A Progressive Education

Noted educator Tom Little and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Katherine Ellison reveal the home-grown solution to turning American students into life-long learners. The longtime head of Park Day School, Tom Little embarked on a tour of 43 progressive schools across the country. In this book, his life’s work, he interweaves his teaching experience, the knowledge he gleaned from his trip, and the history of Progressive Education. As Little and Katherine Ellison reveal, these educators and schools invigorate learning and promote inquisitiveness by allowing the curriculum to grow organically out of children's questions—whether they lead to studying the senses, working on a farm, or re-creating a desert ecosystem in the classroom. We see curious students draw on information across disciplines to think in imaginative yet practical ways, like in a "Mini-Maker Faire" or designing and building a chair from scratch. Becoming good citizens was another of Little's goals. He believed in the need for students to learn how to become advocates for themselves, from setting rules on the playground to engaging in issues of social justice in the wider community. Using the philosophy of Progressive Education, schools can prepare students to shape a vibrant future in the arts and sciences for themselves and the nation.

Arguing against the tougher standards rhetoric that marks the current education debate, the author of No Contest and Punished by Rewards writes that such tactics squeeze the pleasure out of learning. Reprint.

The progressive ideology and methods are clearly the prominent choice in our schools today. In generic, layman's terms, Norman Dale Norris discusses how the progressive movement came about and how the ideas are practiced today, some of which are less than desirable. Norris is sympathetic and supportive of the progressive ideology and offers suggestions for success.

A Progressive Education? argues that the period after WWII witnessed a fundamental transformation in concepts of childhood and adolescence in England and Wales.

This book provides a provocative but carefully argued addition to the theory and practice of education in developing countries. The book provides an ethical and empirical justification for support of formalistic teaching in primary and secondary schools in developing countries. It also refutes the application of progressive education principles to curriculum and pre- and in-service teacher education in such contexts. The central focus of this book is the formalistic teaching prevalent in the classrooms of many developing countries. Formalistic (‘teacher-centred’, ‘traditional’, ‘didactic’, ‘pedagogic’) teaching is appropriate in the many countries with revelatory epistemologies, unpopular and old-fashioned though these methods may seem in some western, especially Anglophone, ones. Formalism has been the object of many failed progressive curriculum and teacher education reforms in developing countries for some 50 years.

The memoir of an innovative American educator and the remarkable school she built—“a lucid presentation of what progressive education can accomplish” (The New York Times). Over a century ago, American educator Caroline Pratt created an innovative school that fosters creativity and independent thought by asking the provocative question: “Was it unreasonable to try to fit the school to the child, rather than . . . the child to the school?” A strong-willed small-town schoolteacher who ran a one-room schoolhouse by the time she was seventeen, Pratt came to viscerally reject the teaching methods of her day, which often featured a long-winded teacher at the front of the room and rows of miserable children sitting on benches nailed to the floor. In this “persuasive presentation of progressive education,” Pratt recounts how she founded what is now the dynamic City and Country School in New York City, invented the “unit blocks” that have become a staple in classrooms around the globe, and played an important role in reimagining preschool and primary-school education in ways that are essential for the tumultuously creative time we live in today (Kirkus Reviews).

Front Cover -- Half Title -- Series Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Contents -- Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1 Remembering Little Red -- 2 Child-Friendly Schools -- 3 The "We've Been There andDone It" Fantasy -- 4 Close Encounters of anEducational Kind -- 5 Buried Treasure -- Epilogue -- Bibliography -- Index -- Back Cover

List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments 1: Progressive Education: A Definition 2: Old Wine, New Bottles 3: Progressive Schools in the 1930s 4: Progressive Education in the 1930s: The Local Perspective5: Postwar Education: The Challenge 6: Progressive Education under Fire 7: Postwar Education in the Suburbs 8: Postwar Education in Middle America 9: Progressive Education and the Process of Reform Tables: School and Community Statistics, 1930-1960 Notes Index Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

This penetrating historical study traces the rise and fall of the theory of recapitulation and its enduring influence on American education. Inherently ethnocentric and racist, the theory of recapitulation was pervasive in the social sciences at the turn of the 20th century when early progressive educators uncritically adopted its basic tenets. The theory pointed to the West as the developmental endpoint of history and depicted people of color as ontologically less developed than their white counterparts. Building on cutting-edge scholarship, this is the first major study to trace the racial worldviews of key progressive thinkers, such as Colonel Francis W. Parker, John Dewey, Charles Judd, William Bagley, and many others. Chapter Summaries: “Roots” traces the intellectual context from which the new, child-centered education emerged.“Recapitulation” explains how racially segregated schools were justified and a differentiated curriculum was rationalized.“Reform” explores some of the most successful early progressive educational reforms, as well as the contents of children’s literature and popular textbooks.“Racism” documents the constancy of the idea of racial hierarchy among progressive educators, such as Edward Thorndike, G. Stanley Hall, and William Bagley.“Relativity” documents how scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter Woodson, Horace Kallen, and Randolph Bourne outlined a new inclusive ideology of cultural pluralism, but overlooked the cultural relativism of anthropologist Franz Boas.“Refashioning,” examines the enduring effects of recapitulation on education, such as child-centered teaching and the deficit approach to students of color. “For American scholars, 'progressive education' is something of a talisman: we all give it ritual worship, but we rarely question its origins or premises. By contrast, race has become perhaps the dominant theme in contemporary educational studies. In this bold and brilliant study, Thomas Fallace uses our present-day racial lens to critique our historic dogmas about progressive education. We might not like what we see, but we should not look away.” —Jonathan Zimmerman, New York University “This is an important and provocative book. Fallace provides a thoughtful analysis of how race influenced the foundational ideas of progressive educators in America. He has made an important contribution to the history of curriculum and educational reform.” —William B. Stanley, Professor , Curriculum and Instruction, Monmouth University

How and why we should educate children has always been a central concern for governments around the world, and there have long been those who have opposed orthodoxy, challenged perception and called for a radicalization of youth. Progressive Education draws together Continental Romantics, Utopian dreamers, radical feminists, pioneering psychologists and social agitators to explore the history of the progressive education movement. Beginning with Jean Jacques Rousseau's seminal treatise Emile and closing with the Critical Pedagogy movement, this book draws on the latest scholarship to cover the key thinkers, movements and areas where schooling has been more than just a didactic pupil-teacher relationship. Blending narrative flair with thematic detail, this important work seeks to chart ideas which, whether accepted or not, continue to challenge and shape our understanding of education today.