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>Most elaborate test is one being conducted by P. E. A.'s Commission on the Relation of School and College. This is the famed "so-schools experiment," comparing achievements of boys and girls from Progressive schools, admitted to college without examination, with those of matched graduates of conventional schools. Last week Commission Chairman Wilford M. Aikin, of Ohio State, reported that by the second year of this five-year trial, Progressive students were doing a little better in marks than conventional ones, were using their college opportunities more wisely.
The Meaning of Progressive Education lies deeper, however, than questions of efficiency. For the first principle and the religion of Progressive Educators is democracy, and their biggest question: how to achieve it. On the left wing a group thinks that Progressive Education should be chiefly concerned with the social order. Opposed are those who are chiefly concerned about individual development. Recently Progressive Education's No. 1 present-day philosopher, Ohio State's gaunt Professor Boyd Henry Bode, in a book called Progressive Education at the Crossroads, declared that nothing but chaos could result from exclusive attention to children's individual needs, interests and learning. Progressive schools, he insisted, must lead their pupils to oppose dictatorship and make democracy "a way of life," and he defined democracy as "continuous extension of common interests."
More direct is Progressive Education's 20-year-old international organization, the New Education Fellowship, on whose executive board is Frederick Redefer. Says the Fellowship: "We must regard as an obstacle to our educational aim any organization of society that permits of the oppression or exploitation of some human beings by others, whether within national boundaries or across them."
*Appraisal of Newer Elementary School Practices—Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University.