In search of American progressives and teachers

Abstract

Over half a century ago Lawrence Cremin set in motion a historical debate about educational progressivism, a movement, if it was one, that meant ‘different things to different people’ and roused passions for and against. Personified in many individual and institutional initiatives, it appeared to resonate with individual liberty, political democracy and social reform. Historians since, including Roy Lowe, have joined in the debate. Did it succeed and what were its effects? Perfecting or pernicious? Cohesive or divisive? Models for reforming pedagogy were found in Pestalozzi and Froebel, but translating ideals into practice was the challenge. Laboratory and model schools lent weight to advocacy of reform, but were often private or privileged in their constitution. Dewey and his daughter in Schools of Tomorrow publicised a selection of these. Against this backdrop, historians have subsequently sought to explain why traditional pedagogic practices remained so powerful. Cuban drew on a wide-ranging set of primary sources to reconstruct classroom practices and explore the conservative practice of the public schools. Exceptions can be explained by a confluence of factors, local demographic, school and district leadership, paradoxical exercise of authority and control in the implementation of progressive practice.

Keywords:

• progressive education
• pedagogic theory and practice
• school reform
• Lawrence Cremin
• Roy Lowe

Notes

¹L. A. Cremin, ‘What Was Progressive Education, What Happened To It’?, Vital Speeches of the Day 25 (September 15, 1959): 721.

²Cremin, ‘What Was Progressive Education’, 722. On the many criticisms of progressive education in the 1950s, see D. Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade: American Education 1945–1980 (New York, Basic Books, 1983), chapter 2, and D. Ravitch, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), chapter 9.

³Cremin, ‘What Was Progressive Education’, 722.

⁴J. L. Rury, ‘Transformation in Perspective: Lawrence Cremin’s Transformation of the School’, History of Education Quarterly 31, no. 1 (1991): 68.

⁵L. A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957 (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), x. See also K. Jervis and C. Montag, eds., Progressive Education for the 1990s: Transforming Practice (New York: Teachers College Press, 1991), and H. Röhrs and V. Lenhart, eds., Progressive Education Across the Continents: A Handbook (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995).

⁶Cremin, Transformation, x.

⁷H. M. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum 1893–1958 (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), xi.

⁸R. Lowe, The Death of Progressive Education: How Teachers Lost Control of the Classroom (London: Routledge, 2007), 59–61, 155–7. Also read R. Lowe, ‘Education in England During the Second World War’, in Education and the Second World War: Studies in Schooling and Social Change, ed. R. Lowe (London: Falmer Press, 1992), 8–9.

⁹S. Cohen, ‘The Influence of Progressive Education on School Reform in the U.S.A.’, in Röhrs and Lenhart, Progressive Education, 329.

¹⁰W. J. Reese, ‘The Origins of Progressive Education’, History of Education Quarterly 41, no. 1 (2001):1–24.

¹¹D. F. Labaree, ‘Progressivism, Schools and Schools of Education: An American Romance’, Paedagogica Historica 41, nos 1&2 (2005): 277.

¹²Labaree, ‘Progressivism, Schools and Schools of Education’, 277.

¹³Cremin, Transformation, vii.

¹⁴W. J. Reese, America’s Public Schools: From the Common School to ‘No Child Left Behind’ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), chapter 3.

¹⁵ Twenty-Sixth Annual Report of the Trustees and Visitors of Common Schools, To the City Council of Cincinnati, for the School Year Ending 30^th June 1855 (Cincinnati: Gazette C. Steam Printing House, 1855), 70.

¹⁶J. M. Gregory, The Seven Laws of Teaching (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1886), 34.

¹⁷Gregory, Seven Laws, 46.

¹⁸C. F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983), 124–5.

¹⁹Reese, America’s Public Schools, chapter 3.

²⁰Kaestle, Pillars, 109–10.

²¹C. A. Ogren, The American State Normal School: ‘An Instrument of Great Good’ (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 35.

²²Ogren, American State Normal, 36–7.

²³³Ogren, American State Normal, 29, 44–5. Also read J. W. Fraser, Preparing America’s Teachers: A History (New York: Teachers College Press, 2007), 52–3, 121–2.

²⁴Ogren, American State Normal, 37–8, and Reese, America’s Public Schools, 88, 93–4. On the professional training of kindergarten teachers, which initially occurred outside of normal schools, see Fraser, Preparing America’s Teachers, 168–72; and the landmark study by B. Beatty, Preschool Education in America: The Culture of Young Children from the Colonial Era to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

²⁵Kaestle, Pillars, 16–18.

