ABSTRACT
The progressive movement in Europe was basically individual and voluntary, pursued by enthusiastic reformers in private schools supported by various kinds of philanthropic foundations, societies and committees, while at a more general level it came together in the loose confederation of the New Education Fellowship. The movement had no common philosophy, nor did it seek to make radical changes to the existing conceptions of knowledge, and, while it drew inspiration from the socialist tradition, both ‘utopian’ and ‘scientific’, aided by religious and scientific movements, it did not challenge the concept of bourgeois culture. In Culture and Anarchy Matthew Arnold had expressed the same convictions as James Mill earlier in the century: the middle class is the bearer of real culture; it is the repository of ‘the best which has been thought and said’ in the world and which leads us to pursue perfection. So reform of society is a process of striving towards gradual inner educative development.
