Progressivism, Schools and Schools of Education An American Romance - Lecture Notes - United State Philosophy - David F. Labaree, Study notes of United States Philosophy

Download Progressivism, Schools and Schools of Education An American Romance - Lecture Notes - United State Philosophy - David F. Labaree and more Study notes United States Philosophy in PDF only on Docsity! Paedagogica Historica, Vol. 41, Nos. 1&2, February 2005, pp. 275–288 ISSN 0030-9230 (print)/ISSN 1477-674X (online)/05/010275–14 © 2005 Stichting Paedagogica Historica DOI: 10.1080/0030923042000335583 Progressivism, Schools and Schools of Education: An American Romance David F. Labaree Taylor and Francis LtdCPDH400116.sgm10.1080/ 030923042000335583P edagogica Historica0 30-923 (pri t)/1477-674X (online)Original Article2 05Stichting Paeda og Historica41 & 200February 2005DFL b r edlabaree@s anford.edu This paper tells a story about progressivism, schools and schools of education in twentieth-century America. Depending on one’s position in the politics of education, this story can assume the form of a tragedy or a romance, or perhaps even a comedy. The heart of the tale is the struggle for control of American education in the early twentieth century between two factions of the movement for progres- sive education. The administrative progressives won this struggle, and they reconstructed the organiza- tion and curriculum of American schools in a form that has lasted to the present day. Meanwhile the other group, the pedagogical progressives, who failed miserably in shaping what we do in schools, did at least succeed in shaping how we talk about schools. Professors in schools of education were caught in the middle of this dispute, and they ended up in an awkwardly compromised position. Their hands were busy—preparing teachers to work within the confines of the educational system established by the administrative progressives, and carrying out research to make this system work more efficiently. But their hearts were with the pedagogues. So they became the high priests of pedagogical progressivism, keeping this faith alive within the halls of the education school, and teaching the words of its credo to new generations of educators. Why is it that American education professors have such a longstanding, deeply rooted and widely shared rhetorical commitment to the progressive vision? The answer can be found in the convergence between the history of the education school and the history of the child- centered strand of progressivism during the early twentieth century. Historical circumstances drew them together so strongly that they became inseparable. As a result, progressivism became the ideology of the education professor. Education schools have their own legend about how this happened, which is a stir- ring tale about a marriage made in heaven, between an ideal that would save education and a stal- wart champion that would fight the forces of traditionalism to make this ideal a reality. As is the case with most legends, there is some truth in this account. But here a different story is told. In this story, the union between pedagogical progressivism and the education school is not the result of mutual attrac- tion but of something more enduring: mutual need. It was not a marriage of the strong but a wedding of the weak. Both were losers in their respective arenas: child-centered progressivism lost out in the struggle for control of American schools, and the education school lost out in the struggle for respect in American higher education. They needed each other, with one looking for a safe haven and the other looking for a righteous mission. As a result, education schools came to have a rhetorical commitment to progressivism that is so wide that, within these institutions, it is largely beyond challenge. At the same time, however, this progressive vision never came to dominate the practice of teaching and learning in schools—or even to reach deeply into the practice of teacher educators and researchers within education schools themselves. 276 D. F. Labaree Introduction In this paper, I tell a story about progressivism, schools and schools of education in twentieth-century America.1 It is a story about success and failure, about love and hate. Depending on one’s position in the politics of education, this story can assume the form of tragedy, comedy or romance. The heart of the tale is the struggle for control of American education in the early twentieth century between two factions of the movement for progressive education. The administrative progressives won this struggle, and they reconstructed the organi- zation and curriculum of American schools in a form that has lasted to the present day. Meanwhile the other group, the pedagogical progressives, who failed miserably in shaping what we do in schools, did at least succeed in shaping how we talk about schools. Professors in schools of education were caught in the middle of this dispute, and they ended up in an awkwardly compromised position. Their hands were busy— preparing teachers to work within the confines of the educational system established by the administrative progressives, and carrying out research to make this system work more efficiently. But their hearts were with the pedagogues. So they became the high priests of pedagogical progressivism, keeping this faith alive within the halls of the education