John Dewey and Progressive Education

Abstract

In present-day textbooks on education, Dewey’s name is associated with progressive education. This chapter outlined progressivism in America (1860–1920) and took a closer look at progressive education (1910–1940). In it I presented 11 educators/scholars and 6 schools to give readers a sense of diversity of the progressive education movement. The ideas of Dewey’s disciples and young colleagues at Columbia, namely, William Kilpatrick, Harold Rugg and George Counts were discussed. Then I examined Dewey’s role in progressive education and offered an emerging consensus in light of recent research.

Introduction

Dewey Reads Science Fiction

Imagine you were bookish John Dewey, a graduate-turned-professor from Vermont (1875–1879) to Michigan (1884–1894). What leisure reading would you do? The answer is important for it might reflect Dewey’s personal interest as much as the social ethos of his times. Needless to say, the ideas from leisure reading might have crept into ones thinking.

You may be astonished that Dewey read science fiction. Looking Backward: 2000–1887 was a science fiction written by American novelist Edward Bellamy in 1888, eight years before the famed British novelist H. G. Wells published The Time Machine.

When asked in his seventies about what books he considered the most influential in his life time, Dewey named William James’s Principles of Psychology and Bellamy’s Looking Backward (Martin 2002: 83). It is not surprising that Dewey would name Principles of Psychology for its lasting impact on American intellectual thoughts but to name Looking Backward appears a bit out of expectation.

Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–1887

For readers unfamiliar with the nineteenth-century American literature, Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) was a novelist with a strong socialist inclination, which made him a good comparison with H. G. Wells. Bellamy’s father was a Baptist minister, who sent his son to Europe to study law. Upon returning to the USA, Bellamy took up journalism instead and worked in the New York Post. By 1878, he was publishing novels. After a few unnoticeable attempts, Bellamy stormed the literary world in 1888 with his utopian science fiction Looking Backward: 2000–1887. It sold over one million copies within a few years.

Looking Backward was set in Boston in 1887, during which the protagonist, Julian West, fell into a mesmerized sleep in an underground sleeping chamber. He was revived and woken up in the year of 2000 and found himself in an utterly different society. In 1887, Boston was a busy city with noisy streets. There were huge income gap between the rich and the poor; the poor lived in crowded slums while the rich lived in huge mansions with lavish decoration. The haves owned everything and paid the have-nots very low wages, leading to frequent workers’ strikes and riots.

In 2000, as Bellamy’s utopian novel unfolded, Boston became a small garden city with tree-lined boulevards and modern facilities. Poverty and hunger was eradicated by means of a government-planned economy in which everybody received an equal share of the domestic products. All citizens had college education and young men and women had free choice of their career, retiring at the age of 45. People led an efficient and orderly life, with a sense of brotherhood and fraternity. The dark side of human nature such as selfishness, greed and hypocrisy became history, being transformed into selflessness, benevolence and sincerity.

The American Reformers’ Quest

For readers of the twenty-first century, you may think Bellamy’s futuristic vision of 2000 too naïve. But imagine you were in the time-space capsule of 1887 Boston, what intellectual resources did you have for your dreams? In 1887, you did not have any historical evidence of the failure of the central-planning state economy, nor the suspicion of the “big brother watching”¹ that infringed on individual freedom. You, like Dewey, might belong to the new middle class who might have witnessed social injustice and economic inequity with indignation. All told, Bellamy’s vision had inspired intellectuals and the public to eliminate social ills by equitable distribution of economic goods. A Bellamyite movement started, and by 1891, 162 “Nationalist Clubs”² were formed for a movement to champion for state ownership and the abandonment of market competition. When Bellamy himself went into politics but died young at the age of 48, his vision had inspired a generation of American reformers for a more equitable society, though not necessarily a socialist one. The above sets the stage of progressivism and progressive education that we will explore in the next section.

Progressivism in America (1860–1920)

For American cultural history, readers can get more complete information from college courses of American history or even from high school textbooks. Below is a very brief account of the emerging ideas of progressivism in American culture during Dewey’s times, which is relevant to this chapter.

From Tradition to Modernity (1860–1879)

A British colony having gained independence in 1776, the USA was culturally more attached to Britain than to Spain, France or Holland, though immigrants and the religious persecuted from all Continental Europe sought refuge there. Thus, the New Englanders settled there with the British protestant ethic plus liberal individualism without an aristocracy but a power structure rested on mercantilism, liberty and pioneering spirit.

British classical economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo all had their impact on early American thought of free market economy and perfect competition. By the mid-nineteenth century, Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory and Herbert Spencer’s notion of “survival of the fittest” permeated American thought. With most Americans living in isolated rural communities, their Christian faith was aligned with their belief in individualism, laissez-faire and progress. Their values were summarized below by Robert Wiebe in his most acclaimed work, The Search for Order, 1877–1920:

Most important, the theory, the [Darwinian] theory, for all of its harsh qualities, drew upon a rich tradition of village values. Equal opportunity for each man; a test of individual merit; wealth as a reward for virtue; credit for hard work, frugality, and dedication; a premium upon efficiency; a government that minded its own business; a belief in society’s progressive improvement; these and many more read like a catalogue of mid nineteenth-century virtues. (Wiebe 1967: 136)

To my readers, it is instructive to read Dewey’s own account in his The School and Society (1899), which outlined how America changed from the rural self-sufficient agrarian economy into an early industrial urban economy. A vivid example is that in the 1860s the villagers still used animal fat and wicks to make their own candles. Then came electric light (MW1: 7). Soon, candle-making became mass production.

It was the forces of industrialization and urbanization that changed the face of America. With railroads cutting through cotton fields and connecting towns and villages; with the discovery of oil and the growth of the manufactory industry, small towns grew into big cities with new problems and social ills. Traditional values gave way to modern ones amid poverty and progress. This became the title of a best seller, Poverty and Progress (1879) written by Henry George (1839–1897), a journalist, political economist and pioneering progressivist. He studied the paradox of poverty and increasing inequity during a period of rapid economic growth through technological progress and argued, following the line of Ricardo, that land ownership, the monopoly of land, was the crux of the problem. The landowner simply held the property, reaped the benefit from other factors of production—capital, labor, entrepreneurship. To remedy the situation, George proposed a single tax, or land value tax, i.e., to tax the value of the land and use the tax to finance public investment and service, such as infrastructure building, transportation, education and social welfare. His rationale: land belongs to all people. He respected private property and did not advocate the confiscation of private property, however.

The publication of Poverty and Progress in 1879 marked the beginning of the Progressive Era. The book had had lasting impact on American thought and social reform.³ John Dewey must have read it in his formative years and he later estimated that it “had a wider distribution than almost all other books on political economy put together” (LW9: 300).

The Progressive Era (1879–1920)

In the 1880s, the American society was plagued with immense social ills caused by industrialization and urbanization. When Poverty and Progress became a best seller in 1880s, it had gone into the American psychic that the capitalists and landowners, by taking advantage of the laissez-faire economics and free market mechanism, reaped most of the economic wealth and left the mass in poverty, amid technological progress. They had erected monopolies in major industries and widespread political corruption was a way for them to perpetuate the system. The pressing problems of urbanization, city vices and immigration became the background of the intensifying conflict between the proletarians and the capitalists.

One bloody incident was the Haymarket Square Riot in Chicago in May 1886. A peaceful rally for an eight-hour day led to clashes between demonstrating workers and the police, followed by a bomb explosion killing 7 police officers and 4 civilians. The subsequent trial sentenced seven rioters to death. All these took place in big cities. Jacob Riis (1849–1914), one of the earliest reformist-journalists, described the New York slums, the dark streets and tenement apartments in How the Other Half Lives (1890): a poor, hungry and ragged man, unable to feed his children, became a man with a knife, seeking to kill and revenge at the wealthy outside Fifth Avenue of New York downtown. Observed Weibe,

Now danger lurked everywhere. Farmers and wage earners, dissenting ministers and angry editors, immigrants and ideologists, peaceful petitioners and armed strikers, all blurred into visions of a society unhinged. (Wiebe 1967: 78)

Despite conflict and antagonism, the progressivists looked at these problems optimistically: they believed in progress and took active action to solve them. The era was supposed to end with the First World War (1914–1918), after which the USA rose to become a dominant world power.

