PROGRESSIVISM

Progressivism is a cluster of doctrines concerning pedagogy, aims and the curriculum. It is characterised by a distrust of authority in education and by an emphasis on the individual child as the centre of pedagogic concern. The two key figures in progressivist thinking are Rousseau and Dewey; others are Pestalozzi, Froebel and Montessori. Although Dewey appears to have been influenced by Rousseau, they have distinctive approaches to education and while Rousseau and his followers have been influential in Europe, particularly in the UK, Dewey remains the dominant progressive thinker in the United States. Rousseau’s major educational text, Emile or Education (1911a), is

best understood as a prolegomenon in moral psychology for the emancipatory political project outlined in The Discourses on Inequality (1911b) and The Social Contract (1913). Only in a society freed from the harmful influence of inflamed amour propre (see self-respect) would it be possible for humans to associate as free and equal beings capable of binding together for the common good. In society as it existed in Rousseau’s time, patterns of domination and submission led, on the one hand, to people who enjoyed dominating others for the sake of it and, on the other hand, to people inflamed with paranoid resentment against those who wielded power over them. Rousseau does not distinguish between power and authority in existing societies, and assumes any kind of social relationship that involves asymmetrical power relations which is not consciously entered into by free and equal rational beings, even when it expresses legitimate authority, to be harmful. For this reason he proposed to educate Emile away from society

under the tutelage of an adult who would guide him to a state of independence free from any trace of inflamed amour propre. The tutor (Rousseau himself) is then the archetypal progressivist pedagogue, whose relationship to his charge is ambiguous. For the tutor could not have an overt position of power vis-a`-vis his pupil for fear of bringing about the result that he had been put in place to avoid, namely, the engendering of paranoid resentment. This means that he could not engage in overt teaching, but had to rely on manipulation on the one hand and the spontaneous growth of curiosity in Emile on the other. This latter was dependent on his developing amour propre, which was, in turn, dependent on the beneficial interaction of biological maturation and social intercourse. Rousseau thus introduced the ideas of development and growth into educational

thought and these in turn influenced Pestalozzi (who emphasised the importance of readiness for learning) and Froebel (who emphasised the importance of play). The upshot of Rousseau-inspired progressivism is that children

should be enabled to learn what they wish to learn when they are ready to do so and the preferred pedagogical method should be play enriched with the covert guidance of the teacher/facilitator. These ideas entered mainstream psychology through the work of Piaget and more recently have influenced psycholinguistics through the work of Chomsky. Rousseau presents an individualistic account of education which is difficult to apply in an unadulterated form to public education systems. Dewey criticised Rousseau on the grounds that he wished nature to do all the work of teaching and he also believed that Rousseau was mistaken in thinking that children should be taken out of the environment; rather they should be placed in an environment suitable to learning. As Darling (1994) has argued, both of these criticisms are misplaced. Rousseau assigned a very definite role to the tutor as arch-manipulator of the educational setting, exerting a covert but near-absolute power over the pupil. This in itself poses the danger that the child’s discovery that he is being manipulated may lead to the very kind of paranoid resentment that Emile’s education was designed to avoid (see self-respect). At the same time, Rousseau was very sensitive to the kind of environment that children were supposed to grow up in, rejecting sophisticated contemporary society for a much simpler social environment which could be controlled for the benefit of the child’s education. However, these criticisms illustrate the differences of emphasis between the two thinkers. American progressivism thus differs in important respects from the

European movement, whose most important influence is Rousseau. The clearest difference lies in the former’s very strong relationship with pragmatism, especially with the work of Dewey. Pragmatists insist that philosophy needs to put human beings, with their purposes and problems, at the centre of philosophical inquiry. In Dewey’s philosophy of education, this means that the primary recipients of education, children, become central to education. Students’ purposes and problems, as they are conceived of by students, are the starting point for educational activity. Like European progressivists, the Americans stress the importance of growth in the educational process. The aim of education is to promote growth, since it is only through growth that people will be able to adopt a wider range of purposes, and means of achieving those purposes, and thus go on to promote further growth. Growth and democracy are intertwined since,

according to Dewey, democracy involves the making of further connections among individuals in order to promote mutual growth in a social context in which no one is allocated undeserved privileges. Unlike Rousseau and his followers, however, Dewey stressed the importance of a social context in which this growth took place. In American progressivism, the public schooling system is an appropriate vehicle for education, precisely because it can serve as a breeding ground for democratic values through the promotion of connections between individuals that can further serve their purposes. Of themselves, these views need not lead to the practice of child-

centred forms of education, but Dewey (1916) insisted that the purposes and contextual features of schooling should be determined by the students themselves and their own perception of their interests, rather than be determined by adult perceptions. While Rousseau was concerned that a child’s activity was not overtly other-directed, he retained the view that the tutor worked with the long-term interests of the pupil in mind, to promote a healthy form of amour propre. It is not clear whether Dewey should be called a liberal or an instrumentalist in educational aims. On the one hand, he believed that education had intrinsic aims, which were essentially defined in educational terms. On the other, he also believed that education should enable students to engage fully in the world and find a place there through the pursuit of their own projects, which would, in most cases, involve gaining employment. There is definitely an emphasis on practical activity in the classroom, which Dewey saw as a necessary means of learning. Learning takes place through encountering difficulties, trying out responses to them and, when those responses are successful in furthering inquiry, adopting them as knowledge. There are distinctive features of the pedagogy of American pro-

