As Jim Nehring at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell observed,
“Progressive schools are the legacy of a long and proud tradition of thoughtful
school practice stretching back for centuries” — including hands-on learning,
multiage classrooms, and mentor-apprentice relationships — while what we
generally refer to as traditional schooling “is largely the result of outdated
policy changes that have calcified into conventions.”
Progressive educators are concerned with helping children become not only good
learners but also good people
Learning isn’t something that happens to individual children — separate selves
at separate desks. Children learn with and from one another in a caring
community, and that’s true of moral as well as academic learning.
Interdependence counts at least as much as independence
Progressive schools are characterized by what I like to call a “working with”
rather than a “doing to” model.
A sense of community and responsibility for others isn’t confined to the
classroom; indeed, students are helped to locate themselves in widening circles
of care that extend beyond self, beyond friends, beyond their own ethnic group,
and beyond their own coun
“What’s the effect on students’ interest in learning, their desire to
continue reading, thinking, and questioning?”
Alfred North Whitehead declared long ago, “A merely well-informed man is the
most useless bore on God’s earth.” Facts and skills do matter, but only in a
context and for a purpose. That’s why progressive education tends to
be organized around problems, projects, and questions — rather than around lists
of facts, skills, and separate disciplines
students play a vital role in helping to design the curriculum, formulate the
questions, seek out (and create) answers, think through possibilities, and
evaluate how successful they — and their teachers — have been
Each student is unique, so a single set of policies, expectations, or
assignments would be as counterproductive as it was disrespectful.)
they design it with them
what distinguishes progressive education is that students must construct
their own understanding of ideas.
A school that is culturally progressive is not necessarily educationally
progressive. An institution can be steeped in lefty politics and multi-grain
values; it can be committed to diversity, peace, and saving the planet — but
remain strikingly traditional in its pedagogy
A truly impressive collection of research has demonstrated that when students
are able to spend more time thinking about ideas than memorizing facts and
practicing skills — and when they are invited to help direct their own learning
— they are not only more likely to enjoy what they’re doing but to do it better.
Regardless of one’s values, in other words, this approach can be recommended
purely on the basis of its effectiveness. And if your criteria are more
ambitious — long-term retention of what’s been taught, the capacity to
understand ideas and apply them to new kinds of problems, a desire to continue
learning — the relative benefits of progressive education are even greater.[5]
Students in elementary and middle school did better in science when their
teaching was “centered on projects in which they took a high degree of
initiative.
For starters, they tell me, progressive education is not only less familiar but
also much harder to do, and especially to do well. It asks a lot more of the
students and at first can seem a burden to those who have figured out how to
play the game in traditional classrooms — often succeeding by conventional
standards without doing much real thinking. It’s also much more demanding of
teachers, who have to know their subject matter inside and out if they want
their students to “make sense of biology or literature” as opposed to “simply
memoriz[ing] the frog’s anatomy or the sentence’s structure.”[12] But
progressive teachers also have to know a lot about pedagogy because no amount of
content knowledge (say, expertise in science or English) can tell you how to
facilitate learning. The belief that anyone who knows enough math can teach it
is a corollary of the belief that learning is a process of passive absorption —a
view that cognitive science has decisively debunked.