The Idea of Progress

Beneath these economic and political conflicts lies the idea progress, the nineteenth-century assumption that everything, society included, was moving forward and making progress toward perfection. Nineteenth-century progressivism embodied two important concepts: stage and evolution. Auguste Comte (1794–1859), the father of modern sociology, was among the first to postulate that human societies underwent three stages: the theological stage, the metaphysical stage and the positive (scientific) stage. As for evolution, progressivism picked up Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, manifest in Herbert Spencer’s notion of “survival of the fittest,” thus the term social Darwinism to justify fierce market competition as well as political struggle for the fittest, leading to the fittest and perfect outcome.

American progressivists took up these two notions with some ingenious revision. Notably, Lester Ward, an American sociologist of the Progressive Era, proposed in Dynamic Sociology (1883) that society evolved in four stages: natural man, loose aggregates, national states and universal integration. Around 1900, progressive economist Simon Patten proposed three stages in economic progress: pain economy (scarcity), pleasure economy (abundance) and creative economy (self-direction, cooperation and altruism) (Quoted from Wiebe 1967: 141). As for social Darwinism, all progressivists were against “social” or “economic” survival of the fittest. They had a crusading mission to eliminate economic inequity. Instead of leaving society alone to take care of itself, they advocated social intervention. Thus, Patten suggested breaking the bonds of “social heredity” and William Bagley (1874–1946), an educationalist, suggested nurturing the “socially efficient individual.”

Progressive Politics and Agenda

With social and economic upheaval aggravated by an economic depression of 1893–1894, the political elites felt the mood and joined force with city reformers for a new, improved society. The authors of the two best sellers, Henry George and Edward Bellamy, joined politics in different ways. Henry George campaigned for mayor of New York City twice: first as a candidate of the United Labor Party in 1886 and the second time as an independent Democrat in 1897 (He died of a stroke four days before the election). When Edward Bellamy inspired the Bellamyite movement for an utopian, nationalizing America, he founded a magazine, The New Nation, in 1891 and promoted united action between Nationalist Clubs with The People’s Party (Populist Party).

More importantly, progressive politics moved to the national level at the turn of the twentieth century as the two presidents, Theodore Roosevelt, serving from 1901 to 1908, and Woodrow Wilson, serving from 1913 to 1920, were increasingly progressive. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. (1858–1919), an image of an American “Cowboy” with robust masculinity, was the driving force behind progressive politics. As the 26th President of the USA, he proposed “square deal,” which means changing the rules for more equality of opportunity. In his 94-page pamphlet of A Square Deal for Every Man (1904),⁴ Roosevelt set forth 75 topics, which more or less covered control of corporation, conservation of natural resources, hygienic food and consumer protection. During his presidency, he worked to break the trusts, regulated the railroads, established national parks and advocated pure food and drugs, among other progressive measures.

Roosevelt aimed at a comeback for the 1912 election but was unable to win the Republican nomination. Thereby he founded the Progressive Party (nicknamed Bull Moose Party) and finished second (27.4% of the popular vote) in the presidential election. While Democratic nominee Woodrow Wilson won the election (41.8% of the popular vote), both Roosevelt and Wilson were considered progressivists so that American progressive politics lasted from 1900 to 1920.

One “public enemy” of progressive politics was the trusts. In 1890, the Sherman Antitrust Act was passed almost unanimously to prohibit agreements between big businesses to restraint trade or competition. President Roosevelt sued 45 companies under the Sherman Act while the succeeding President Taft sued 75. In 1914, the Congress passed the Clayton Act and the Federal Trade Commission Act as further antitrust measures. It must be noted, however, that many progressivists were not against big business per se; they were against big evil corporations which acted ruthlessly and greedily. They had in mind a new society, an orderly society that fostered cooperation between labor and big corporations. They supported social efficiency and social engineering but were generally anti-socialist in outlook.

Progressivists did not come as a unified band, but with diverse values as social gospelers, Christian socialists, romantic Marxists, corporate executives, political elites, public intellectuals. What united them was the faith of progress and social reform through human action. With the deep-rooted value of British mercantilism and individualism, they aimed to improve free market capitalism and rejected socialism. The diverse reform movements had attained enviable achievements: purifying the electorate, attaining women suffrage, improving municipal administration, regulating monopolies and corporations (trust-busting), anti-corruption, anti-prostitution, improving labor laws, prohibiting child-labor, conservation, etc.⁵

The Rise of the New Middle Class

Marxian political economy has it: industrialism created antagonism of the two classes: the bourgeoisie (capitalists) and the proletariat (workers). There were also petti-bourgeois, which we call them middle classes. In America, as in other nineteenth-century Western economies, the rise of the middle class probably started with industrialization and urbanization. They were a diverse group of professional occupations bound by unique professional skills and functions: in medicine, law, economics, accounting, administration, management, teaching, social work, architecture, engineering and so forth. They offered services of paramount need to support a new industrial society and a self-enhanced consumer society. They formed professional associations, published trade journals, established standards of practice and joined with tertiary institutions to confer qualifications. They actually offered upward social mobility for the lower class, and they outnumbered the capitalists, landowners and aristocracy. As the number of farmers dwindled, the number and kinds of professionals were on the rise. Armed with new knowledge and technical know-how, they were the impetus of more efficient work, improved services and better life. They were the educated with a new language, a new perspective to old problems and a scientific outlook to solve problems. Their zeal and optimism created a hopeful future—a progressive society.

The Beginning of Scientific Management

In retrospect, scientific management looks like the last piece of jigsaw puzzle to fit in the American progressive society. With science as the new religion and efficiency as the new gospel, how to produce more, produce better and avoid waste is a crucial issue of productivity.

Frederick Taylor (1856–1915), an efficiency expert in industrial production, became one of the leaders in the efficiency movement. His ideas were simple: to replace the rule-of-thumb work method with a scientific study of the tasks and steps involved, followed by a detailed improved plan of instruction and supervision. He first worked in Midvale Steel Works and later Bethlehem Steel Corporation in the machine shop, where, through empirical tests, he was able to quadruple cutting speeds. Initially, he used the term “process management” and “shop management” but later adopted the term “scientific management” in his best remembered work, “The Principles of Scientific Management (1911).”⁶

The purpose of scientific management, also known as Taylorism, is to improve efficiency and avoid wastes. In his book, Taylor pointed out that there was “inefficiency in almost all of our daily acts” (introduction, p. 2). The solution was not to find “the right man” to supervise the work, but to set up a system of management by scientific rules, laws and principles. While he supported the prevalent “initiative and incentive” system for the employee for better work, Taylor stressed the importance of scientific task analysis, such as his famous time-motion study, to set standard and flow of work. Taylor further stressed the importance of training workers as well as their hearty cooperation (Chapter 2). By applying scientific management to improve efficiency, both employers and employees would benefit (Chapter 1) and that there would be equal division of work and responsibility between management and workers (Chapter 2).

The Progressive Nation

Taylor argued that systematic scientific management could be applied to the manufacturing plant, to great corporations and even to government. He saw efficiency as a national goal, for even President Roosevelt urged for “national efficiency.”⁷ This view echoed those of other progressivists such as Herbert Croly (1869–1930), a political philosopher who sought to improve the government administrative machinery by training experts in public services. More specifically, in his influential book, The Promise of American Life (1909), Croly argued for a strong national government and the strengthening of labor unions, with efficient management to promote equity among its citizens. Croly coined “New Nationalism” and later worked for Roosevelt in the 1912 presidential election, followed by publishing another book, Progressive Democracy in 1915.

