Education: Progressives’ Progress

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Twenty years ago Progressive Education was a tiny and, in many eyes, a crackpot movement quarantined in a handful of private schools. Today it covers much more territory. Now predominantly a public-school affair. Progressive Education has strongholds in the suburbs of greater New York. Chicago and Los Angeles, is transforming such major public school systems as those of Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles,New York City, Detroit. No U. S. school has completely escaped its influence.

For this the Progressive Education Association is chiefly to be thanked or blamed. Twenty years old this fall, P. E. A. numbers only 10,500 of the nation’s 1,000,000 educators, but its cocky. 33-year-old executive secretary, Frederick Lovatt Redefer, was able to boast truthfully last week: “We are no longer a rebel group.” Its leading critic, white-thatched Professor William Chandler Bagley of Columbia’s Teachers College, concedes that this little group today wields a dominant influence in U. S. education.

Alarmed at Progressive Education’s rapid spread, a handful of educational traditionalists, including Professor Bagley, last February organized a group called the Essentialists, issued a manifesto. Their indictment : the new movement has made U. S. education “effeminate,” has made U. S. children inferior spellers and readers. Their proposal: more attention to discipline, systematic work, “essentials” (such as the 3 Rs). This platform raised a cheer here and there, but the Essentialists have not yet slowed up the Progressive marcb.

What It Is. Biggest worry of the Progressives is that their program is spreading too fast, too thinly. For genuine Progressive Education is still available only to pupils in expensive private schools or the public schools of swank suburbs. Most bandwagon-jumping schools have swallowed chunks of Progressive methods, little Progressive philosophy. One of the reasons: No two people agree on what Progressive Education is.

Recently George Horace Gallup’s Institute of Public Opinion asked Professor Bagley and Teachers College’s famed Emeritus Professor William Heard Kilpatrick, leading spokesman for the Progressives, to define the Progressive v. Traditional issue in a question to be put to voters. After two days’ travail, each of the professors brought Dr. Gallup half of a 110-word question. Dr. Gallup threw up his hands, abandoned the idea. The question :

From Traditionalist Bagley: In your opinion, should our public schools prepare boys and girls for adult responsibilities through systematic training in such subjects as reading, writing, arithmetic, history and English, requiring mastery of such subjects, and, when necessary, stressing discipline and obedience, with informal learning recognized but regarded as supplementary rather than central? or

From Progressive Kilpatrick: Should our schools make central the informal learning of experience and activity work, placing much less stress on formal, systematic assignments, discipline and obedience, and instead seeking to develop pupil initiative, discipline and responsibility as well as mastery of basic subjects by encouraging pupils to show initiative and develop responsibility, with teachers, while in control, serving primarily as guides?

John Dewey is regarded as the father of Progressive Education, but actually he was neither its first philosopher nor its first schoolmaster. First great modern philosopher was Rousseau, who, in Emile (1762), advocated a child-centred school. First Progressive-school system in the U. S. was started in 1875 by the late Colonel Francis Wayland Parker in Quincy, Mass. Last week in Manhattan was celebrated the Goth anniversary of the second, the Ethical Culture School, founded in 1878 by Felix Adler.

Dewey, in his books and laboratory school at University of Chicago (1896-1904), coordinated earlier ideas and experiments, formulated and carried out a complete philosophy of education. New devices have been developed since Dewey, but still the core of Progressive Education are his central ideas: that children should be treated as individuals, a child’s interests and needs should shape the curriculum, children should learn by doing (i.e., taking trips, building, painting), should practice democracy, should learn to solve the same kind of problems they will meet after school.

Today in a typical Progressive school, children call their teachers by their first names, treat them as friends instead of masters. In place of fixed desks and seats are chairs, workbenches. Instead of textbooks,pupils use newspapers, magazines, reference books, observation trips. Instead of studying subjects in separate capsules, as reading, spelling, arithmetic, they have projects.

Thus, having had their interest aroused by Indian blankets a teacher has brought into their classroom, pupils may decide to study Indians. They form committees, go to libraries, museums, parks to find out what Indians ate, where and how they lived. Later they report to their classmates, build tepees, write and produce plays. In the same way they study boats, farming, Egypt. In doing so they have been learning to read, write, count, multiply.

