ABSTRACT
Progressive educational philosophies, associated with the names of Francis Parker, G.Stanley Hall, and John Dewey, among others, date back a century and have waxed and waned as prominent school reform discourses. Debates among advocates for different types of pedagogies persist on university campuses, in educational and popular journals, and at the community and school levels. Although the complexity of pedagogical and curricular preferences is recognized-hence the difficulty of classifying them-for purposes of the arguments put forth in this chapter, I cluster advocates into two camps: conservatives and progressives. Conservatives favor a technical or classical education in which knowledge is predetermined and aligned with subject matter disciplines, which are further sequenced into linear grade levels. There are fairly rigid boundaries between subject area disciplines and also within ranked levels of achievement within subjects. The knowledge base is supposedly1 of Western European origin and therefore monocultural and assimilationist in perspective. For conservatives, the task of schooling is the transmission of traditional academic content through didactic pedagogy from a knowledgeable person (teacher) to one who knows less (student). Successful learners are to learn and retain prescribed subject content and literacy skills and demonstrate their knowledge and skills on standardized tests. Freire (1989) refers to this as the “banking concept” of education. Excellence is enforced through the top-down control of accountability standards and mandated competitive evaluation.2 Conservatives want to preserve the status quo-or return to a time perceived as being closer to conservative ideals-so their goals are to enhance students’ skills and credentials to prepare them for a place in a preexisting, hierarchically stratified postschool life.