In summary, both Taylor and Croly championed for efficiency. Taylor found the means (scientific management) and Croly found the sphere (Federal Government). Through science and technology, more goods and services could be produced efficiently and a strong government could help to manage and distribute them fairly. Both saw the importance of cooperation: Taylor urged for the cooperation between workers and management and Croly urged for the cooperation between labor unions and government.

Such is the social, political and intellectual background of the Progressive Era which has led to the emergence of progressive education. The mood of progressivism was one of science, optimism, efficiency and cooperation for a hopeful future. The public sentiments in politics were antitrust, anti-corruption, muckraking, fair election and fair voting. The organizing principles for society and government were: equity, democracy, efficiency, scientific management and rationality. These principles created a new social order, which moved American society from a traditional personal community into a modern impersonal world. The rising middle class is both the cause and the outcome of forging professionalization, bureaucratization and accountability in social institutions, including education.

From New to Progressive Education

When I began my study of progressive education many years ago, I pondered over a simple but basic question: Who started progressive education and when? Apparently it was John Dewey who was named as “the father of progressive education” (Encyclopedia.com).⁸ However, Dewey himself gave the credit to his colleague Francis Parker, calling him “the father of the progressive education movement” (LW5: 320). So who started progressive education, when and how?

Francis Parker—The Father of Progressive Education

Apparently progressive education is a movement traceable to Parker’s Quincy System in 1876, twenty years before John Dewey entered the field. As a movement, it was not started by just one person but grew out of social needs envisioned by many like-minded reformers. To begin with, the movement did not even have a name, only discontent with existing conditions and demand for changes.

Francis Wayland Parker (1837–1902) was a self-made pioneering educator of nineteenth-century America. Born in New Hampshire and educated in public schools, he started as a village teacher at the age of 16, first in New Hampshire and later Massachusetts. He fought The American Civil War (1861–1865) and obtained a colonel title, after which he traveled to Europe in 1872 and studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin, learning the latest European pedagogy and psychology. Upon return to the USA, Parker was elected superintendent of schools in Quincy, Massachusetts. During his term of office from 1875 to 1880, Parker implemented sweeping curriculum reform. He abolished alphabet learning by rote: the speller, the reader, the grammar, the copybook were replaced with magazines, newspapers and school-based materials. Arithmetic was taught by application, not by learning the rules. Geography was taught in field trips. The “Quincy System” quickly caught national attention, but he modestly stated he had nothing new to offer:

I repeat, ……that I am simply trying to apply well established principles of teaching, principles derived directly from the laws of the mind. The methods springing from them are found in the development of every child. They are used everywhere except in school. I have introduced no new principle, method, or detail. No experiments have been tried, and there is no peculiar “Quincy System”. (Quoted from Cremin 1962: 130)

The Quincy System produced impressive results: school children there excelled at reading, writing and spelling and stood fourth in their county in arithmetic (Cremin 1962: 131). In 1880, Parker left and became superintendent of the Boston Public Schools and later principal of the Cook County Normal School, Chicago (1883–1899). In 1894, Dewey visited the school, impressed with Parker’s work and enrolled his children Evelyn and Fred there. Parker was no theoretician, only a dedicated practitioner of education. He believed in child-centered education (from Fröbel), the scientific study of pedagogy (from Herbart) and learning with meaning (from Pestalozzi). He had given talks on teaching, published as Talks on Teaching (1883) and Talks on Pedagogics (1894). Still under the pre-Darwinian Christian faith for crusade of child education, Parker preached in 1894:

……the divinity…… striving imagination stretches away to the invisible, all powerful, all-controlling, all-loving. One who permeates the universe, lives in it, and breathes his life through it, the eternal life to be taken into the human soul. The myth is the obscure image, in the child’s soul, of God Himself. (Talks on Pedagogics, 1894)

When Dewey began his work in education at age 35 in 1894, Parker was already an established pioneer in his late-fifties. Their professional relationship was that of mutual admiration and respect. They were comrade-in-arms where Parker worked on the practice and Dewey offered the theory. The two differed in appearance and personality as well: Dewey was young, gentle and studious; Parker was bald head, emotional and aggressive. Dewey sent his children to Parker’s school and Parker invited Dewey to offer course of lectures there. A reporter once attended the lecture and gave a vivid and interesting contrast of the two personalities—a lion and a lamb:

…… one would never dream that the quiet man with his level eyebrows and pleasant gentle voice was the lion, and the great Colonel Parker was the lamb. Such, however, is the case. Col. Parker sits at one side of the platform, listening, often with closed eyes, as is his wont, to the agreeable voice of Dr. Dewey, as he quietly utters those radical ideas. …… Col. Parker, in his aggressively earnest way, has been lustily pounding for years, on the same thing. Dr. Dewey does not pound. He quietly loosens the hoops, and the bottom insensibly vanishes.

Dr. Dewey is worshipped by his hearers. There is a charm about his personality which is simply irresistible. He is as simple in his language as in his manner… At the close of the lecture…… Col. Parker then rose, …… said: “Ladies and gentlemen, if what Dr. Dewey has been telling you is true, the millions upon millions which are expended upon our public school system is not only spent in the wrong way, but we are dulling bright intellects and doing incalculable harm to the future generations.”⁹

It appears Parker well knew that his metaphysical and romantic pedagogy had to give way to a more scientific functional approach. No doubt Parker welcomed Dewey but Parker’s untimely death in 1902 ended their fruitful collaboration.

Charles Eliot—The New Education

It would be of research interest to see how the term “progressive education” evolved. In 1860, Herbert Spencer’s writings in education were collected and published in Education: Intellectual, Moral and Physical. He proposed that education was “to prepare us for complete living,” which included self-preservation, necessities of life, offspring rearing, proper human relations and gratification of tastes and feelings.¹⁰ His ideal education had had much impact on the American public, especially on Charles W. Eliot (1834–1926), who became president of Harvard University in 1869. In that year Eliot wrote The New Education,¹¹ which was about reforming higher education in America. Eliot was actively involved in secondary education reform as well. As for primary education, a writer in 1883 called the Quincy System “The New Education and Colonel Parker.” In other words, all reform effort in education, be it primary, secondary or tertiary, was under the generic term of “New Education.”

Dewey’s Changing Usage

In 1884, Dewey called his vision in psychology “The New Psychology.” Then, he used the term “new education” in 1899 for the education he delivered in the laboratory school, as seen in his lecture to parents (The School and Society, MW1: 6). In another address at the Francis W. Parker School in 1904 (MW3: 240), Dewey employed the term “indirect education,” which was published with a note from the editor as “new education” (MW3: 418).

In November 1908, the first volume of Progressive Journal of Education appeared. By then, the term “progressive” had already got into the public mind, together with President Roosevelt’s progressive politics. In 1915, when Dewey published his Schools of Tomorrow, he called the schools he investigated “progressive schools” (MW8: 263, 311) and those teachers “educational reformers” (MW8: 207). The term “new education” was dropped and “modern education” was used instead (MW8: 208). Finally in 1916, “progressive education” appeared in Democracy and Education, with a brief statement that “it is the aim of progressive education to take part in correcting unfair privilege and unfair deprivation, not to perpetuate them” (MW9: 72). This usage was in line with the progressivist ideal. Apparently, the early usage of the term by Dewey was to denote some kind of reform effort for equity and fairness, similar to what the connotation of “progressive” politics would carry.

