ABSTRACT
As a history of progressive education in the United States, Diane Ravitch’s Left back: A century of failed school reforms (2000) is a study in rhetoric, oversimplification, and misrepresentation. Beginning with an indiscri - minate definition of progressive education, the author proceeds to set up straw men and false dichotomies in an attack on the progressive education movement. Ravitch leaves largely undefined the presumed “academic” ideal she promotes as superior for U.S. schools so that it cannot be meaningfully examined. Finally she chooses to ignore how universalizing secondary education affected the challenge of designing curriculum for all adolescent members of society rather than the 1 in 20 who attended high school in 1900. There is a “narrowly defined purpose” at work in Left back, and it is not commensurate with the goals of a public intellectual:
there’s no sense that there are truths and ideas to be pursued. There are only truths and ideas to be used and crafted and made into their most useful and appropriate form. Everyone is thought to be after something, everyone is thought to have some particular goal in mind, independent of the goal that he or she happens to articulate.
