During the heyday of "progressive" education in the 1930s, a celebrated cartoon showed a young pupil plaintively asking the teacher: "Do we have to do what we want again today?"
Such jokes may soon be back in style, for much of progressive education has been revived in the current movement toward "informal" education in "open" classrooms. Once again it threatens to become a fad. In hundreds of tiny private "free" schools and in public classrooms in nearly every state, the fixed rows of desks and the fixed weekly lessons have been abandoned. Instead, children roam from one study project to another, theoretically following their native curiosity and learning at their own uneven rates. But even the supporters of "informal education" are beginning to fear that many schools are adopting the new methods without making teachers apply them systematically. Dropping conventional constraints makes teaching "absolutely more difficult," says Lillian Weber, associate professor of education at the City College of New York. "You can't just stand there and wait for magic to happen."
Dewey's Heirs. A stocky, forceful divorcee who looks a bit like a traditional schoolmarm, Mrs. Weber, 54, is emerging as one of the nation's most thoughtful advocates of making informal education intellectually demanding. By now she has trained some 100 teachers who are using informal techniques with about 2,700 kindergarten-through-fourth-graders in New York City public schools; she also has a Ford Foundation grant to train ten consultants to spread her methods. She has put her studies of similar British experiments into an expert new book, The English Infant School and Informal Education (Prentice-Hall; $4.95).
Informal education, which still seems radical to regulation-loving school administrators, derives from insights into learning that go back to Montessori and Dewey, and have since been confirmed by psychologists like Jean Piaget. For older children as well as preschoolers, says Mrs. Weber, "the most intense form of learning is the child's learning through play and the experiences he seeks out for himself."
Gerbil Cages. Weber-style classes overflow into nearby corridors with an abundance of playthings that teachers in regular classrooms use only sparingly. There are cages of gerbils, collections of shells and leaves, art corners, carpeted areas where children can sprawl while they read. To encourage math and science, there is more than the usual amount of measuring equipment, from tape measures to stop watches. To encourage reading and writing, most of the materials have "activity cards" posing questions. Near a science book lying on a second-grade windowsill, for instance, the card asks: "Do you think our tree is a red maple tree? Look at the leaf on page 11 and sign your name under yes or no." Despite the appearance of chaos "the structure is far from haphazard," Mrs. Weber says. "It comes from what you decide to put in the classroom and how it's laid out."