When John Dewey returned from China in 1921, Progressive Education Association had already been formed with the term “progressive education” further popularized. From the 1920s to 1940s, Dewey employed the term “progressive education” frequently in his education writings to denote either the ideal education in his mind or the new, non-traditional education already in practice. It is of interest to note, however, that many educators continued to use the term “new education” even in the 1930s. One symposium organized in 1930 had the title of “The New Education Ten Years After,” which was an evaluation of progressive education of the 1920s. Even in Experience and Education of 1938, Dewey was using “new education” and “progressive education” interchangeably (LW13: 4, 14, 61).

The Diversity in Progressive Education

The Progressive Education Association

With progressive schools and practices already in place for more than two decades, Stanwood Cobb (1881–1982), Eugene Randolph Smith and other like-minded young educators founded the Progressive Education Association in 1919. They were inspired by Marietta Johnson’s organic school in Fairhope, Alabama and set forth statement of principles very much in Johnson’s vision:

• Freedom to Develop Naturally

• Interest as Motive of Work

• The Teacher as Guide, Not a Task-Master

• Scientific Study of Child Development

• Attention to the Child’s Physical Development

• Co-operation Between School and Home

• The Progressive School as Leader in Educational Movements¹²

Caught in the mood of progressivism, the Progressive Education Association started with a bold aim: reforming the entire school system in America (Cremin 1962: 241). The association was not a professional body; it was “primarily an association of parents and others who are interested in education as it affects the community and the nation,” serving to exchange views between parents and experimental educators (ibid.: 245). To start with, it was on the fringe of the education system; no support from university, nor schools of education, only the lay public. While Cobb and Smith both became teachers and later school principals, their experience was mainly confined to private schools rather than the mainstream public schools.

The Progressive Education Association invited John Dewey to be its first honorary president. When Dewey declined (he would be in Japan and China in the next two years), they were excited to get President Eliot of Harvard to fill this symbolic position. In 1927, they invited Dewey again upon Eliot’s death. This time Dewey accepted it but gave a critical presidential address in 1928 (see below for detail).

The Diversity of Progressive Education

In the 1920s, we saw the Progressive Education Association slowly rising to national prominence. However, it did not monopolize or solely direct the progressive education movement. Rather there were many prominent players, nearly all of them related to Dewey. Below is an outline of eight educators and their work. My list is never intended to be exhaustive but I hope to have covered the major ones as well as showed their diversity. Each educator probably deserves a chapter in a whole book on the subject.

Marietta Johnson’s Fairhope School

Marietta Johnson (1864–1938) dreamed of teaching at the age of ten and had taught elementary and high school. She read a book on child psychology (Nathan Oppenheim: The Development of the Child) and Dewey’s early educational writings. In 1903, she visited Fairhope, Alabama and later started her “Organic Education” for body, mind and spirit: to “minister to the health of the body, develop the finest mental grasp, and preserve the sincerity and unself-consciousness of the emotional life” (Cremin 1962: 149). In her Thirty Years with an Idea (1939), she outlined her utopian education:

No examinations, no tests, no failures, no rewards, no self-consciousness; the development of sincerity, the freedom of children to live their lives straight out, no double motives, children never subjected to the temptation to cheat, even to appear to know when they do not know; the development of fundamental sincerity, which is the basis of all morality.¹³

In 1914, Dewey visited Johnson’s school and was very much impressed with the Fairhope experiment. Naturally, Dewey supported the notion of organicity: the child and her education was seen as an organic whole, and Johnson called it “a unit organism.” In addition, Dewey had always had preference of a rural setting for education.

Dewey reported the Organic School in Schools of Tomorrow, which brought Johnson to national attention. Johnson’s child-centered education, as reported, resonated Dewey’s child interest, freedom and self-expression. Both saw the importance of teacher guidance in child-centered education. Johnson’s vision became the guiding spirit of the Progressive Education Association and many child-centered schools in the 1920s.

William Wirt’s Gary Plan

William Wirt (1874–1938) was a farm boy, studied political science and later attended some of Dewey’s class in the University of Chicago. He witnessed urbanization and wanted to preserve the traditional American values of liberalism, community and self-advancement through education. In 1907, he became the school superintendent of Gary, Indiana, which was a new industrial town 27 miles southeast of Chicago. While Wirt was not much an original thinker (Cohen 1966: 21), he had a vision to integrate a few disparaging ideas together: Dewey’s school as an embryonic community, Taylor’s scientific management for efficiency and pedagogical reform for manual training. This he did by his “platoon system” and “work-play-study” program.

From the onset, the Gary Schools were designed with the concept of shared facilities and floating class (platoon system). The school facilities were also community facilities: the school auditorium was another town hall where townspeople gathered, socialized and learned. Schools were open all day with adult evening classes and Saturday classes. To maximize the utilization of space and resources, fewer classrooms were built and the budget was spent on setting up manual training workshops, kitchens, laboratories, playground, gymnasium and other facilities. Students did not stay in one homeroom; through ingenious timetabling, students were “herded” from classroom to workshop, laboratory to gymnasium, playground to kitchen, etc. where they were actively and busily engaged in the “work-play-study” program.

In Gary, boys and girls learned cooking, carpentry, gardening, sewing, molding, through work and practice with workmen, gardeners, artisans. Academic subjects were departmentalized with attention on rapid, normal and slow learners. In this way, the Gary plan was implementing the progressive ideal of “learning by doing,” manual training, education of the gifted, and operating an embryonic community life in efficiency.

The Gary plan attracted much publicity since 1911. After Evelyn Dewey had visited it in 1914 and Schools of Tomorrow described it with endorsement, Gary became an object of emulation. While Dewey might not have met William Wirt personally and the two had only a few correspondences (Thorburn 2017: 4–5), Dewey’s brilliant student Randolph Bourne took it as par excellence of progressive education in his work, The Gary Schools (1916):

Those who follow Professor Dewey’s philosophy find in the Gary schools – as Professor Dewey does himself – the most complete and admirable application yet attempted, a synthesis of the best aspects of the progressive “schools of tomorrow”. (Bourne 1916: 144)

For Bourne, the Gary plan was American; it had caught the mood of the Progressive Era: efficiency and democracy. Philosophically speaking, it was Deweyan and American:

Its philosophy is American, its democratic organization is American. It is one of the institutions that our American ‘Kultur’ should be proudest of. Perhaps professional educators, accustomed to other concepts and military methods and administrative illusions, will not welcome this kind of school. But teachers hampered by drill and routine will want it, and so will parents and children. (The New Republic II, 1915: 328)

It appears Dewey did not have direct influence on Wirt. It was Wirt who took Dewey’s ideas and developed it into a system which could become a model for public schools. Despite the failure to implement it in New York, the Gary plan and platoon system continued to grow in the 1920s, with over 200 cities in 41 states experimenting it. It was the triumph of Dewey’s ideas as much as the pursuit for efficiency by school districts that had led to Gary’s popularization.

Helen Parkhurst’s Dalton Plan

Helen Parkhurst (1886–1973) was an acclaimed American educator in progressive education. She graduated from Wisconsin State Teachers College in 1904 and began teaching farm children. Parkhurst encountered Dewey while doing postgraduate work at Columbia (Higgins and Coffield 2016: 18). Motivated by Dewey’s notion of freedom and self-expression, Parkhurst tried out experiments of self-directed and self-spaced learning in 1911–1912. She asked students to sign contract and took responsibility of their learning; teachers only prepared material, gave assignments (tasks) and offered guidance while students planned and worked on their own pace. It was the earliest form of individualized instruction.