school, and teaching the words of its credo to new generations of educators. I write about this story both as a historian of American education and as a professor in an American education school. And I write about the subject to this audience because it addresses two of the major themes of the ISCHE25 confer- ence in Sao Paulo. One theme was ‘modernity and the processes of school institu- tionalization’. Think of progressivism as a case in point. The movement for progressive education was the primary force that shaped the modern American system of schooling and which institutionalized this system in a form that has endured to the present day. A second theme was ‘the international circulation of pedagogical knowledge and models’. Think of the way progressive ideas of teach- ing and schooling have become part of the international language of education. My sense is that this case resonates with the experience of educational moderniza- tion in a variety of other countries around the globe, but I will leave it up to the readers to supply evidence about how true this is in their own country. My field of expertise is limited to the American case, so I will focus primarily on the first issue. Let me begin with a couple of definitions. An education school, in the American sense of the term, is an academic unit within a university—usually called a school or college or department of education—where faculty members prepare teachers, 1 This paper is a revised version of an invited lecture delivered at the 25th annual meeting of the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE) in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 18 July 2003. It draws from material found in my recent book (Labaree, David F. The Trouble with Ed Schools. New Haven: CT, 2004): chapter 7) and in an earlier paper (Labaree, David F. “The Ed School’s Romance with Progressivism.” In Brookings Papers on Educational Policy, 2004, edited by Diane Ravitch. Washington, DC, 2004: 89–129. Paedagogica Historica 279 and a stalwart champion that would fight the forces of traditionalism to make this ideal a reality. As is the case with most legends, there is some truth in this account. But here I want to tell a different story. In this story, the union between pedagogical progres- sivism and the education school is not the result of mutual attraction but of something more enduring: mutual need. It was not a marriage of the strong but a wedding of the weak. Both were losers in their respective arenas: child-centered progressivism lost out in the struggle for control of American schools, and the education school lost out in the struggle for respect in American higher education. They needed each other, with one looking for a safe haven and the other looking for a righteous mission. As a result, education schools came to have a rhetorical commitment to this form of progressivism which is so wide that, within these institutions, it is largely beyond challenge. At the same time, however, this progressive vision never came to dominate the practice of teaching and learning in schools—or even to reach deeply into the practice of teacher educators and researchers within education schools themselves. A Short History of Progressivism in American Education In order to examine the roots of the education school’s commitment to a particular form of progressivism, we first need to explore briefly the history of the progressive education movement in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. Only then can we understand the way that the institution and the ideology fell into each other’s arms. The first thing we need to acknowledge about the history of the progressive educa- tion movement in the United States is that it was not a single entity but instead a clus- ter of overlapping and competing tendencies. All of the historians of this movement are agreed on this point. These historians have used a variety of schemes for sorting out the various tendencies within the movement. David Tyack talks about adminis- trative and pedagogical progressives;7 Robert Church and Michael Sedlak use the terms conservative and liberal progressives;8 Kliebard defines three groupings, which he calls social efficiency, child development and social reconstruction.9 I will use the administrative and pedagogical labels, which seem to have the most currency,10 with the understanding that the conservative and social efficiency groups fit more or less within the administrative category and the liberal and social reconstructionist groups fit roughly within the pedagogical, with child development straddling the two. The second thing we need to recognize about the history of this movement is that the administrative progressives trounced their pedagogical counterparts. Ellen Lagemann explains this with admirable precision: ‘I have often argued to students, only in part to be perverse, that one cannot understand the history of education in 7 Tyack, David. The One Best System. Cambridge, 1974. 8 Church, Robert L., and Michael W. Sedlak. Education in the United States. New York, 1976. 9 Kliebard, Herbert. The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893–1958. Boston, 1986. 10 See for example: Rury, John L. Education and Social Change: Themes in the History of American Education. Mahwah, NJ, 2002. 