²⁶Kaestle, Pillars, 120–35, and W. J. Reese, The Origins of the American High School (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

²⁷Cremin, Transformation, 4–7, D. B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 55–6, 82–3, and Reese, America’s Public Schools, 114, 138.

²⁸Cremin, Transformation, 201–15.

²⁹Cremin, Transformation, 135, R. B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 110, and H. M. Kliebard, ‘John Dewey’, in Historical Dictionary of American Education, ed. R.J. Altenbaugh (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 112.

³⁰Kliebard, ‘John Dewey’, 112.

³¹Westbrook, John Dewey, 98–104, and Reese, America’s Public Schools, 136–42.

³²J. Dewey, ‘My Pedagogic Creed’, in Dewey on Education, ed. Martin S. Dworkin (New York: Teachers College Press, 1959), 22.

³³Westbrook, John Dewey, 108.

³⁴Cremin, Transformation, 237–8, and Reese, America’s Public Schools, 137.

³⁵J. Dewey, School and Society, in Dworkin, ed., Dewey on Education, 51–2.

³⁶W. J. Reese, Power and the Promise of School Reform: Grassroots Movements during the Progressive Era (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986).

³⁷T. L. Steffes, School, Society, & State: A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

³⁸Dewey, School and Society, 50–70, and Kliebard, Struggle, chapter 3, for a clear description of the Laboratory School and Dewey’s philosophy, especially related to the curriculum.

³⁹J. Dewey and E. Dewey, Schools of Tomorrow (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 1915), chapter 7, and R. D. Cohen, Children of the Mill: Schooling and Society in Gary, Indiana, 1906–1960 (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, c.2002).

⁴⁰Dewey and Dewey, Schools of Tomorrow, 31–44.

⁴¹Dewey and Dewey, Schools of Tomorrow, 54.

⁴²Dewey and Dewey, Schools of Tomorrow, 54–8.

⁴³Rury, ‘Transformation in Perspective’, 73.

⁴⁴Cremin, Transformation, 181, 343–53.

⁴⁵Rury, ‘Transformation in Perspective’, 71–3.

⁴⁶See especially J. I. Goodlad, A Place Called School: Prospects for the Future (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984). On the parallels between earlier forms of progressivism and those of the 1960s, read L. A. Cremin, Public Education (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 3–24.

⁴⁷L. Cuban, How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms 1890–1980, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 1993), 245.

⁴⁸Kliebard, Struggle, 210–12.

⁴⁹Arthur Zilversmit, Changing Schools: Progressive Education Theory and Practice, 1930–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 37–56.

⁵⁰Zilversmit, Changing Schools, 66.

⁵¹Zilversmit, Changing Schools, chapter 4.

⁵²Zilversmit, Changing Schools, 45–56.

⁵³See especially Tyack, One Best System, 126–76.

⁵⁴Zilversmit, Changing Schools, 51–6, 122–8; and A. Zilversmit, ‘Carleton Wolsey Washburne’, in Altenbaugh, Historical Dictionary, 378–9.

⁵⁵See B. M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), which underscores the centrality of home ownership to working class economic security.

⁵⁶Lowe, Death of Progressive Education, 1.

⁵⁷J. W. Newman, ‘Experimental School, Experimental Community: The Marietta Johnson School of Organic Education in Fairhope, Alabama’, in ‘Schools of Tomorrow’, Schools of Today: What Happened to Progressive Education, ed. S. F. Semel and A. R. Sadovnik (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 80–1.

⁵⁸E. F. Provenzo, Jr., ‘An Adventure With Children: Reflections on the Park School of Buffalo and American Progressive Education’, in Semel and Sadovnik, ‘Schools of Tomorrow’, 108, 110–11.

⁵⁹S. F. Semel, ‘The City and Country School: A Progressive Paradigm’, in Semel and Sadovnik, ‘Schools of Tomorrow’, 131 and Zilversmit, Changing Schools, 122.

⁶⁰Semel, ‘City and Country Day School’, 131.

⁶¹Semel, ‘City and Country Day School’, 131–2.

⁶²M. E. Hauser, ‘Caroline Pratt and the City and Country School’, in Founding Mothers and Others: Women Educational Leaders During the Progressive Era, ed. A. R. Sadovnik and S. F. Semel (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 71.

⁶³S. F. Semel, ‘Helen Parkhurst and the Dalton School’, in Sadovnik and Semel, Founding Mothers, 90, and S. F. Semel, The Dalton School: The Transformation of a Progressive School (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), for a comprehensive history.