In 1912–1913, Parkhurst traveled to Italy and studied under Maria Montessori. When the latter visited the USA in her whirlwind lectures in 1913–1915, Parkhurst worked for her and became the director of all Montessori Schools in the nation. In 1919, Parkhurst continued her experiment in a high school, the Children’s University School in Dalton, Massachusetts. She argued that lockstep teaching was not efficient. Her experiment was an “efficiency measure” in which she “creates conditions… for the learner to learn.”¹⁴

According to Steven Cowen and Gary McCulloch, professor with the London Institute of Education, Evelyn Dewey became a mentor to Parkhurst, and her Dalton Plan was introduced to Britain by Rosa Bassett, a headmistress of a London secondary school¹⁵ (Higgins and Coffield 2016: 18). In 1922, Parkhurst published Education on the Dalton Plan, which was complemented by Evelyn Dewey’s The Dalton Laboratory Plan as well as another book The Dalton Plan in the Elementary School by Albert Lynch. By then, Dalton Association had sprung up all over England.

It appears the Dalton Plan was more popular in the UK than in the US. Here again Dewey had an indirect influence on Parkhurst by inspiring her direction of research and experiments. In fact, the terminologies behind Parkhurst’s method, such as “create condition,” “liberation of the pupil,” “learning equals experience,” “experience is the best teacher,” “self-direction,” “interaction,” “co-operation,” etc. are all Deweyan. Parkhurst remained influential in American education and later became a radio and TV host of children programs.¹⁶

Caroline Pratt and Lucy Mitchell’s Play School

During the Progressive Era, many women of the new age worked on early childhood education. Caroline Pratt and Lucy Mitchell were among them, based in New York City.

Caroline Pratt (1867–1954) taught in a village school and later earned a Bachelor of pedagogy from Teachers College, Columbia University in 1894. Afterward she taught manual training and carpentry. Around 1911, she designed a line of toys, called “do-with toys,” for children to play and tell their own open-ended stories in familiar settings. She believed in hands-on experience and learning through play. In 1913, she launched her Play School in Greenwich Village, New York City. It was reported in Schools of Tomorrow as:

The “Play School” conducted by Miss Pratt in New York City organizes all the work around the play activities of little children…… her plan is: To offer an opportunity to the child to pick up the thread of life in his own community, and to express what he gets in an individual way. The experiment concerns itself with getting subject-matter first hand,…… and with applying such information to individual schemes of play with related toys and blocks as well as expressing himself through such general means as drawing, dramatization, and spoken language. (MW8: 283)

Caught in the mood of expressionism of the Greenwich Village intelligentsia, Pratt saw children as creative artists. She was joined by Lucy Sprague Mitchell (1878–1967), a fervent educator who wanted to study how mental growth affected learning experience. In 1912, Lucy’s husband Wesley took up a teaching position in Columbia and they moved to New York City. The Mitchells and Deweys became friends and Lucy studied John Dewey’s work, met and learnt much about child development from John personally. In 1916, she founded the Bureau of Educational Experiments (BEE), which aimed to collect information on experiments and research to understand the “whole child” (Dalton 2002: 97). Through BEE, Mitchell established a nursery school as laboratory for observations and expanded Play School to become City and Country School in 1921.¹⁷ She also revolutionized children’s literature in her Here and Now Story Book with child-centered daily life stories of rhythm, rhyme and repetition. By 1930 BEE moved to Bank Street, New York City and was renamed Bank Street College of Education in 1950.

When Dewey endorsed Pratt and supported Mitchell, the two were not only Dewey’s personal friends, but they elaborated Dewey’s philosophy of education in early childhood education. Pratt stressed hands-on experience, play and community, which aligned with Dewey’s learning by doing and school as a miniature community; the do-with toys are miniature of made-believed living. Mitchell was an ambitious educator whose innovations were mostly focused on early childhood education. Inspired by Dewey, she tried out many child-centered experiments and funded many projects, such as nutrition and sex education classes, rural school programs and a special laboratory school by Neurological Institute (Dalton 2002: 97). She helped to popularize Dewey’s ideas in early childhood education.

The Columbia Connection

At the turn of the twentieth century when Dewey arrived at Columbia University, its Teachers College had already become the center of educational research and teacher training of the nation. Teachers College graduates came to dominate education faculties in other universities and school districts throughout the USA (Cunningham and Heilbronn 2016: 25). They were a prominent part of the progressive education movement.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Dewey was the superstar in Columbia for education while James Cattell and Edward Thorndike dominated psychology and educational psychology there, respectively. A few Teachers College professors had had significant impact as well, notably William Kilpatrick, Harold Rugg and George Counts.

William Kilpatrick and Project Method

William Kilpatrick (1871–1965) was Dewey’s student, colleague and advocate. After teaching and a number of administrative posts, Kilpatrick came to Columbia in 1907 and earned his doctorate in 1912. He taught at Teachers College for the next 25 years until retirement, strongly promoting Deweyan education.

At a time when teacher education and teacher certification became a must for a teaching career, thus the professionalization of teaching, Kilpatrick’s classes in Teachers College were always full. Over the years, he had taught over 35,000 teachers and so carried the title of “teacher of teachers” and “million dollar professor.” In 1918, Kilpatrick proposed The Project Method, a short article to advocate “whole-hearted purposeful activity proceeding in a social environment” with four steps: purposing, planning, executing and judging. It looks like an extension of Dewey’s How We Think with five phases (see Chapter 7 of this book). Kilpatrick’s idea was Deweyan and revolutionary because he started from the child’s active learning and was against a fixed curriculum, fixed-ordered teaching and memorization. On the other hand, he tried hard to integrate Dewey and Thorndike’s ideas (see elaboration in the next section). In 1923, he published Source Book in the Philosophy of Education, followed by Foundation of Method in 1926. The former was to support and scaffold Dewey’s philosophy of education in Democracy and Education with other readings and perspectives while the latter is a detailed argument for the project method.

For good or for bad, Kilpatrick put Dewey into mainstream education and became Dewey’s principal interpreter. Academically, his ideas and theories had closely followed Dewey’s line of thought. In the same vein, Kilpatrick’s project method became a popular label attached to progressive education.

On a personal basis, Kilpatrick was closely attached to Dewey. It was once quoted Dewey saying: “He (Kilpatrick) is the best I ever had” (Cremin 1962: 216). For readers’ interest, Kilpatrick was present in Dewey’s 70th, 80th and 90th birthday celebrations. In the 70th birthday celebration, Kilpatrick, then president of Teachers College, served as chairman of the advisory board for the event. In the 80th celebration, he delivered a speech: “John Dewey and American Life” and introduced Dewey. By the 90th birthday, Kilpatrick, already retired and nearly 80 years old, again chaired a committee of sponsors to raise funds for Dewey’s cause.¹⁸

The contribution of Kilpatrick to the populization of Dewey’s ideas must be enormous; for without him, Dewey may remain a little more than an outspoken public intellectual and an obscure philosopher of education, very much similar to the fate of Dewey’s teacher E. Stanley Hall, a seldom-mentioned pioneer of child-study movement of the late nineteenth century.

Harold Rugg on Child-Centered Schools and Progressive Curriculum

The progressive education movement took off after the publication of Schools of Tomorrow in 1915. Experiments and innovations sprung up throughout the USA, as Evelyn Dewey continued her investigative report in New Schools for Old in 1919, plus The Dalton Laboratory Plan, a whole book on individualized instruction in 1922. To chronicle the development of the 1920s, Harold Rugg, another professor with Columbia, co-authored with Ann Shumaker, The Child-Centered School: An Appraisal of the New Education in 1928. In it we saw schools tending toward child-centeredness, focusing on the child’s creative self-expression, the child’s physical and emotional needs as well as her artistic development.

According to Rugg and Shumaker, the new “child-centered” schools operated under the following principles: child’s freedom, child’s initiative, child’s interest, activity, creative self-expression and personality and social adjustment. These schools were revolts against traditional formal, mechanical teaching, freeing the child as the master of learning. It was the triumph of the child’s creative self-expression over the standardization in teaching. Many “new” schools provided laboratory and demonstration facilities for the dissemination of their practices.

