21; Middle class schools and Progressive education; The History of American education

In the Committee of Ten report Charles W. Eliot. And his fellow committee members struggled valiantly to preserve the idea of a common school in secondary education haunted by the specter of class divisions and industrial America. Deep into Babson to create it by segregated and separated school system. They had relied as you know on the concept of mental discipline to preserve curricular and social unity in the high schools. 13 years after they had submitted their report their work was then as good as the puti aided in the pronouncements of the Douglass commission in Massachusetts. Where do you stand on the whole had insisted that preparation for college was not the same as preparation for life. The Douglass Commission had advocated industrial

education and vocational training as designed for the non academically interested child who was to be prepared in school for a life in industry or agriculture in factory and on the farm. At the same time. In Chicago. John Dewey had begun his work on school reforms in which the puti aided both the unrelieved stress on the curriculum and on mental discipline as well as the idea of education as preparation for life. Clearly. For John Dewey the school was right to prepare. Neither for life. Nor for college. They were instead to provide OK Janelle's where children under the guidance of their teachers could wear that teach us enter upon a

life of inquiry and thereby form habits of continuing interaction with the natural world in which they lived. And in co-operative social discourse with their fellow human beings. Finally to round out this picture. There was the steadily growing core of school people both teachers and administrators who sought to chart their course in the classrooms between the demands put upon them by society for teaching the children. And the teachings of a likewise growing number of professional educators in the Teachers College just in the Departments of Education and the Ministry of injunctions of those of this a period who wrestled with the problems of institutional survival by

the second decade of the 20th century than all of these. More specifically educational developments were then overshadowed. By the massive presence of the new immigrants the children of the urban workers from southern and eastern Europe. Who were unaccustomed to American language and American culture. And presented an enormous problem of assimilation and integration into American society. And secondly of course by the impact of World War 1. With it we knew near panic he shouts for 100 percent American ism and patriotism. And its demands for a united unified American people that could make the world safe for democracy. The push there for turret's conformity towards a unifying school. That would embrace all American children

and bring them together rather than divide them. Became well-nigh irresistible. And it as you know found is that you case an expression in the so called cardinal principle support of the National Education Association and then founded this institution and body meant in a comprehensive. American high school. These were all developments which were then to burst upon the nation in 1918 and the following decade. Iota of this confluence pushes and strains. Of educational developments and wider social demands. Then emerge two quite different traditions in modern American education which both however well use rude referred to under the same name. I mean educational progress of the US by

1918 progressivism without the adjective educational. Progressivism had a respectable tradition of its own. In American life and politics. In education one can trace it back into the 19th century and see many of its ideas and concepts emerge. But by 1918 we can more clearly see its two major wings take different directions and part company from each other. And for our purposes I shall distinguish them then. Between what I should call not on the one side the collectivistic progressives of the educational mainstream and on the other the individualistic progressives. In an admittedly vague way I should also see them or at least interpret them as corresponding to those educators who were concerned primarily

with the education of the children of the others and those on the other hand who always thought primarily of the education of their own children and that to us familiar distinction emerged again in these two branches of progressive it's because of this by the collectivistic progressives of the mainstream. I mean those educators that menaced Vegas supervisors of the new comprehensive schools. Who were intensely concerned. With managing. Adjusting and providing for masses of children. In new Maine progressively democratic environments and where they're preoccupied with the custody of other people's children. And saw that problem primarily as a problem of the just ticks. And Administration the financing of budgeting. By the

individualistic progressive on the other hand I mean that movement that began with the teachers and parents of the Progressive Education Association. Who were intensely concerned with the individual child. Intensely concerned with their own children whom they of course always saw as individuals. Occupied with pedagogy with child nurture with academic learning with psychological adjustment. And all of them very proper middle class concerns of middle class parents and teachers for their children. And today then it is of this letter a group of the individualistic progressives and their followers that I want to speak. My thesis for this lecture is. That progressive education as first formulated in the Progressive Education Association. Well they had a sponsor of the

educationally concerned middle class. Of both teachers and parents of the spawns to the turmoil. The Democrat ization and the vulgar was ation. That accompany the spread of industrial and commercial democracy. It was a relief formulation of possibilities and purposes of teaching and learning. With the help of modern pedagogy philosophy child study and psychoanalysis. This movement tried to save it condemning learning artistic growth and human development from the socialized US and justice and to put education and learning in the place of socialization and schooling in an age of overpowering social precious socialization conformity. It sought to

