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Progressive Education

Progressive education is a movement pertaining to pedagogy that began in the late nineteenth century and has persisted in various forms till date. The term "progressive" was engaged to distinguish this education from the traditional curriculum of the 19th century, which was rooted in classical preparation for the university and strongly differentiated by socio-economic level. By contrast, progressive education finds its roots in present experience. Most progressive education programs have these qualities in common:

• Learning by doing - hands-on projects and experiential learning
• Integrated curriculum
• Problem-solving and critical thinking
• Collaborative Group work and development of social skills
• Understanding and action as opposed to rote learning
• Projects on social responsibility and democracy
• Integration of community service and service learning projects into the daily curriculum
• De-emphasis on textbooks
• Life-long learning and social skills
• Assessment by evaluation of child's projects and productions

PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION

John Dewey remembered as the "father of Progressive education/' was the most eloquent and influential figure in educational Progressivism.

Dewey's vision for the school was inextricably tied to his larger vision of the good society wherein each classroom represented a microcosm of the human relationships that constituted the larger community. Dewey believed that the school, as a "little democracy," could create a "more lovely society." Dewey's emphasis on the importance of democratic relationships in the classroom setting necessarily shifted the focus of educational theory from the institution of the school to the needs of the students. This dramatic change in American pedagogy, however, was not alone the work of John Dewey.

Second, Dewey and his fellow educational Progressives drew from the work of the German philosopher Friedrich Froebel and Swiss educator Johann Pestalozzi. Froebel and Pestalozzi were among the first to coherently opine that the process of education should be concerned with educating the "whole child," wherein learning shifted from the subject matter and eventually rested upon the needs and interests of the child. Taking care of both the pupil's head and heart, they believed, was the real work of schooling. Froebel drew upon the garden metaphor of cultivating young children toward maturity, and he provided the European foundations for the late-nineteenth-century kindergarten movement in the United States. Similarly, Pestalozzi popularized the pedagogical method of object teaching, wherein a teacher began with an object related to the child's world in order to initiate the child into the world of education.

Finally, Dewey drew inspiration from the ideas of philosopher and psychologist William James. Dewey's interpretation of James's philosophical pragmatism, which was similar to the ideas underpinning Pestalozzi's object teaching, joined thinking and doing as two seamlessly connected halves of the learning process. By focusing on the relationship between thinking and doing, Dewey believed his educational philosophy could equip each child with the problem-solving skills required to overcome obstacles between a given and desired set of circumstances.

A very important feature of progressive education is student-centered learning

Theorists like John Dewey, Jean Piaget, and Lev Vygotsky whose collective work focused on how students learn are primarily responsible for the move to student-centered learning.

Student-centered learning also called child-centered learning focuses more on the needs of the students, his abilities, interests, and learning styles with the teacher as a facilitator. This classroom teaching method acknowledges student's voice as central to the learning experience for every learner. Teacher-centered learning has the teacher at its Centre in an active role and students in a passive, receptive role. Student-centered learning requires students to be active participants in their own learning.

To that end, the inclusion of educational practices such as Bloom's Taxonomy and Gardner's Theory of Multiple intelligences can be helpful to a student-centered classroom because it promotes various modes of diverse learning styles. Student-centered learning should be integrated into the curriculum because it

• Strengthens student motivation
• Promotes peer communication
• Reduces disruptive behavior
•  Builds student-teacher relationships
• Promotes discovery/active learning
• Builds responsibility for one's own learning

JOHN DEWEY ON CHILP-CENTEREP EDUCATION

John Dewey's contribution to education has been identified with child-centered schooling. Through such works as The School and Society, The Child and the Curriculum, and Democracy and Education, Dewey articulated a unique, indeed revolutionary, reformulation of educational theory and practice. The problem that Dewey wanted to solve was rote teaching and learning, and his solution was to adapt instruction to students' interests and to use interest-centered activities as the engine of education.

The problems that Dewey worried most about did not arise in schools and reached far beyond education.