The “new” schools were not without shortcomings. Rugg and Shumaker gave a critique for their chaos, their lack of design and planning and their neglect of training in thinking. A reviewer also pointed to its lack of purpose and values:

No one who has studied the accomplishments of children who are intensely interested or who have set up desirable purposes can doubt that interests and purposes are essential to the educational process, but this does not mean that transient child interests should be the center of the course of study. If interests and purposes are to have educational worth, they must be based on values, and the more universal and permanent the values, the better.¹⁹

Readers may be interested to note that Harold Rugg’s (1886–1960) contribution to progressive education was more on curriculum work than child-centered schools. He graduated in civil engineering from Dartmouth College in 1909 and later earned his doctorate in education from the University of Illinois in 1915. His engineering background became his strength when he worked with Charles Judd at the University of Chicago, applying statistics to education and publishing Statistical Methods Applied to Education in 1917. In 1920, he moved to Teachers College and began working on social studies and school curriculum. He published Man and His Changing Society, which later became a junior high textbook series in social studies. His approach was to engage students in the investigation of social problems from a critical perspective and to propose solutions. His textbooks, which sold over one million copies since 1929, advocated social justice with a progressive overtone. The textbook was attacked in the 1940s by conservatives for its “pro-socialist” ideas and was censored and systematically removed from some school districts across the USA.²⁰ It became a dark chapter in progressive education.

George Counts’s Social Reconstructionism

On October 29, 1929, the Wall Street stock market crashed, which soon developed into an economic depression. It swept through America in all aspects, including education. In face of rising unemployment and economic hardship shortly after the roaring twenties of innovation, reform, automation and ludicrous consumption, the public tried to comprehend and find a new direction for society. The concern of progressive educators also changed from child-centered education to education for social improvement. The new spokesman: George Counts; his vision: social constructionism.

George Counts (1889–1974) was a high school principal before earning his PhD under Charles Judd in the University of Chicago in 1916. Thereafter he taught in a few colleges and universities before landing to Teachers College in 1926 and stayed there until his retirement in 1955. Counts was a political activist, a socialist as well as a scholar. His starting point was Dewey’s idea of embryonic community and education for social reform. Counts elaborated it with a sociological analysis in The Selective Character of American Secondary Education (1922) and The Social Composition of Boards of Education (1927), arguing that business interests and the upper-class controlled high schools and school boards.

Being critical of American education, Counts’s ideas became more pro-socialist after his visit to the Soviet Union in 1927 and 1929. Counts was invited to deliver a speech to the Progressive Education Association in 1932. At the onset of the Great Depression, Counts challenged the basic premise of child-centered progressive education in his address entitled Dare Progressive Education be Progressive?, which was later published in Dare the School Build a New Social Order?²¹ Counts saw that progressive educators were afraid of influencing children to avoid “indoctrination”: they worked with the assumption that children would develop their own understanding of the world by themselves. They wanted to keep politics out of education, but in fact they had supported the status quo and middle-class values. Counts argued that education was basically a political and social venture. When business and financial elites (oligarchs) blundered and led to the current economic crisis, he challenged teachers to lead children and education for the creation of a new social order, a just society with true democracy.

It can be seen that Counts had moved a step further in Dewey’s education for democracy and social reform. He dared to call teachers to action, to urge educators to become social reformers. Counts’s true collective democracy resonated with Dewey’s participatory democracy where everyone participates and shares others’ point of views. Counts became anti-communist after Stalin’s political purge in the Soviet Union. He served as president of American Federation of Teachers from 1939 to 1942 was founder of New York State Liberal Party and ran for the US Senate in 1952. Counts remained politically active throughout his life.

It is of interest to note that Counts and Dewey had had the same political inclination. Both visited the Soviet Union in the 1920s. When Counts spoke with enthusiasm, Dewey spoke with caution. Counts became disillusioned and turned to anti-communism in the 1930s as the Soviet Union showed its totalitarian nature. About that time, Dewey defended democracy against the rising tide of dictatorship in Germany, Italy and Russia. When Dewey was about to retire from Columbia, Counts joined the faculty in the 1920s and became associated with Dewey. Both addressed the Progressive Education Association and were critical of progressive education. In 1934, Counts founded a new journal, Social Frontier: A Journal of Education Criticism and Reconstruction. In the journal, Counts set aside a “John Dewey’s Page” for Dewey to write whatever he desired. In 1940, when British philosopher Bertrand Russell was appointed visiting professor to the City College of New York, it became a court case for he was accused of being “an alien and an advocate of sexual immorality.” Dewey immediately jumped to Russell’s defense, and Counts unreservedly supported Dewey. They wrote to the mayor of New York City, demanding academic freedom and calling it “the persecution of Socrates and Galileo” (Martin 2002: 445). It shows clearly that the two were comrade-in-arms to fight for the cause of liberty.²²

Dewey’s Role in Progressive Education

No Consensus in Research

What was Dewey’s role in the progressive education movement? Many historians have tried to answer this question. As early as 1959, Martin Dworkin pointed out that Dewey’s role “was largely that of a reverently misinterpreted prophet rather than a carefully obeyed commander” (Dworkin 1959: 9). When Lawrence Cremin saw “the dialectic between Dewey the observer and Dewey the reformer” (The school Review 1959: 163), he argued that in both roles, Dewey affected the movement, but which had developed in ways different from his ideas. Dispute this failure, Cremin saw Dewey’s triumph as his ideas of progressive education became conventional wisdom in 1940s (Cremin 1962: 328).

A high school textbook typically saw Dewey as the leader of the educational reform: “under the leadership of Professor Dewey, an effort was made to rid American schools of the rigid, factory-like atmosphere which had long prevailed.”²³ On the other hand, Raymond Callahan argued in his Education and the Cult of Efficiency (1962), that Dewey’s progressive ideas were utterly defeated and replaced by the social forces behind public school administration which urged for social efficiency and scientific management. This view was taken up more than 20 years later when Ellen Lagemann proposed an intriguing thesis and argued cogently, with historical factual support, that “Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost” (History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 2, 1989: 185). Her point was that Thorndike’s scientific psychology (she called it positivist approach) gained popularity and became mainstream American education while Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy of education did not. To follow up with this controversy, Herbert Kliebard (2004), in his most acclaimed American history on school curriculum, entitled The Struggle for the American Curriculum (1893–1958), advanced yet another thesis. He told the story of the American curriculum as a struggle among four competing schools and groups: the humanists (traditionalists), the child-centered movement, the social efficiency educators and the social meliorists (social reformers). However, Dewey belonged to none of them. Dewey as a towering figure simply hovers over them. “I decide in the end that he did not belong in any of them and that he should appear in the books as somehow hovering over the struggle rather than as belonging to any particular side” (Kliebard 2004: xix). Readers may be bewildered with the impression that historians have not yet reached a consensus on Dewey’s role in the progressive education movement.

William Hayes, writing on The Progressive Education Movement (2007), made a point: that a historical movement such as progressive education can seldom be attributed to the work of any one individual (Hayes 2006: 17). He thus put alongside Dewey with Francis Parker, Jean Piaget (1896–1980) and William Kilpatrick as other pioneers in the progressive education movement (Hayes, Chapter 3), without specifying who influenced whom in what role. As I showed earlier, Parker was an elder colleague of Dewey, pre-Darwinian in outlook and a Frobelian, so that his views could be subsumed in Dewey’s; William Kilpatrick was Dewey’s faithful disciple who further elaborated Dewey’s ideas with the implementation of the “project method.” Piaget was a Swiss psychologist whose impact on American education was not felt until the translation of his works in the 1950s. We thus came back to a full circle: Dewey was the single most influential theoretician in progressive education movement but what was his role?