280 D. F. Labaree the United States during the twentieth century unless one realizes that Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost.’11 What this means for our purposes is that the pedagogical progressives had the most impact on educational rhetoric, whereas the administrative progressives had the most impact on the structure and practice of education in schools. A sign of the intellectual influence exerted by the pedagogical group is that their language has come to define what we now call progressivism. And this language has become the orthodox way for teachers and teacher educators to talk about classroom instruction. At the same time, however, it was the administrative progressives who were most effective in putting their reforms to work in the daily life of schools. In the remainder of the paper I seek to define these two competing visions of progressivism, explain how Thorndike won, and explain why the education school chose to keep faith with Dewey. Competing Visions: Pedagogical vs. Administrative Progressivism There were a number of prominent leaders among the pedagogical progressives— including Francis Parker, G. Stanley Hall, William Kilpatrick, George Counts, Harold Rugg and Boyd Bode. But, of course, John Dewey was the godfather of this movement. He was not particularly happy to be in this position. During his lifetime, he frequently complained about the misuse of his ideas by many of the pedagogical progressives, and he would not be happy about many of the things that contemporary education professors espouse in his name. But, for better or for worse, most of the central ideas of the current progressive creed can be traced to his writing. Perhaps the best way to characterize the central thrust of the pedagogical progres- sive view of education is to follow the lead of E. D. Hirsch and point to its essential romanticism. Hirsch sees two romantic beliefs in particular lying at the heart of educational progressivism: ‘First, Romanticism believed that human nature is innately good, and should therefore be encouraged to take its natural course, unspoiled by the artificial impositions of social prejudice and convention. Second, Romanticism concluded that the child is neither a scaled-down, ignorant version of the adult nor a formless piece of clay in need of molding, rather, the child is a special being in its own right with unique, trustworthy—indeed holy—impulses that should be allowed to develop and run their course’.12 Closely linked to these beliefs is ‘the idea that civilization has a corrupting rather than a benign, uplifting, virtue-enhancing effect on the young child’.13 From this perspective, traditional education is not just an ineffective method of instruction but one that is misdirected and damaging, by seeking to impose a fixed body of knowl- edge on the child at the will of the teacher. The romantic alternative is a naturalistic 11 Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe. “The Plural Worlds of Educational Research.” History of Education Quarterly, 29 (1989): 185. 12 Hirsch, The Schools We Need: 74. 13 Ibid.: 75. Paedagogica Historica 281 pedagogy (which arises from the needs, interests and capacities of the child and responds to the will of the child) and a skill-based curriculum (which focuses on providing the child with the learning skills that can be used to acquire whatever knowledge he or she desires). Two important components of the naturalism inherent in progressive pedagogy, according to Hirsch, are developmentalism and holistic learning. If learning is natu- ral, then teaching needs to adapt itself to the natural developmental capacities of the learner, which requires a careful effort to provide particular subject matters and skills only when they are appropriate for the student’s stage of development. ‘Developmen- tally appropriate’ practices and curricula are central to this progressive vision. The second key extension of the naturalistic approach to teaching is the idea that learning is most natural when it takes place in holistic form, where multiple domains of skill and knowledge are integrated into thematic units and projects instead of being taught as separate subjects. Thus we have the progressive passion for interdisciplinary studies, thematic units and the project method. What held the pedagogical progressives together was a common romantic vision, but the vision that held the administrative progressives together was strictly utilitar- ian. And whereas the former focused on teaching and learning in the classroom, the latter focused on governance and on the structure and purpose of the curriculum. In addition to Thorndike, high-visibility members of this group in the first half of the twentieth century included David Snedden, Ross Finney, Edward Ross, Leonard Ayres, Charles Ellwood, Charles Judd, Ellwood P. Cubberley, Charles Peters, W. W. Charters, John Bobbitt, Charles Prosser and, in conjunction with the pedagogical progressives, G. Stanley Hall. The organizing principle of the diverse reform efforts that arose from this group was social efficiency.14 In one sense, this meant restructuring the governance and organi- zation of schooling in order to make it run more efficiently, in line with business management practices. In another sense, social efficiency meant reorganizing educa- tion in order to make it more efficient in meeting the needs of economy and society, by preparing students to play effective adult roles in work, family and community. This utilitarian