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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?