Dewey and Thorndike Integrated

In response to Lageman’s claim that “Thorndike won and Dewey lost,” I wish to briefly introduce my readers to Edward Lee Thorndike (1874–1949), who was a student of James McKeen Cattell, Dewey’s classmate in Johns Hopkins (see my Chapter 3). Of Thorndike’s long affiliation with Teachers College, Columbia University since 1899, he pioneered in educational psychology, comparative psychology, behaviorism, animal learning, psychometrics and had published over 450 books and articles. He started the trend of behavioral psychology and psychological measurement which had had impact on American education up to today. But American education of the twentieth century was not just a fight between Dewey and Thorndike, or their ideas. It was the competition of many contending ideas; some became more dominant in a certain period and waned. Others might have undergone metamorphosis and reinterpretation. In this case, Dewey’s ideas in education seem to have survived longer than Thorndike’s psychology.

On the other hand, Dewey’s disciple Kilpatrick had tried to integrate Dewey’s education with Thorndike psychology in The Project Method. Notably, Kilpatrick’s purposeful activity had integrated Thorndike’s law of effect. In a broad sense, the animal interacts with the environment to solve problems for a purpose. So do the human species. To a certain extent, the law of effect, of learning by trial and error, has some superficial, or universal, similarity with learning by doing. It can explain animal and human learning as well. The difference is that Thorndike tried to discover universal laws of learning for all species while Dewey tried to account for the unique process of human learning. The former focused on precise measurement, such as learning curve and quantity of reinforcements while the latter was concerned with the qualitative description of a growth process.

The Emerging View

Amidst the above divergent views, a few consensus have emerged. First, Dewey is the foremost theoretician of American education reform, whether we call it new, progressive, child-centered or otherwise. Supporters and opponents alike would quote Dewey for their own needs, motives and interpretation. One example of bizarre criticism was that Dewey’s notion of impulse had led to classroom nihilism (Edmondson III 2006: 32–33). The critic further pointed to “Dewey’s abuse of language for his rhetorical convenience” (ibid.: 96). Fact is he wanted a more academic education and a disciplined classroom in America. Second, there were contending forces and orientations of reform before, during and after Dewey’s times. Some were more aligned with Dewey’s, such as the child-centered educators and the social meliorists, but others were less so, such as the traditionalists and the efficiency experts. But all competing schools felt the impact of Dewey’s ideas, so that it is sensible for Kliebard to put Dewey as a towering figure above them. Third, there is no doubt that Dewey’s ideas would be misinterpreted and distorted in the course of the progressive education movement. To quote from Richard Hofstadter, one of Dewey’s critics:

It is commonly said that Dewey was misunderstood, and it is repeatedly pointed out that in time he had to protest against some of the educational practices carried on in his name. Perhaps his intent was widely, even regularly violated, but Dewey was hard to read and interpret. He wrote a prose of terrible vagueness and plasticity. (Hofstadter 1964: 361)

Finally, while Dewey did not intentionally or directly lead the progressive education movement, his impact on American education has been felt. More specifically, in elementary education, his child-centered approach becomes the dominant paradigm since the 1920s, though practitioners might not have followed through Dewey’s ideals. In secondary education, we saw the publication of the Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education by the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education of the National Education Association in 1918. The report was fully imbued with Deweyan concepts and principles, such as the following:

Education in a democracy, both within and without the school, should develop in each individual the knowledge, interests, ideals, habits, and powers whereby he will find his place and use that place to shape both himself and society toward ever nobler ends…… The purpose of democracy is to so organize society that each member may develop his personality primarily through activities designed for the well-being of his fellow members and of society as a whole.²⁴

Hofstadter has soberly observed, “Dewey’s thought was constantly invoked. His vocabulary and ideas, which were clearly evident in the Cardinal Principles of 1918, seem to appear in every subsequent document of the new education. He has been praised, paraphrased, repeated, discussed, apotheosized, even on occasions read” (Hofstadter 1964: 361). Historian Joel Spring echoed the same view: “The Cardinal Principles, the comprehensive high school, vocational guidance, and the junior high school represent, of course, the main stream” (Spring 1970: 69). In this way, many of Dewey’s ideas have been incorporated into mainstream American education of the twentieth century.

A personal note on Teachers College, the seedbed of progressive education in America. I studied there some 30 years ago. There was a building named after Thorndike and a statue of Dewey placed at the entrance of its Milburn Library. Faculties talked about the ideas of both men enthusiastically and students studied them with reverence.

Further Readings

For readers interested in John Dewey and Progressive Education, you may dig deeper in the following.

A. The Progressive Era (1879–1920)

This is an important historical era of America transforming from tradition to modernity. The following books are of interest; they offer intellectual history, political history and important personalities of the period:

• 1. Wiebe, R. H. (1967). The Search for Order, 1877–1920. New York: Hill and Wang.

  Wiebe gave a comprehensive history of the Progressive Era. It offers a historical narrative and sociological analysis for an era of rapid economic and political change. The nation moves from crisis in the communities (Chapter 3) to the revolution in values (Chapter 6) and to the illusion of fulfillment (Chapter 8). The book is part of The Making of America Series, a six-volume history of the USA.

• 2. Dawley, A. (2003). Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

  As the title suggests, The American progressives wanted to change the world. A kind of New Internationalism (Chapter 1) and a new form of Social Republic (Chapter 2) were in the making during the period. Dawley wrote with a sober and detached tone as world history underwent revolution from Mexico to China to Russia plus the rise of nationalism (Chapter 3) with World War and Reconstruction (Chapter 5). A scholarly and interpretative work imbued with details and quotes.

• 3. McGeer, M. (2014). A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement. New York: Oxford University Press.

  A recent book on the history of the Progressive Era, Mc Geer explained how the rise of the American middle class started a revolution: redefine the role of women, rewrite the rules of politics, revolutionize marriage and ban the sale of alcohol, and many more. It has created drastic and lasting change in America comparable to the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt and New Frontier of John Kennedy.

  In politics, the dilemma between social good of progressivism and the American value of individual freedom keeps surfacing in two-party politics and continues up to today.

• 4. Flanagan, M. A. (2007). American Reformed: Progressive and Progressivisms. New York: Oxford University Press.

  Written as a textbook on the American Progressive Era, the author tries to show how democracy and “social justice” movement permeates throughout the period in politics, social justice, economic equity and foreign policy. It covers how women, the blacks, the minorities and the labor unions involved and revolved around the movement which defined democracy in this young nation.

• 5. Gould, L. L. (2000). America in the Progressive Era (1890–1914). London: Routledge.

  Gould’s book offers an analytical narrative of the rise and decline of progressive reform from 1890 to 1914. The author puts focus on Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, both progressive in outlook and set somewhat similar agenda as America emerged to become a world power.

B. Progressive Education

The following books and papers can introduce you to the subject:

• 1. Cremin, L. A. (1962). The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957. New York: Knopf.

  A classic on the history of progressive education, Cremin amassed enormous data to show the transformation of the American schools from 1876 to 1957. In Part 1, he detected the progressive impulse and outlined the pedagogical pioneers (Chapter 5). In Part 2, he examined the progressive ideas, people (Chapter 6), organization (Chapter 6) and its impact (Chapter 8). A must read on the subject.

• 2. Fallace, T. D. (2011). Tracing John Dewey’s Influence on Progressive Education, 1903–1951: Toward a Received Dewey. Teachers College Record, 113(2), 463–492.

  In this paper, Fallace argued that Dewey’s influence on progressive education was assumed, not demonstrated. He pointed out four methodological flaws and saw that many historical actors were held responsible for the misinterpretation and misapplication of Dewey’s ideas. Fallace’s claim was justified in so far as history is often open to interpretation: many forces were at work to affect progressive education and John Dewey was but one of them.