Before the Industrial Revolution

• Education was rooted in meaningful work, in what Dewey termed "occupations".
• According to Dewey, the educative forces of the domestic spinning and weaving, the saw mill, the gristmill, the cooper shop, and the blacksmith forge, were continuously operative." As a result, learning was "a matter of immediate and personal concern".
• The clothing worn was for the most part made in the house: the members of the household were usually familiar also with the shearing of the sheep, the carding and spinning of the wool, and the plying of the loom. Not only this, but practically every member of the household had his own share in the work".
• Work experience was the curriculum for children growing up on farms and agricultural villages.

After the Industrial Revolution

• There was increase increasing economic and political inequality that resulted from concentrations of wealth and poverty increased exponentially.
• Learning grew isolated from work, because industrialism moved labor out of family and village settings and relocated it in factories.
• Learning was sent to school and there it became artificial. That was the central problem of education in an industrial age: According to Dewey, "schools have been so set apart, so isolated from the ordinary conditions and motives of life" that they are "the one place in the world where it is most difficult to get experience" This was a direct result of the great transformations associated with industrialism.
• The growing social division of labor and the rise of markets eroded self-sufficient rural economies and eliminated children's opportunities to learn from experience,
• Learning became passive. It focused on the "mere absorption of facts."
• Schools dealt with as large numbers of children as possible. Classrooms everywhere looked alike, with their "rows of ugly desks placed in geometrical order almost all of the same size."
• The language used in schools was unnatural and artificial and stifled students' ability to speak and write well.

These evils of schooling were not the result of poor pedagogy but of the industrial division of labor, capitalist competition, and the school system that grew up as a result.

Dewey's views of a school-My Pedagogic Creed

• School must represent present life - life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home/ in the neighborhood, or on the playground
• The school, as an institution, should simplify existing social life; should reduce it, as it were, to an embryonic form. Existing life is so complex that the child cannot be brought into contact with it without either confusion or distraction; he is either overwhelmed by the multiplicity of activities which are going on, so that he loses his own power of orderly reaction, or he is so stimulated by these various activities that his powers are prematurely called into play and he becomes either unduly specialized or else disintegrated.
• As such simplified social life, the school life should grow gradually out of the home life; that it should take up and continue the activities with which the child is already familiar in the home.
• School life should exhibit these activities to the child, and reproduce them in such ways that the child will gradually learn the meaning of them, and be capable of playing his own part in relation to them.
• Education fails because it neglects this fundamental principle of the school as a form of community life. It conceives the school as a place where certain information is to be given, where certain lessons are to be learned, or where certain habits are to be formed".
• Education is the process of living and is not meant to be the preparation of future living so school must represent the present life. As such, parts of the student's home life (such as moral and ethical education) should take part in the schooling process. The teacher is a part of this not as an authoritative figure but as a member of the community who is there to assist the student.

Dewey on the subject-matter

• The social life of the child is the basis of concentration, or correlation, in all his training or growth. The social life gives the unconscious unity and the background of all his efforts and of all his attainments. The subject-matter of the school curriculum should mark a gradual differentiation out of the primitive unconscious unity of social life.
• We violate the child's nature and render difficult the best ethical results, by introducing the child too abruptly to a number of special studies, of reading, writing, geography, etc., out of relation to this social life. Therefore, that the true center of correlation on the school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child's own social activities.
• That education cannot be unified in the study of science, or so called nature study, because apart from human activity, nature itself is not a unity; nature in itself is a number of diverse objects in space and time, and to attempt to make it the center of work by itself, is to introduce a principle of radiation rather than one of concentration.
• Literature is the reflex expression and interpretation of social experience; that hence it must follow upon and not precede such experience. It, therefore, cannot be made the basis, although it may be made the summary of unification.
• Once more that history is of educative value in so far as it presents phases of social life and growth. It must be controlled by reference to social life. When taken simply as history it is thrown into the distant past and becomes dead and inert. Taken as the record of man's social life and progress it becomes full of meaning.
• The primary basis of education is in the child's powers at work along the same general constructive lines as those which have brought civilization into being. The only way to make the child conscious of his social heritage is to enable him to perform those fundamental types of activity which make civilization what it is.
• The study of science is educational in so far as it brings out the materials and processes which make social life what it is. One of the greatest difficulties in the present teaching of science is that the material is presented in purely objective form, or is treated as a new peculiar kind of experience which the child can add to that which he has already had. In reality, science is of value because it gives the ability to interpret and control the experience already had. It should be introduced, not as so much new subject-matter, but as showing the factors already involved in previous experience and as furnishing tools by which that experience can be more easily and effectively regulated.
• At present we lose much of the value of literature and language studies because of our elimination of social element. Language is almost always treated in the books of pedagogy simply as the expression of thought. It is true that language is a logical instrument, but it is fundamentally and primarily a social instrument. Language is the device for communication; it is the tool through which one individual comes to share the ideas and feelings of others. When treated simply as a way of getting individual information, or as a means of showing off what one has learned, it loses its social motive and end.
• According to Dewey, the curriculum in the schools should reflect that of society. The center of the school curriculum should reflect the development of humans in society. The study of the core subjects (language, science, history) should be coupled with the study of cooking, sewing and manual training. Furthermore, he feels that "progress is not in the succession of studies but in the development of new attitudes towards, and new interests in, experience".