preserve. Or recreate islands of individuality in the schools. Shelters in which youth could discover themselves and their capacities. It wanted to bring into balance the child and the curriculum the individual and his or her social environment. All those phrases already tipped you off to the place of John Dewey of course. And it was John Dewey who it sounded the keynote. Education as of the lading the individual child to the socially organized studies. Let me quote him here once more. The child and the curriculum are simply two limits which define a single process just as two points define a straight line. So the present stand poor point of the child and the facts and truth of studies. To find instruction

instruction is continuing the reconstruction moving from the child's present experience out into that represented by the organized bodies of truth that we call studies. For doing that and those who followed him re the rediscovery of instruction is the key instruction defined as a reconstruction of experience. Making conscious in in short the content of life that people have indeed lived through that they know. That we construction of experience of individual experience in social settings always of ever bringing together the individual experience with that of one's or the child's neighbors. In this view the characteristics for education as in the captivity comprised a triad. There is the child. And

there's the curriculum. And there is instruction linking the two. Instruction then not seen as a force imposed from above or from the outside. And not as a result. That is to be produced through a clever management manipulation threat. Incentives outside devices or behavior modification but rather to be evoked in the child. In the US in this whole theory of this type of because of education there's a premium placed on self direction on freedom on creativity. On unfolding. On the encouragement of curiosity and also on academic or scientific discipline which is to come through insight into the scientific process into the scientific process of inquiry. The point in all of that is that progressive education and its

freedoms where a warrant for one's own children. And the counter side of it is so often or was so often that behavior modification external discipline they were reserved for the education of the children of the others. Now in this tradition then of individualistic progressive as the American progresses we're very conscious. Of their pedagogical roots in European educational theory. Names like Testa lots. Are affordable or with so we're not at all unknown to these educators and towards the end of the 19th century perhaps the figure that looms largest among them was the German philosopher Johann Herr bought. And whose name the early beginnings of the American educational So she in fact gathered as

her broad society the American Her bought since which was a group primarily led by normal school teachers but teachers educators. Her boy himself had been the successor to the chair of cunt in Koenig's back in this early is 89 later collaborated with the villain whom books in the founding of the University of Berlin and then again most of his pedagogical fame as a professor at the University of get good thing and where he taught from 1833 to 1841. What Herbert did for the American educator someone should warn people who have that very clearly in mind was not exactly what Herbert actually taught in Germany there were two different things. But whatever he taught in Germany its impact on America and American teachers of course is what matters. And what in mind here is that he was the one who in essence

broke. The whole faculty psychology on the American mind. If you want to put it in the bombastic way certainly it's way over American teach educators. That faculty psychology which be if talked about here early of the present at the mind of these many many cubbyholes that static view her but replaced with a dynamic view. A view that gave the human mind a far greater playroom for gate a mobility made room in fact for the notion that was to become much more famous there afte on to Freud that there is such a thing as the subconscious. That people may have ideas in their mind of which they themselves are not what perhaps would say not yet conscious. There are ideas lying dormant in the mind. And they can do good teaching for the right kind of stimulation be brought out poor and out as it were from the

subconscious into the subconscious of the mind. And the picture of course with the growing of the unfolding of ideas comes very much into play here. Secondly besides the notion of this. The subconscious part of the mind. The notion. That the operations of the mind is purposeful and that human beings do things because they want to achieve certain ends and that for her brought specifically ideas. Thus our will lay to interests and to moral purposes. And when I do creation then really means is a bringing together. Of past experience and purpose which looks of course into the future. In that process of connecting Is it worth tying the past with the future. Those matters that had already been learned that are in the mind of a child in the classroom. Two new things that the teacher wants to stimulate and that the teacher perhaps wants to teach. That connection he

gave the name he to it he gave the name perception. The comprehending of new knowledge in terms of the old the making of connections in the mind. Now that of course added up to a psychology which was ideally suited to pedagogues here was the perfect answer of what it really is psychologically speaking that the teacher does when he or she teaches. What this process of teaching really means. This is the starting point of the new modern pedagogy in America at the end of the 19th century. Then of course there were other figures too who took up the theme in the United States itself. One of the best known among them is James you probably know him as the philosopher of pragmatism and the life history of William James. His introduction to these topics of psychology and

