out of fashion in the mid-1950s. But
progressive education came back and remains influential today, when it is often
called discovery learning.
What is progressive education? And where did it come from? When is it right and
when is it wrong?
THE ROMANTIC VISION
Progressive education did not spring full grown from the head of Dewey. It draws on
earlier ideas from the Romantic era (in the early nineteenth century) in Western
Europe. According to the Romantic notion, children can and should learn all things
naturally. Learning new things easily excites children, according to the Romantic
vision. Children are curious about everything. Children are like flowering plants. If
they are just planted into good soil (a good learning environment), they will
naturally grow and blossom.
This Romantic-era view of children and of schooling had its origin in the writings of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and others. It is not so much that Rousseau
himself was directly influential in America. But the Romantic era coincided with the
time in which American intellectuals such as Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
were shaping American culture. Hence it is the overall Romantic attitude toward
learning that has been influential in the American approach to education.
Taking up Romantic themes that linked education to the maturation of the child,
American philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952) taught, lectured, and wrote about
how to change schools along the lines of his philosophical ideas about how we come
to know things. For some years, Dewey even had his own laboratory school
affiliated with the University of Chicago.
Dewey held that the child is a natural learner, with a native impulse to inquire, an
“instinct of investigation.” Dewey celebrated the “native and unspoiled attitude of
childhood, marked by ardent curiosity, fertile imagination, and love of experimental
inquiry” and contended that this attitude was “very, very near” to scientific habits of
mind. He deplored classrooms where the “center of gravity” was in the teacher or in
the textbooks or anywhere other than “the immediate instincts and activities of the
child himself.”
The emphasis on “the immediate instincts and activities of the child” made an
impression on Americans and is probably the most widely known feature of
progressive education even today.
Prominent progressive educators Harold O. Rugg and Ann Shumaker wrote that the
new progressive sort of school they envisioned was to be devoted to “selfexpression and maximum child growth, . . . [a place where children will be eager to
go to school because] they dance; they sing . . . ; they model in clay and sand; they
draw and paint, read and write, make up stories and dramatize them; they work in
the garden” and so forth.
Progressive education’s emphasis on “the immediate instincts and activities of the
child” made a lasting impression on Americans and is probably the most widely
known feature of progressive education. A famous cartoon of the 1950s shows a
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class of exhausted and bored students imploring, indeed begging their teacher,
“Please, do we have to do what we feel like doing today?” This cartoon, of course,
somewhat misrepresents what Dewey wanted in the classroom. But it does
accurately represent what other progressives, the advocates of child-centered
education, have wanted.
THE PROGRESSIVE AGENDA IN EDUCATION
Progressives placed these items on the pedagogic agenda:
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All learning in school is to come through playing.
Children’s social and emotional development and psychological attitudes
(self-concept, self-esteem, how well the child works with others) are to be
given an overriding importance.
A high-school-as-supermarket curriculum, an approach in which core
subjects are crowded out, should be adopted. In the words of critic Mortimer
Smith: “hairdressing and embalming are just as important, if not a little more
so, than history and philosophy.”
Drudgery and hard work on the way to mastering a subject should be
abolished.
Competition among students should be eliminated.
Dewey himself didn’t advocate these things. But many of Dewey’s disciples and
other progressives did—and still do.
Discovery learning is the form of progressive education that is perhaps most
widespread today. Its basic idea is that people can only learn things and understand
them when they discover them for themselves. Whereas John Dewey backed his
progressive pedagogy with philosophical ideas about what truth is and what
happens when we think, discovery learning relies for its justification on
psychological theories about learning (“radical constructivism”) and about the
maturation of children’s mental faculties (“developmental appropriateness”).
ANSWERING BACK
Progressivism has always had its critics. William C. Bagley, of the Teachers College
at Columbia—itself a center and stronghold of progressivism—said in 1934 that
replacing “systematic and sequential learning” and putting in its place “activities”
would “defeat the most important ends of education in democracy,” specifically, the
objective of attaining “as high a level of common culture as possible.”
There is an alternative to the progressive approach: direct instruction or explicit
teaching. Direct instruction receives support from recent findings in cognitive
psychology: Although children do naturally pick up what psychologists call “primary
cognitive abilities” (such as spoken language and fine motor skills) without being
taught, children are born ignorant and need to be explicitly taught most skills and
knowledge (“secondary cognitive abilities”) by people who know the subjects.
Teachers are expected to know more than students and should seek to transmit that
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knowledge. Teachers should not respond to all questions from students in class (as
some discovery learning teachers do) with “What do you think?”