vision was strikingly different from the romantic perspective of the pedagogical progressives, who wanted school to focus on the learning needs and expe- riences of students, in the present rather than the future, as children rather than as apprentice adults. It led to the administrative progressives’ most distinctive contribu- tion to American education: scientific curriculum making. This notion of curriculum was grounded in the principle of differentiation. It started with the developmental differences in students at different points in their social and intellectual growth, as spelled out in the work of psychologists such as Hall, and with the differences in intel- lectual ability of students at the same age, as measured by the apparently objective methods of the new IQ testing movement. The idea, then, was to match these differ- ences in the abilities of individual students with the different mental requirements of 14 This discussion of administrative progressivism draws heavily on: Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum. 284 D. F. Labaree makes the classroom a preparation for adulthood rather than an exploration of child- hood; and, in the name of these social benefits, it risks extinguishing the child’s engagement in learning and curiosity about the world. It was, in short, exactly the kind of curriculum that Dewey deplored, ‘externally presented material, conceived and generated in standpoints and attitudes remote from the child, and developed in motives alien to him’.19 Not only did the social efficiency curriculum threaten the kind of natural learning process treasured by the pedagogical progressives, but it also threatened the values of social justice and egalitarian community that were central to their beliefs. This curric- ulum was radical in its challenge to traditional notions of academic education, but it was profoundly conservative in its embrace of the existing social order and in its eagerness to prepare students for predetermined positions within that order.20 It introduced tracking and ability grouping into American schools; it introduced ability testing and guidance as ways of sorting students into the appropriate classes; and it institutionalized the educational reproduction of social inequality by creating a system in which educational differences followed from and in turn reinforced differ- ences in class, gender and race. While the administrative progressives enjoyed considerable and enduring success in implementing their program, pedagogical progressives did not. In general, the inroads they made on practice were small and fleeting. Zilversmit summarized his study of school districts in the Chicago area in a way that paralleled the view expressed by Dewey himself looking back on the progressive movement from the perspective of the 1950s. Zilversmit put it this way: ‘The ultimate failure was that so much of progressivism’s apparent success was rhetorical. While some schools and individual teachers had heeded Dewey’s call for a more child-centered school, most had given only lip service to these ideas while continuing older practices.’21 Schools that adopted progressive teaching with any depth and seriousness were few, and these efforts usually did not last. Private progressive schools popped up, flourished for a while, and then typically reverted to the norm when the founder died or moved on. Public school systems that took the plunge likewise slipped back to a more traditional academic curriculum over time. Explaining Why the Administrative Progressives Won Why did the administrative progressives have a larger impact on schools than their pedagogical counterparts? First, their reform message appealed to people in power. Business and political leaders were attracted to a mode of educational reform that promised to eliminate 19 Dewey, John. “The Child and the Curriculum.” In The School and Society and the Child and the Curriculum. Chicago, 1902/1990: 205. 20 Cremin, The Transformation of the School; Church and Sedlak, Education in the United States; Ravitch, Left Back; Rury, Education and Social Change. 21 Zilversmit, Changing Schools: 168. Paedagogica Historica 285 waste, to organize and manage schools more efficiently, to tailor instruction to the needs of employers, to Americanize the children of immigrants, and to provide students with the skills and attitudes they would need to perform and to accept their future roles in society. For people who could make these reforms happen, this was the right message at the right time. Second, the utilitarian quality of the administrative progressive agenda made it easier to sell than the romantic vision of their pedagogical counterparts. They were offering a way to make schools work better in serving society’s needs, whereas the pedagogical progressives were offering a way to make learning more natural, more intrinsically engaging, more authentic. In a contest between utility and romance, util- ity is usually going to win: it promises to give us something we need rather than merely something we might like. Third, the administrative progressives argued that their agenda stood on the authority of science. The pedagogical progressives also drew on science in making their claims (for example, Dewey published a book in 1929 called The Sources of a Science of Education)22 but they had a harder time demonstrating the empirical effec- tiveness of such diffuse