What is a "Progressive School?"
We are frequently asked about what is a progressive school. "Progressive" often conjures up misleading or incomplete images. But the story of progressive schools is a rich and important one. The history of the progressive education movement is an important part of the story of American education, and progressive schools have been (and are) among our leading schools. At the risk of oversimplification - after all, every good school is unique and distinctive with it's own strengths and character - we offer here some thoughts on the history of the progressive movement and the ideals of progressive schools.
Some links to other information sources about the philosophy or history of the progressive education movement:
Progressive education is usually identified with educational reforms and new thinking about schooling that began to be fashionable around the start of the 20th Century. John Dewey, the American philosopher, is most closely identified with the progressive schools movement. Although Dewey did not invent progressive schools, his early works, School and Society, in 1899, and The Child and the School, in 1902, established conceptual and pedagogic foundations for the new schooling. The first so-called "progressive school" was Dewey's own Lab School at the University of Chicago, which Dewey had founded in 1897 as a laboratory to develop his philosophical ideas. Colonel Francis Parker's school was the second progressive school, opened in Chicago in 1901. The Park School of Baltimore was established in 1912 and was followed throughout the 20's and 30's with the founding of progressive schools like Shady Hill in Massachusetts, The Bank Street School and the Little Red Schoolhouse in New York, Putney School in Vermont, and the Cambridge School of Weston. The Progressive Education Association was established in 1919, promoting the ideas articulated by Dewey and other reformers, and these ideas came to dominate American education through the 1930's.
The progressive school reforms, at the end of the 19th Century, were a reaction to what the reformers viewed as rigid and strict, unresponsive subject-centered schools. Children had been viewed as empty vessels into which knowledge was poured. Strict discipline and regimentation were found in most schools, which tended to be cold unfriendly places. By contrast, the progressive reformers promoted a more child-centered pedagogy, in which the child is allowed and encouraged to flow and to grow.
Long before Dewey, the beginnings of the new school were taking shape in Germany where Friedrich Froebel invented the Kindergarten. The spirit of the kindergarten - joyous, free, experimental, and child-centered - was what the reformers wanted to capture for all children. They also emphasized learning by doing, hands-on active learning rather than passive. The progressive reformers believed that the school should be molded around the interests and needs of the child, rather than the child being reshaped to fit some preconceived model of schooling.
The new school elevated the importance and role of the child's experience and experiencing. Learning must start with the learner's experience. Understanding cannot be achieved at a logical, technical level until it has been achieved as a psychological experience level.
Education for Dewey was not an event but a process, one that grows from within, with the student being guided by the teacher who functions more as a trusted mentor than an authoritarian dispenser of knowledge. The process is continuous, always recycling, spiraling and never ending. For Dewey, education is growth, and the aim of education is more education.
For progressive reformers at the turn of the Century, education was but a part of a larger social and political context. Progressive schools would emphasize community building - For Dewey, school should be "embryonic society" - and create the foundations of a just and harmonious society. As later became well-developed and articulated in his later works, Dewey saw education as the engine of social and political transformation. The great historian of education and chronicler of the progressive movement, Lawrence Cremin wrote:
"Progressive education began as part and parcel of that broader program of social and political reform called the progressive movement. Contrary to the widespread misconception that it dates from the advent of the Progressive Education Association in 1919, the idea had its origin during the quarter-century before World War I in an effort to cast the school as a fundamental lever of social and political regeneration. It began as a many-sided protest against a restricted view of the school, but it was always much more than this; for essentially it viewed education as an adjunct to politics in realizing the promise of American life." [The Transformation of the School, pg. 88]
Progressive schools have thus always emphasized education for social justice and equity, and responsible citizenship in a democratic society. Community and democracy are important concepts in progressive schools.