In a Progressive school, children also spend part of their time dancing, singing, making musical instruments, telling stories. Instead of doing calisthenics, they play games. Result of all this is that a modern Progressive school is noisy, apparently chaotic, but pupils are too busy to be naughty. When they are naughty or sulky, they are sent not to a be-ferruled principal but to a psychiatrist, who tries to find out what is wrong at home.

Teachers. If U. S. education, out of step with the industrial 20th Century, was ripe for change when Dewey arrived, it was not yet ready to plump for any such apparently helter-skelter scheme as this and Progressive Education made little headway before 1918. That fall one Stanwood Cobb, an instructor in Annapolis’ severely traditional U. S. Naval Academy, rounded up a few progressive educators, formed the Progressive Education Association.

To finance research and advertising for Progressive Education, P. E. A. needed money. It did not need to look outside its own group, for one of its members was gentle, modest Mrs. Avery Coonley, daughter of Capitalist Dexter Mason Ferry (Ferry Seeds), who was running a little Progressive school in Downer’s Grove, Ill. Watered by Mrs. Coonley’s gifts, P. E. A. flourished and Progressive Education burst into bloom.

Many a new Progressive school opened. Landmarks were Miss HelenParkhurst’s Dalton School in Manhattan, whichintroduced the famed Dalton Plan of work contracts for individual pupils, and Carleton Washburne’s system in Winnetka, Ill., which became in 1919 the first public Progressive school system in the U. S.

Today the Dalton School no longer uses the original Dalton Plan and Winnetka is considered a little backward by Progressive educators. Their present idols are Superintendent Paul Misner’s schools in Glencoe, Ill., which have achieved a remarkably close tie-up with the community’s general life, and Superintendent Alexander Jerry Stoddard’s high schools in Denver, where the “core curriculum” (i.e., building all studies around core subjects, such as “Modern Living”) is in full flower.

These shifts of affection illustrate the one fact on which all Progressive educators agree: Progressive Education is not standardized and they hope it never will be. Cited by Executive Secretary Redefer as a horrible example of devotion to a device instead of progress is the doggedness of a Progressive school teacher who one day hit upon the momentarily happy idea of having Bozo, a pet dog, write imaginary letters to her pupils. Her pupils have been learning reading from Bozo for 15 years.

Because Progressive Education is not standardized, it makes great demands on its teachers who, besides having learning, skill and wholesome personalities, must be resourceful, creative. The history of Progressive Education is the history of great teachers. Mainspring of the Progressive movement today, however, is not its teachers but its propagandists, a group of youngsters whose job it is to sell Progressive Education. Top-notch propagandists are Stanford University’s Curriculum Expert Paul R. Hanna; Ethical Culture School’s cadaverous Director Vivian T. Thayer; (secondary school curriculum expert); hard-boiled Alice V. Keliher, chairman of P. E. A.’s Commission on Human Relations; plump, persuasive Mental Hygienist Caroline Zachry. Chief organizer and propagandist, however, is Executive Secretary Redefer.

Portrait of a Progressive. Like many another Progressive educator. Frederick Lovatt (“Red”) Redefer is a Quaker. He was born, however, the ninth child of a poor Methodist minister, in Haverstraw, N. Y. Graduated from traditional public schools in Brooklyn and Great Neck, L. I., he got a civil engineer’s degree at Swarthmore and a chance to make his fortune in business, but he decided to return to Swarthmore to study education.

He won highest honors there, taught for a year at Progressive Oak Lane Country Day School in Philadelphia, became at 26 superintendent of Glencoe’s schools. Arch-patriot Elizabeth Billing, who lives in nearby Kenilworth, soon listed Pacifist Redefer in her “red network.” When Glencoe, a rich Chicago suburb, was frightened by Depression into dropping art, music and manual training from its curriculum,Redefer quit as superintendent, became in 1932 P. E. A.’s executive secretary.

