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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.