The Park School was founded in 1912 and has been commited to progressive educational principles since. As an example of a contemporary progressive institution, Park's Statement of Mission includes these aims:
The Park School embodies both in its tradition and in its daily practices two assumptions: First that human beings are capable and desirous of rational self-discipline and of acting towards others with respect, kindness, concern, and moral conviction; Second, that the activity of learning is an expression of positive energies, fulfills natural impulse, and enriches life.
...The conviction that the child contains inner strength, talents, and powers which can be liberated and nurtured ... insists that the teachers' authority as an adult and as a scholar should be used not to suppress or constrain, but to provide the skills, opportunities, challenges, and encouragement to bring about the flowering and fulfillment of the individual to think and act in the world with responsible freedom.
As articulated by John Dewey and others at the turn of the century, progressivism challenged the rigidity and narrowness of traditional education. In contrast to the notion that children must be made to learn by the authority of a teacher, progressivism posited an innate drive to learn and explore as deriving from the life force and characterizing human beings throughout their life span. For the notion that children must be made to learn through the teacher's control and authority, they substituted a conviction that teachers could harness the child's natural drive to explore the environment by designing lessons that engaged students as dynamic partners in learning. Louise Mehta, Faculty Handbook, pg. 9. From Jean Thompson Sharpless, The Park School: The First Seventy-Five Years.
Goucher College professor Hans Froelicher, Sr., was selected as the first President of Park (prior to his election to the Presidency of Goucher). Prior to the school's opening, Froelicher commented on the school he helped to found.
"In the school I had in mind, there would be no forcing process... Pupils were to learn because they were interested, because they loved their work, because they loved their school, because they were inspired by the highest type of teacher, because they saw the reason of things... They would be more self-dependent, alert, informed; they would be intellects, eager for knowing and doing."
Later, Froelicher outlined some of the cardinal principles:
The conscious and clearly stated aim of this school was to prepare, first of all, for life, and secondarily, for college.
[The] school was to be frankly non-sectarian...open to pupils of both sexes. It was to be a country school in the city, favoring as much as wisdom would advise, the field and the grove as the classroom. It was to be bound by no pedagogical precedent merely because it was a precedent. Its teaching staff was to be given freedom to work out the problem set them according to their own judgment.
It was to be democratic in spirit, affording equal opportunities to all those admitted to its advantages.
It was to give the most careful attention to the physical welfare of its pupils. *It was to create a wholesome atmosphere.
It was to give the best kind of intellectual training. ...It was to prepare each girl and boy for complete living, enabling them to perform effectively their duties towards themselves and their neighbors.
It was to be a school in which the personal influence of the teacher counts for as much as the instruction, where the teacher would be the trusted friend and guide of the pupil....
Finally, Froelicher pointed the way to the school's mission of providing innovative educational leadership:
If a private school has any [place in a democracy, it is that of leadership in educational theory and practices, to the end not only of furnishing the state and society with men and women educated to leadership, but to encourage and lead to improvements in the public school systems of the country by experimenting in new methods and materials. [Quoted by Francis Froelicher, Jr., in Maryland Historical Magazine, 90, 1, Spring 1995.]
In recent years, a national network of teachers embracing progressive education has met biannually. The Network of Progressive Educators adopted (1991) this mission statement, which describes the modern vision of the progressive school.
The purpose of the Network of the Progressive Educators is to support progressive principles, to connect educators and organizations, both public and private, to encourage progressive classroom practices and democratically organized schools, and to pursue diversity, equity, and inclusion for all children.
Statement of Principles
- Students learn best through direct experience, primary sources, personal relationships, and cooperative exploration.
- The blending of student's interests and teachers' knowledge is the starting point for all work.
- Assessment is accomplished through multiple perspectives.
- The school and the home are active partners in meeting the needs of the students.
- Parents, students, and staff cooperate in school decision-making.
- Schools build on the home cultures of students and their families.
- Schools encourage young people to fulfill their responsibilities as world citizens by teaching critical inquiry and the complexities of global issues.
- Schools help students develop their social conscience, appreciate the worth of others, and face issues of race, class, and gender.