teaching is of interest in itself. He began as a student in 1861 at the Lawrence scientific school. Now that you may remember from an earlier lecture was the new parallel Scientific School at Harvard. It was that type of institution that led the new interest in him Perkel science and James begin with a study of chemistry a few years later he came under the influence of the then Swiss geologist who lived in the United States and taught at Harvard. Louis Agassi. And James shifted his interest from chemistry to comparative anatomy and physiology. All very scientific empirical fields. By 1864 he and wrote in The Harvard Medical School and then he did what every So for suspecting buddy budding scientists did in those years. He went to Germany and studied the physiology of the nervous system at Leipzig one of the German

psychologist Bonet. After you had come back he received his medical doctor at Harvard University in 1869. The very year that you took over the reins of Harvard. And three years later he became an instructor. In physiology at Harvard and then in anatomy. And I-76. The next step in his. Vaunted wonder what an interesting career was that he began to teach a course in physiological psychology. That perhaps was the decisive break psychology Until then in the United States had in fact been a subject subordinated to to philosophy. It was a subject of book learning and of mental speculations of what the world and what the processes of the mind might be like. James That is one of the early pioneers in this country to look at psychology at the Natural Sciences empirically taking it from physiology and not

from philosophy and 14 years later he produced this masterpiece called the principles of psychology. The first modern textbook of empirical psychology appearing in the United States. In it you find two major ideas that off significance certainly for teaching. And the first one you don't even normally associate with psychology because you probably think of it in literature. It's called the stream of consciousness. The notion that consciousness is a continuous process and that in James definition it includes Aleisha as well as elements. That is to say it is not the atomistic type of philosophy that rests conscious as it says this is what we have here. Maybe there is to a chair right now in my mind and a second later I look at do when you are in my mind and that's you add all these things up and you get the content of your mind. James was in effect saying between this chair and do this something in

between the relationship and that is just as important. For knowing what the mind is all about. Then the elements that's what he meant when he said that consciousness is continuous. It includes relations as well as elements and even on it in includes a fringe. As well as a core. There are things very much in the center of your mind. And others that have drifted off to the sides. And if you really want to be a psychologist and study somebody as mine you better take these do more ports on the sides as well which of course the lates to her unconscious. And secondly next to the stream of consciousness the idea that behavior is purposeless purposeful purpose of. Our various ways of feeling and thinking he wrote have grown to be what they are. Because of their utility in shaping our reactions on the outer world. Mental live as primarily teleological. So you have people now who pick up the new ideas the new psychology

into this group to belong. Stanley Hall whom you have mentioned many times before as the so-called father of the child study movement and the author of a big fat book called adolescence. He received the first Ph.D. in psychology in 1878 at Harvard and his first book after it was see if the degree was called the content of children's minds. And now the illustrations of how infect the minds of these new scholars work. The content of children's mind is an interesting piece. If you wanted to do you find it probably terribly dull and boring. And what it was was sort of an inventory by sending out loads and loads of question Eartha loads and loads of schools and asking them to be administered by the teachers I'm sure you're familiar how that works and asking what do this student think about. Just put it all down and you get long long lists of then you classify them you organize them and now you have your first scientific study of what Indeed you have in the minds of children. That's how

it all began. Survey Research and everything else that followed. It belongs the point is it belongs into this period it belongs into this climate of scientific thinking out of which the new pedagogy arose. And 1882. Stanley Hall also opened up the first empirical psychological Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. Now all of these contributions wherever they came from placed emphasis on the individual child on the notions of growth and development. On science as being a matter of an inquiry and on pedagogy as suspectible field of scholarship. And it was not the teachers and parents who were interested and attracted it by these developments that gathered in 1918 in the progress of Education Association. These were teachers and parents who were the pulsed. By the philosophy expressed in the cardinal principles.

Who could not stomach the concern with management that ministration with public schooling is keeping. And with the adoption of the philosophy of business deficiency for the proper running of schools they sought therefore a new relationship between individual development and social needs and goals. I quote from the founding document of the. Education is the purpose of Education Association the conduct of the pupil should be self governed according to the social needs of his community. Teachers should be guides not task masters. And I want to give you sort of a bouquet of view and opinions of these early progresses in their own language how they express themselves. There were a number of different varieties. First perhaps the largest assault call Child Study Group who placed the emphasis clearly on the child as an organism that has to be fostered and helped in schools and I'll

use my get a Johnson. Early pioneers who created a private school in Fair Hope Alabama called the organic school and left us a manuscript called 30 years with an idea which you can find today in the Teachers College library. And I quote from that manuscript of how she wrote about her views and experiences upon education. The school process she wrote would be that of Franklin ministering to the young. At each stage of development there would be guidance and control. But no inhibiting self-consciousness. No double motives no fundamental insincerity. There would be no teaching of subjects nor any teaching of children. The effort would be to provide experiences and studies through which childhood and youth developed. Education then here is seen as an unfolding with minimal guidance and the key virtue.