notions as child-centered instruction and the project method. Meanwhile the social efficiency leaders adeptly deployed data from a flood of tests and statistics and school surveys to ‘prove’ the value of their reforms. Fourth, as Lagemann points out, Dewey lost the battle for the schools in part because he retired early from the field.23 His direct involvement in schools lasted only eight years, from the founding of the Laboratory School in 1896 until the time he left Chicago and entered the philosophy department at Columbia in 1904. After that, his work on education was spun out of memory and woven into theory, giving it an abstract and academic air, and these qualities became an enduring legacy for the pedagogical progressives. In contrast, the administrative progressives were deeply involved in the schools as administrators, policymakers, curriculum developers and educational researchers. Empirically grounded, personally engaged and resolutely practical, they enjoyed enormous credibility in promoting their reform agenda. Under these circumstances, it should be no surprise that Dewey’s main effect was on educa- tional rhetoric while Thorndike’s main effect was on educational practice. Finally, the administrative progressives’ focus on the management of schools and the structure of the curriculum gave them an important power advantage over the pedagogical progressives, who focused on teachers and their practice in the class- room. Teachers were in a weak position to effect change in the face of opponents who were school administrators and educational policymakers. This was especially true when the latter had managed to define the administrative and curriculum structures within which teachers had to function. Even teachers who really wanted to carry out child-centered instruction in their classrooms found themselves confined within a bureaucratic school system which mandated a differentiated and vocationally oriented curriculum that was not conducive to this kind of teaching. Under these 22 Dewey, John. The Sources of a Science of Education. New York, 1929. 23 Lagemann, “The Plural Worlds of Educational Research”. 286 D. F. Labaree circumstances, it is no surprise that teachers were more likely to adopt some rhetoric from pedagogical progressivism and to inject some token activity and movement into their classrooms than they were to implement the full Deweyan agenda. Pedagogical Progressivism and the Education School So how did the triumph of the administrative progressives affect education schools? As Michael Katz has argued, academic units focused on education started out with a critical stance toward their subject, but by the 1930s they had evolved into a strictly functional role supporting the existing system of schooling.24 By this time, schools were organized according to the principles of administrative progressivism. They were professionally managed organizations devoted to the production of socially effi- cient educational outcomes. They sorted students by academic ability and future job prospects and then provided a stratified curriculum designed to meet these highly divergent needs. The job of education schools was to prepare teachers and adminis- trators who could operate efficiently within this model of schooling, and to carry out research that would make the system run more smoothly. It was a job, to be sure, but it was not much of a mission. It presented the education professor as a functionary, a cog in the new social-efficiency education machine, but this left the professor with nothing to profess. Administrative progressivism promised a cold and scientific kind of educational efficiency. This was cause enough for some professors; many of the administrative progressives were themselves education professors, particularly those in programs such as administration, educational psychology and testing. Yet for most of the faculty, especially those involved in curric- ulum and instruction and teacher education, this was not the kind of cause that made them want to jump out of bed in the morning and race into work. With their roles thus downscaled and deskilled, it is easy to understand why the success of administrative progressivism reinforced the education faculty’s attraction to pedagogical progressivism. The latter was a vision of education that could really get an education professor’s blood pumping. Pedagogical progressivism proposed to do a lot more than just make schools efficient. It called for turning education upside down, by having the purposes and interests of the student drive the curriculum rather than forcing the curriculum onto the student. It offered a way to free schools from artificial constraints and rigid disciplines and unleash the student’s natural impulse to learn. It proposed to recreate the classroom as a model democratic community of learners, which could become a way to reduce injustice and enhance democratic equality in the larger society. Pedagogical progressivism, therefore, may have lost the fight to shape practice in schools and even in education schools; but the vision was still alive, and in the educa- tion school it found an ideological safe haven. It offered most education professors the mission they needed in order to infuse meaning into their newly redefined work 24 Katz, Michael B. “From Theory to Survey in Graduate Schools of Education.” Journal of Higher Education 36 (1966): 325–334.