What Is Progressive Education? Principles and Pioneers of the New Schools

Progressive education is the name the United States gave to a movement that, from the late nineteenth century, set out to build school around the child’s activity and interests. In Europe the same current was called the new education, or the active school. Robert Hampel, writing in a Gale encyclopedia, describes it as a mixed movement held together by a handful of shared ideas: it took shape in the late 1800s, spread quickly in the early twentieth century and had lost its force by the 1950s.

Treccani, the Italian encyclopedia, reports the most common distinction. Practical experiments with no theory behind them are called new schools, and the Italian word attivismo is kept for the authors who also built a theory; the entry adds that the two are hard to separate, in concepts as much as in dates.

The new schools in Europe, from Abbotsholme to the Odenwald

The first new school Treccani mentions is Abbotsholme, founded by Cecil Reddie in 1889 in Derbyshire, England. It was a boarding school, and pupils lived there full time. Reddie wanted to tie study to real life: sport and games alternated with lessons and practical work, and pupils cooperated and ran their own affairs. The Enciclopedia Italiana describes Bedales, J. H. Badley’s school, in the same terms.

Schools with similar ideas soon opened elsewhere. In Normandy, Edmond Demolins opened the École des Roches in 1899; its complex and costly organization, Treccani says, put it within reach of only a few. In Germany, Hermann Lietz followed the English example with his country boarding schools, the Landerziehungsheime: Ilsenburg in 1898, Haubinda in 1901, Biberstein in 1904. Paul Geheeb, who came out of those schools, founded the Odenwald School at Oberhambach. Alexander S. Neill went further down the same road with Summerhill, a school that pointed toward a libertarian education.

Ferrière, the active school and the 1921 League

Adolphe Ferrière, a psychologist and educator born in Geneva in 1879, was the one who linked these experiments together. In 1899 he founded the International Bureau of New Schools (Bureau international des écoles nouvelles) in his home city to make the new schools’ work known, keep their records and put them in touch with one another. He ran it until 1925, the year he and Pierre Bovet founded the International Bureau of Education. Ferrière gathered the schools under the name “active school”, an expression he took from Bovet that later spread widely. He saw the child as an active being who, while growing up, retraces the stages of human evolution.

In 1921, at Calais, Ferrière was among the founders of the International League for New Education (Ligue internationale pour l’éducation nouvelle); from 1922 he edited its journal, Pour l’ère nouvelle. Neill, Claparède and Decroly were also at the founding conference. The psychologist Henri Wallon traced it to the pacifism that came out of the First World War, and to the hope that teaching respect for the person could prevent another war. Later congresses, from Montreux in 1923 to Cheltenham in 1936, drew Cousinet, Freinet, Montessori and Piaget, among others.

At its first congress the League wrote a charter of seven principles, which Enrico Bottero translated into Italian for the Didattiche attive centre at the University of Bologna:

• education should build up the child’s spiritual energy and prepare the child for the primacy of the spirit;
• each child’s individuality must be respected, and it develops only through discipline;
• set studies make room for spontaneous interests, expressed in manual, intellectual, aesthetic and social activities;
• discipline, personal and collective, is organized by the children together with their teachers, to strengthen their sense of responsibility;
• cooperation replaces selfish competition;
• boys and girls are educated together, sharing their instruction without being treated identically;
• education shapes a citizen with duties toward neighbors, nation and humanity, and a person aware of their own dignity.

The philosophy of progressive education: putting the child first

Child-centered education, as progressives often called it, had old roots: Treccani traces it back to Rousseau and even to Montaigne. In 1920, in his book L’école sur mesure (“the school made to measure”), Édouard Claparède asked why the idea had still not produced a different kind of school.

In The School and Society (1899), Dewey compared the change under way in education to the Copernican revolution, with the child as the sun and every tool of the school turning around it. In the traditional school, he wrote, the center of gravity lay outside the child, in the teacher and the textbook.

Claparède came to education from the study of children with disabilities, whom the vocabulary of the time called “abnormal”; Treccani notes that Montessori and Decroly took the same path. His outlook was functionalist, meaning that mental phenomena are studied for the job they do in life. Treccani puts interest at the heart of his thought, because for Claparède an organism always acts on its strongest interest. He defended progressive ideas and admitted they were sometimes stated vaguely. He first spoke of a school made to measure in 1901, in a talk to the Medical Society of Geneva. His Psychologie de l’enfant et pédagogie expérimentale, published in 1909, was widely read across Europe, and in 1912 he and Pierre Bovet founded an institute of educational science in Geneva named after Rousseau. Treccani credits that 1909 book with starting in Europe the same renewal of educational thought that Dewey was pursuing in the United States.

John Dewey and progressive education: the Chicago Laboratory School

John Dewey (1859-1952) is, for Treccani, the leading theorist of the movement; the Gale encyclopedia calls him its most effective voice. In January 1896 he opened his school in a small house on Chicago’s South Side, with 16 pupils in three rooms and a large yard. He wanted to put conventional schooling for young children to the test and find out how a school could become a cooperative community. With his wife Alice he turned it into the University Laboratory School, a center for educational experiment that describes itself as the first laboratory school in the United States. In Treccani’s reading of Dewey, education meant preparing a different society, and true education could never be reduced to socializing children into the world as it stood.

Practical example: while shopping for desks and chairs that suited children, Dewey was told by a dealer that he only had furniture made for listening. Dewey took the answer as a portrait of the traditional school, which usually lacked what a child needs to build and investigate, space included.