You will hear this in the next would hasten it come through over and over again is sincerity mixed in with that a tremendous deal of well Mantik utopianism let me quote some more here. It is very thrilling to contemplate what society might be in a few years if our educational system could accept and apply this point of view. No examinations No tests no fail us no what we wards no self-consciousness. The development of sincerity. The freedom of children to live their lives straight out. No double motives. Children never subjected to the temptation to cheat even to appear to know what they do not know. The development of fundamental sincerity which is the basis of all morality. There is an appeal then to modern youth an appeal that may have strange overtones to European youth blown their

eons the new Congress of the world to come. I quote you with what emerged from the college process. Clear eyed. Steady nerve. Clean blood it. With confidence in themselves and the universe are ready to meet whatever life has to offer. With a certainty which consciousness of power. And you guessed that sincerity of purpose give. True discipline results in a knowledge of the laws themselves and the universe which they gladly obeyed. Well this variant of the child development for very difficult Gustavus and more than one slide it off into sentimentalism India a kind of wishy washy mushy sincerity cult. And also into a neo fascist outmigration of power of a Nietzschean kind. And it certainly could be accused of misrepresenting the place in the need of discipline in a child's life. Another person in that movement was a market known book with the founder of the children's

later called the Walton school and Caroline Platt a Pret who founded the play and later the city and country school in New York. Their views were in a sense summed up in a book by Harold Rugg and Shoemaker called the child sent at school. And I quote from that. The child centered schools have wrote that the concept of discipline and have implanted thermally that of growth they organize themselves around the child's attention to learn. Whereas the old schools organize themselves around the teachers intention to teach. Now with those doing in terms every now and then cropping up in this language perhaps it's well to quote John Dewey himself. And what he thought of the child centered approach. Indeed he said it will do harm if Child Study leave in the popular mind the impression that a child of a given

age has a positive equipement of purposes and interests to be cultivated. Just as they stand. Nothing can be developed from nothing. Nothing but the crude can be developed out of the crew. And this is what surely happens when we throw the child back upon us achieve self as a finality. And invite him to spin you true the nature or out of the text. Boys don't do it. Now a second brand second type of percussive education is what I would call the artistic creative variant of it. And it had taken its theoretical departure and a large degree from Sigmund Freud. For ages you know placed great emphasis on the traumas of childhood. Traumas that being created by the early outburst of sexuality. And their impressions saw an immature and

feeble ego. A quote from Freud on that point. The ego cannot fend off the emotional storms which they provoke in any way except by repression. And in this manner a quiet in childhood all those dispositions to later illnesses and functional disturbances. It is of course the problem of oppression that these progressive educators in that school had to face it to cation cannot. But contribute to control by instincts and to adaptation to society. And in that way it has to set boundaries. It makes it's of libel at least to some sort of act. Accusations of being depressive. Affords that. The child must learn to control his instincts. It is impossible to give him liberty to carry out all his impulses without was to act. Accordingly. Education must inhibit forbit

and suppress. But this then for I would say the same self when that happens runs the risk. Of producing neurotic illnesses. And so for it speaks of a necessity for education quote to find its way. Between the skill of noninterference. And the correctness of frustration. And just exactly how you find that way between the two poles. That is the problem. And here is then what the Floridian educators moved in. They endorsed the theory of sublimation. To achieve such satisfaction through education as for example an artist's joy in creation. Or a scientist's joy in solving problems or discovering truth. A finding here than an acceptable way where energies could be channeled in a productive socially acceptable way to avoid precisely that. Scale of noninterference where the teacher would sit we stand back and let the child do what it wanted to do

or the corrupters of frustration way would come down heavy handed and say no can do this can do that but showing the way through sublimation into artistic scientific endeavors. See for example here are the words that come from Rudolph Steiner who somewhat falls in that tradition and was the creator of the school was known as the Waldorf