P. E. A. also had been stricken by Depression, was $11,000 in the hole, had only 4,000 members. Redefer saw that Progressive Education’s future must be in the public schools. Dynamic Willard W.Beatty, then the association’s president, and other Progressives were beginning to prevail upon the Rockefeller General Education Board and Carnegie Foundation to finance large-scale, public school studies by P.E. A. commissions, which in five years have received $1,000,000 from the General Education Board alone.

Redefer went into the field, organized regional conferences for teachers. Unlike the usual cut & dried educational convention, but alive with questions and informal discussion in which everyone takes part, these conferences today draw 5,000 teachers and parents at a sitting.

In Manhattan Frederick Redefer’s headquarters are off Riverside Drive in a four-story brownstone building, filled with books and Progressive pupils’ paintings (visible behind him on TIME’S cover). In his spare time he goes to parties, skis, plays tennis, sometimes rises at 6 a. m. to go figure-skating.

Can They Spell? If Progressive educators are idealists, they are at least shrewd enough not to give their opponents tangible ammunition. They do not leave their pupils’ progress in reading, writing and reckoning entirely to projects and chance but come down on their youngsterswith concentrated individual drill in those subjects when necessary. They have also given much attention of late to testing their pupils, giving an accounting of Progressive Education’s results.

Last week, in three separate tests, the most searching of their kinds ever made, Progressive pupils came through with flying colors:

>A young professor at Ohio State University, J. Wayne Wrightstone, compared some 500 youngsters, carefully matched in intelligence, family background, calibre of their teachers, etc., in matched Progressive and traditional schools.* As has almost every examiner before him, he found that the Progressive pupils were ahead in reading, spelling, language, arithmetic.

To test previously unmeasured intangibles on which Progressives set great store, he invented ingenious new tests, using observation of pupils as well as pencil and paper quizzes. Results: Progressive pupils scored higher than those in traditional schools in knowledge of current affairs and people, honesty, cooperation, leadership, ability in creative, writing and art, critical thinking, breadth of interests. Traditional school pupils knew more about rules of health, Progressive pupils were huskier and healthier.

>From Lincoln School in Manhattan, perhaps the top-ranking Progressive school in the U. S., which is subsidized by Rockefeller money and had two Rockefeller boys as students, groups of pupils last year went to visit coal mines, steel mills, farms, TVA. This experiment was financed by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Last week, after careful tests, Ohio State’s Dr. Louis Rath, an evaluator for P. E. A., reported that in a ten-day trip and six weeks of related classroom study, high-school juniors gained 15% in consistency of their thinking, became markedly more liberal, matured two years in thinking power.

>Most elaborate test is one being conducted by P. E. A.’s Commission on the Relation of School and College. This is the famed “so-schools experiment,” comparingachievements of boys and girls from Progressive schools, admitted to college without examination, with those of matched graduates of conventional schools. Last week Commission Chairman Wilford M. Aikin, of Ohio State, reported that by the second year of this five-year trial, Progressive students were doing a little better in marks than conventional ones, were using their college opportunities more wisely.

The Meaning of Progressive Education lies deeper, however, than questions of efficiency. For the first principle and the religion of Progressive Educators is democracy, and their biggest question: how to achieve it. On the left wing a group thinks that Progressive Education should be chiefly concerned with the social order. Opposed are those who are chiefly concerned about individual development. RecentlyProgressive Education’s No. 1 present-day philosopher, Ohio State’s gaunt Professor Boyd Henry Bode, in a book called Progressive Education at the Crossroads, declared that nothing but chaos could result from exclusive attention to children’s individual needs, interests and learning. Progressive schools, he insisted, must lead their pupils to oppose dictatorship and make democracy “a way of life,” and he defined democracy as “continuous extension of common interests.”

More direct is Progressive Education’s 20-year-old international organization, the New Education Fellowship, on whose executive board is Frederick Redefer. Says the Fellowship: “We must regard as an obstacle to our educational aim any organization of society that permits of the oppression or exploitation of some human beings by others, whether within national boundaries or across them.”

*Appraisal of Newer Elementary School Practices—Bureau ofPublications, Teachers College, Columbia University.