Subject matter often has an inherent internal logic and can be organized on a ladder
of increasing difficulty and complexity—a ladder of learning, if you will. Some
material has to be mastered before one can go on to the next step. Much subject
matter has this hierarchical character, and students have to learn it step by step.
Most children are not naturally curious about learning the multiplication tables or
the long-division algorithm or the rigor of the scientific method. Children have to
learn them through explicit guidance and through drill and practice. Disciplined
study and books are needed to banish ignorance and instill knowledge. To ascertain
whether students have mastered the material, students need to take tests, do
homework, and write reports that are their own individual work. They likewise
need to respond in class individually (and not just as a representative of a
cooperative learning group) to questions posed by the teacher.
Most children are not naturally curious about learning the multiplication tables or
long division.
Direct instruction should not exclude projects, field trips, group work, or a student
explaining at length in class (under guidance from the teacher) how the student
solved a problem. But the nonprogressive educationalist would strictly subordinate
efforts to enlist student interest and the use of motivational techniques to the task of
getting the student to learn the subject matter.
THE GOOD AND THE BAD
There are some good things about progressivism. Progressive educators seek to
motivate the student to take an interest in his or her studies, refusing to rely
exclusively on recitation, memorization, and textbooks. In the 1890s, before
progressivism, exclusive reliance on these methods was standard instructional
practice.
At the same time, we do know that students have to master—to learn so that they
are automatic—skills in reading, spelling, and mathematical facts and operations.
We know that the need to acquire skills and learn facts goes beyond the 3-R
fundamentals. The need is ongoing—continuing through calculus and beyond in
math and continuing through college-level reading and writing in English.
In the culturally important academic subjects—math, science, history and
geography, foreign languages, literature, and the arts—curriculum planners can and
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should organize a curriculum that emphasizes content. Education in these subjects
should be cumulative and sequential, with each year’s study building on what has
been learned previously. Curriculum planners, textbook writers, and teachers
should not ignore or discard the tools, terminology, and methods that practitioners
have historically used in academic disciplines. These tools and methods, along with
the knowledge that practitioners have gained over time by using them, are in fact
what define those disciplines.
We know that to attain advanced conceptual understanding in all subjects, explicit
teaching is necessary. Conceptual understanding does not come without the hard
work of studying a subject for a long time and in depth. The teacher needs to guide
the student throughout and often to impart knowledge directly.
If teachers keep these things in mind, they can and should use large components of
problem solving and applications in teaching and, certainly as well, individual or
group projects. Teachers can make use of empirical findings about how best to teach
subject matter without abandoning or neglecting the principle that knowledge in
intellectual subject areas is connected by an inner logic.
The complaint of the fair-minded critics is not that there is nothing good in
progressivism but that the progressive educators decline to look at the results of
their methods. Instead they elevate those methods into an object of near-religious
veneration and stress method at the expense of knowledge of the subject matter.
Mortimer Smith, an outspoken but fair-minded critic, offers this balanced
assessment of progressive education. It stands as both a just and measured criticism
of progressive education and a caution to proponents of direct instruction:
In his zeal for the tried and true, the traditionalist should not overlook the many
sensible aids to teaching and some of the sound guiding principles undoubtedly
contained in progressive education. It is enough to point out that the movement has
had a tendency to erect methods into dogmas with the unfortunate result that the
process of learning overshadows the content to be learned.
Williamson M. Evers, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of
the Institution’s Koret Task Force on K–12 Education, was the US assistant secretary
of education for policy from 2007 to 2009. In 2003, Evers served in Iraq as a senior
adviser for education to Administrator L. Paul Bremer of the Coalition Provisional
Authority. Evers has been a member of National Educational Research Policy and
Priorities Board, a commissioner on the California State Academic Standards
Commission, a trustee on the Santa Clara County Board of Education, and a
president of the board of directors of the East Palo Alto Charter School. He currently
serves on former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's California Academic Content
Standards Commission.
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His research papers are available at the Hoover Institution Archives.
Excerpted and adapted from What’s Gone Wrong in America’s Classrooms,
Williamson M. Evers, editor, published by the Hoover Press.
What’s Gone Wrong in America’s Classrooms is available from the Hoover Press. Also
available is “¿Habla English?” an episode of the weekly television program
Uncommon Knowledge , jointly produced by the Hoover Institution and the San Jose
PBS affiliate KTEH, featuring a discussion on bilingual education. To order, call 800935-2882.
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