gressivism. First, the role of teachers is largely to further the collectively determined purposes of students. There is, therefore, a strong emphasis on social activity in the school. Second, the learning of material which is not immediately relevant to the purposes of students is to be discouraged. Third, forms of learning that detract from student autonomy, such as rote learning, are also to be discouraged. Fourth, it was important for Dewey that students learn about the properties of materials through experimentation with them; he disliked pre-prepared materials which did not allow the students first-hand acquaintance with their properties. There is a further implication for the curriculum which follows from the first two points, namely that the field of inquiry should not be constrained by predetermined adult categorisations of the subject matter of

human inquiry. There is, therefore, a strong emphasis on subject integration. This educational programme has numerous critics, both on major

issues and in detail. First, Dewey has been criticised for the vagueness and ambiguity of his stance on the nature of education. It is quite legitimate to refuse to draw a hard-and-fast distinction between liberal and instrumental conceptions, but it is less defensible to refuse to prioritise them and still less defensible to say that there can be two, mutually exclusive, conceptions, one liberal, the other instrumental. At one point, he says of the teacher that he is ‘engaged not simply in the training of individuals, but in the formation of the proper social life’ (Dewey 1929). At another, he maintains that ‘the educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end’ (1916: 59). Second, he has been accused of ambiguity as to whether education is to promote new values in society or to encourage students to improve on the old. Third, the adoption of growth as an aim has been thought to be unsatisfactory. Growth can. occur in socially harmful, as well as beneficial, directions and it cannot be acceptable that schools promote the latter. Growing to be a criminal, for example, cannot be a legitimate educational aim in most people’s eyes. Progressivists will reply that criminality doesn’t promote further growth and so cannot be a legitimate educational aim. The existence of successful and unpunished criminals does not lend strong support for this view Just as in the UK, there are mixed views about the impact of pro-

gressivism on education and society in the USA. It is at least arguable that the vocationalist and social tendencies within progressivism in the USA are both an expression of perceived American values and a legitimate extension of them. On the other hand, many in the United States are disturbed about the alleged lack of direction in the public schooling system and a consequent decline in educational performance. Dewey (1938) himself expressed reservations about some of the practices that were carried out in the name of progressivism. As the USA has a decentralised education system, the impact of progressivism has, at the same time, been both more limited than in the UK but also, because it cannot be reversed by governmental fiat, it has, as a practice and a philosophy, possibly securer roots. There is thus a tension within progressivism between individualis-

tic and social conceptions of learning. The Rousseau variant emphasises the importance of the individual in constructing his own cognitive world, while the Dewey variant stresses the role of the

group in doing so. The former strand appeals to the work of Piaget while the latter appeals to the social constructivism that is (questionably) associated with the work of the psychologist Vygotsky (1962). These tensions have a practical effect on pedagogic strategies. While Rousseauian progressives emphasise individual learning at a pace chosen by the learner, Deweyans stress group and project work. Both reject the teacher as authority figure and hence reject a social model that places the teacher at the centre of the classroom. In practice, group work tends to be more complex to operate than individual work and so much progressive education tends, in practice, to be individual work conducted at the child’s own chosen pace. In assessing the impact of progressivism on public education systems,

one must distinguish between influence in schools and influence amongst the educational elite of teacher educators, inspectors and educational academics. Dewey’s work had a significant although limited impact on public education in America. Among the elite, however, Dewey’s and Rousseau’s ideas have enduring appeal and constantly resurface in reworked form such as in the apprenticeship approach to reading advocated by F. Smith, or in the proposals for neo-Deweyan schools to be found for example in English and Hill (1994). In continental Western Europe the influence of both Dewey and Rousseau has been very limited. In other parts of the world such as the West Indies, progressivism has been stoutly resisted. In Britain, however, the influence has been much more significant, particularly in primary schools. Significant landmarks include the publication in 1911 of What Is and What Might Be by Edmond Holmes; an exinspector; the Hadow Report in 1931, which explicitly and unfavourably contrasted passive with active learning; and finally, the Plowden Report of 1967. Progressivism was established in teacher training colleges preparing primary school teachers and was supported in varying degrees by inspectors and educational academics. As such it gained widespread influence throughout the 1970s and 1980s. It came under criticism from within philosophy of education, notably through the work of the analytical school, which defended traditional forms of liberal education, represented by, for example, R. S. Peters and R. F. Dearden. The substance of their critique was that progressive thinking was muddled and ambiguous and could not support the extravagant claims that it made. However, Peters is a far more generous critic of Rousseau than is the conservative writer G. H. Bantock (1965), who draws particular attention to what he sees as Rousseau’s baleful influence on British education, identifying Rousseau’s rejection of authority as a key feature of progressivism’s harmful influence.