For Dewey, thinking and doing cannot be pulled apart in learning. This is learning by doing, an idea Francis W. Parker held as well. School, in Dewey’s view, is already life in its own right as well as a preparation for the life to come. His school notes that he thought children learn best through activities that ask them to solve problems and take responsibility toward their classmates, and that memorization and drill left them seriously behind in their development. Among his influences were the German Friedrich Froebel, who founded the kindergarten, and the Swiss Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi.

Centers of interest, projects, the Dalton Plan: methods in the classroom

Ovide Decroly (1871-1932), a Belgian physician, cared more about the tools of teaching than about the aims of education. He started from an observation: a child takes in things as a whole first, and only later tells the parts apart. In Brussels he replaced the set syllabus with centers of interest. Separate subjects gave way to themes tied to the child’s basic interests, and each theme pulled together knowledge from different fields. Those interests, for Decroly, grew out of four needs: feeding oneself, sheltering from the weather, defending oneself from danger, and working with others.

Practical example: with Decroly’s global method, a child learns to read and write starting from whole sentences or from words that mean something to them, instead of from isolated letters and syllables.

The project method grew out of an idea of Dewey’s and took shape, and its name, with his student William Heard Kilpatrick (1871-1965) between 1918 and 1922; Kilpatrick’s paper The Project Method dates from 1918. In a project, knowledge becomes a set of tools for getting the job done. Kilpatrick named four kinds of project: producing something, consuming something, solving a problem, and learning a skill. What changes from Decroly is who picks the topic. Decroly hands the theme to the child, while in a project the child sets it as a problem to solve. Treccani reports objections to the method, some of them sound, such as its need for favorable conditions, yet it spread widely, above all in the United States. Kilpatrick stressed the growth of the individual; Dewey gave more weight to the social purpose of education.

Practical example: building an object is a production project; checking a train timetable to plan a trip is a consumption project.

The American Helen Parkhurst came to Italy to study the Montessori method, which she then promoted in the United States. She devised the Dalton Plan, named after the Massachusetts town where it was tried out: the school is divided into laboratories, each run by a teacher of a single subject who leaves pupils plenty of room for independent work. From 1920 Carleton Washburne launched the Winnetka Plan in the Chicago suburb where he was superintendent of schools. Each pupil moved at their own pace, in a system with no fixed classes and no grading.

In France, Roger Cousinet bet on free group work, with children running their own groups. Célestin Freinet (1896-1966) created a school for ordinary people and brought a printing press into the classroom.

Practical example: in Freinet’s classes children wrote free texts about their own lives, printed them on the class press and swapped them with other schools.

Maria Montessori opened her first Children’s House (Casa dei Bambini) in Rome on January 6, 1907, in the San Lorenzo district, for the children of workers living in public housing blocks. The method she described in 1909 began with training the senses through structured materials and moved on to intellectual education. Treccani names her and Decroly as the initiators of a “Copernican revolution” in education. In the United States, though, her success faded partly because of criticism from the progressives: Kilpatrick found the method too individualistic.

Traditional school and progressive school compared

Progressives defined themselves mostly by what they opposed. For Dewey, the traditional school handed down to the young the knowledge and skills worked out in the past, and imposed adult standards, content and methods from above on people who were still growing. He also tells of a woman who visited twenty-four schools before finding one where the children’s activity came before the teacher’s explanations.

Aspect	Traditional school, as progressives portrayed it	Progressive school
Center	The teacher and the textbook	The child and the child’s interests
Teacher’s role	Hears lessons recited from memory	Facilitates, through discussion and group projects
Curriculum	The same for all, facts and formulas to memorize	Built on interests, themes and projects
Pupils	Passive, taught en masse	Active, with room for independent and group work
Discipline	Imposed from outside	Organized with the pupils (1921 charter)
Setting	Desks for listening, few materials	Workshops, manual activities, play

Criticism, splits and decline

A rift opened early inside the movement. One side wanted the child’s spontaneity respected always and completely; the other held that real freedom found its expression within organized materials and situations. There was also an argument about where change should happen, in ideal schools outside the system or inside public education. The disputes came to a head at the Nice congress of 1932, which produced new principles: discipline obtained through coercion and fear of punishment was to give way to personal initiative and responsibility.

In Experience and Education (1938), Dewey took many of the new schools to task. He accused them of neglecting organized subject matter and of treating any adult guidance as an intrusion on freedom. Throwing off outside authority, he argued, did not mean throwing off all authority, and the commonest mistake was to confuse freedom of movement with the freedom that counts, freedom of thought and judgment. A child’s impulses were a starting point that had to be worked on. The greatest danger for the new education, he wrote, was to think it easy, something to be improvised day by day.

In the United States the changes went furthest in elementary schools, private schools and wealthier communities; elsewhere the impact was modest. The Gale encyclopedia gives an example: a high school teacher with 150 students and few materials struggled to run projects tailored to each of them. The doubt raised most often was whether these schools were academically rigorous enough, and Dewey himself objected to readings of his ideas that took them as permission to study less. According to Treccani, between 1925 and 1945 the spirit of the active school spread worldwide, though it also suffered political distortions up to the war. The Progressive Education Association, the movement’s main organization in the United States, closed in 1955.

Treccani warns against one misunderstanding. Manual work, play, redesigned spaces and richer materials are surface features when taken alone, and experiments that stopped at that outward layer have hurt any serious assessment of the movement. After the decline, the Gale encyclopedia notes, classrooms did not return to the strict methods of the 1800s.