• 3. Hayes, W. (2006). The Progressive Education Movement: Is It Still a Factor in Today’s Schools? Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Education.

  A short introduction by a retired educator. Hayes tries to relate progressive education to present-day American schools.

• 4. Howlett, J. (2013). Progressive Education: A Critical Introduction. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

  Howlett, a British lecturer in education, tried to show that progressive/liberal education started in Europe (Chapters 1 and 2) and gave a short account of Parker, Dewey and the American tradition (Chapter 6). It is updated with postmodernism, deschooling, critical pedagogy, Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich (Chapter 8). Written in a British style of complicated English, you may read it to avoid American-centeredness.

• 5. Zilversmit, A. (1993). Changing Schools: Progressive Education Theory and Practice. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

  Zilversmit was educated in a traditional “old-fashioned New York City public school” in the early 1940s. He was attracted to the freedom of progressive education and wrote about it with a calm and fair tone. He was on the sympathetic side and offered a historical study with in-depth schools in progress during the period in various locations, including Winnetka, Illinois and several school systems in the Chicago area. Zilversmit saw progressive education as genuine American ideology in education.

• 6. Semel, S. F., & Sadovnik, A. R. (1999). “Schools of Tomorrow,” Schools of Today: What Happened to Progressive Education. New York: Peter Lang.

  Susan Semel worked on her research in the 1980s and was inspired and encouraged by Lawerance Cremin, the historian of Progressive education. Her collaboration with Alan Sadovnik has turned into this volume, published in 1999, that documents the history of some of the most prominent progressive schools of the early twentieth century. It has also included a number of progressive schools of today to show how the legacy of progressive pedagogy has continued to strive. The title is a volume in the History of Schools and Schooling Series. Its second edition appeared in 2016, which was completely revised to include the more recent progressive charter schools, the experience in public progressive education and KIPP (knowledge is Power Program).

• 7. Edmondson, H. T. (2006). John Dewey and the Decline of American Education: How the Patron Saint of Schools Has Corrupted Teaching and Learning. Wilmington: ISI Books.

  A more recent short book (114 pages) to attack John Dewey. The author indicted “America’s education decline” (p. xii) as witnessed by low standard scores to the education system being controlled by teachers (National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers) who move along John Dewey’s education theory (p. xiv). A source book of emotional criticism with lots of quotes but misunderstandings.

• 8. Peal, R. (2014). Progressively Worse: The Burden of Bad Ideas in British Schools. London: Civitas.

  A British history teacher explains how “progressive education has plunged British schools into a decades-long crisis, leaving generations of pupils illiterate and under-educated” (from book bluff). Peal was hailed as a young voice in British education.

C. The Teachers College Professors on Progressive Education

As stated in my chapter, a few professors at Teachers College who were colleagues with John Dewey have had significant impact on progressive education. You may wish to know more about them:

• 1. William Kilpatrick

  • a. Biography

    Tenenbaum, S. (1951). William Heard Kilpatrick: Trail Blazer in Education. New York: Harper.

  • b. Selected Works

    Kilpatrick, W. H. (1923). Source Book in the Philosophy of Education. New York: Macmillan.

    Kilpatrick, W. H. (1925). Foundations Of Method—Informal Talks On Teaching. New York: Macmillan.

    Kilpatrick, W. H. (1941). Selfhood and Civilization: A Study of the Self-Other Process. New York: Macmillan.

• 2. George Counts

  • a. Biography

    Gutek, G. L. (1984). George S. Counts and American Civilization: The Educator as Social Theorist. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.

  • b. Selected Works

    Counts, G. S. (1927). The Social Composition of Boards of Education: A Study in the Social Control of Public Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Counts, G. S. (1928). School and Society in Chicago. New York: Harcourt Brace.

    Counts, G. S. (1952). Education and American Civilization. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University.

• 3. Edward Thorndike

  • a. Biography

    Joncich, G. M. (1968). The Sane Positivist: A Biography of Edward L. Thorndike. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

  • b. Selected Works

    Thorndike, E. L. (1903). Educational Psychology. New York: Lemcke and Buechner.

    Thorndike, E. L. (2010 [1904]). An Introduction to the Theory of Mental and Social Measurements. Charleston,SC: Nabu Press.

    Thorndike, E. L. (1906). Principles of Teaching, Based on Psychology. New York: A. G. Seiler.

    Thorndike, E. L. (2017 [1911]). Animal Intelligence. North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

    Thorndike, E. L. (2009 [1921]). The Teacher’s Word Book. Charleston, SC: BiblioLife.

    Thorndike, E. L. (2012 [1927]). The Measurement of Intelligence. London, UK: Forgotten Books.

    Thorndike, E. L. (1966 [1931]). Human Learning. London: The MIT Press.

D. Notable Progressive Leaders in America

Below is a list of American progressive leaders and their areas of specialization based on Progressive Era, Wikipedia.

• 1. Jane Addams, social reformer

• 2. Susan B. Anthony, suffragist

• 3. Robert P. Bass, New Hampshire politician

• 4. Charles A. Beard, historian and political scientist

• 5. Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court justice

• 6. William Jennings Bryan, Democratic presidential nominee in 1896, 1900, 1908; Secretary of State

• 7. Lucy Burns, suffragist

• 8. Andrew Carnegie, steel magnate, philanthropist

• 9. Carrie Chapman Catt, suffragist

• 10. Winston Churchill, author (not the British politician)

• 11. Herbert Croly, journalist

• 12. Clarence Darrow, lawyer

• 13. Eugene V. Debs, American socialist, political activist, trade unionist, and five times the candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the USA.

• 14. John Dewey, philosopher

• 15. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black scholar

• 16. Thomas Edison, inventor

• 17. Irving Fisher, economist

• 18. Abraham Flexner, education

• 19. Henry Ford, automaker

• 20. Henry George, writer on political economy

• 21. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, feminist

• 22. Susan Glaspell, playwright, novelist

• 23. Emma Goldman, anarchist, philosopher, writer

• 24. Lewis Hine, photographer

• 25. Charles Evans Hughes, statesman

• 26. William James, philosopher

• 27. Hiram Johnson, Governor of California

• 28. Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, union activist

• 29. Samuel M. Jones, politician, reformer

• 30. Florence Kelley, child advocate

• 31. Robert M. La Follette Sr., Governor of Wisconsin

• 32. Fiorello LaGuardia, US Congressman from New York; New York City mayor

• 33. Walter Lippmann, journalist

• 34. Mayo Brothers, medicine

• 35. Fayette Avery McKenzie, sociology

• 36. John R. Mott, YMCA leader

• 37. George Mundelein, Catholic leader

• 38. Alice Paul, suffragist

• 39. Ulrich B. Phillips, historian

• 40. Gifford Pinchot, conservationist

• 41. Walter Rauschenbusch, theologian of Social Gospel

• 42. Jacob Riis, reformer

• 43. John D. Rockefeller Jr., philanthropist

• 44. Theodore Roosevelt, President

• 45. Elihu Root, statesman

• 46. Margaret Sanger, birth control activist

• 47. Anna Howard Shaw, suffragist

• 48. Upton Sinclair, novelist

• 49. Albion Small, sociologist

• 50. Ellen Gates Starr, sociologist

• 51. Lincoln Steffens, reporter

• 52. Henry Stimson, statesman

• 53. William Howard Taft, President and Chief Justice

• 54. Ida Tarbell, muckraker

• 55. Frederick Winslow Taylor, efficiency expert

• 56. Frederick Jackson Turner, historian

• 57. Thorstein Veblen, economist

• 58. Lester Frank Ward, sociologist

• 59. Ida B. Wells, Black leader

• 60. Burton Kendall Wheeler, Montana politician

• 61. Woodrow Wilson, President