Dewey on the nature of method

• The question of method is ultimately reducible to the question of the order of development of the child's powers and interests. The law for presenting and treating material is the law implicit within the child's own nature. Because this is so the following statements are of supreme importance as determining the spirit in which education is carried on:

         (a) The active side precedes the passive in the development of the child nature;

         (b) Expression comes before conscious impression;

         (c) The muscular development precedes the sensory;

         (d) Movements come before conscious sensations;

         (e) Consciousness is essentially motor or impulsive;

         (f) Conscious states tend to project themselves in action.

         (g) Neglect of this principle is the cause of a large part of the waste of time and strength in school work.

         (h) The child is thrown into a passive, receptive/ or absorbing attitude.

         (i) The conditions are such that he is not permitted to follow the law of his nature; the result is friction and waste.

• Ideas (intellectual and rational processes) also result from action and devolve for me sake of the better control of action. What we term reason is primarily the law of orderly or effective action. To attempt to develop the reasoning powers, the powers of judgment, without reference to the selection and arrangement of means in action, is the fundamental fallacy in our present methods of dealing with this matter. As a result we present the child with arbitrary symbols. Symbols are a necessity in mental development, but they have their place as tools for economizing effort; presented by themselves they are a mass of meaningless and arbitrary ideas imposed from without.
• Much of the time and attention now given to the preparation and presentation of lessons might be more wisely and profitably expended in training the child's power of imagery and in seeing to it that he was continually forming definite, vivid, and growing images of the various subjects with which he comes in contact in his experience.
• Only through the continual and sympathetic observation of childhood's interests can the adult enter into the child's life and see what it is ready for, and upon what material it could work most readily and fruitfully. I believe that these interests are neither to be humored nor repressed. To repress interest is to substitute the adult for the child, and so to weaken intellectual curiosity and alertness, to suppress initiative, and to deaden interest. To humor the interests is to substitute the transient for the permanent. The interest is always the sign of some power below; the important thing is to discover this power. To humor the interest is to fail to penetrate below the surface and its sure result is to substitute caprice and whim for genuine interest.
• For Dewey, child-centered education will help students to retrace steps that men and women had taken to solve the crucial problems of humanity-in this case turning raw materials into clothing and mastering the agricultural practices, fabrication processes, and the technologies and science that underlay such problem solving. This work gives the point of departure from which the child can trace and follow the progress of mankind in history, getting an insight also into the materials used and the mechanical principles involved". Such a curriculum would radically resituate students' school work in several different ways. 
• Dewey also firmly believed that his curriculum would solve the chronic problems of students' weak motivation, diffuse interest and boredom with school. For if school work was centered in solving practical problems that were crucial to humanity, the work would be intellectually compelling and psychologically engaging.
• Method is focused on the child's powers and interests. If the child is thrown into a passive role as a student, absorbing information, the result is a waste of the child's education. Information presented to the student will be transformed into new forms, images and symbols by the student so that they fit with their development and interests. The development of this is natural and to repress this process and attempting to "substitute the adult for the child" would weaken the intellectual curiosity of the child.

Besides Dewey, other great philosophers and educationalists like Rousseau, Froebel, Pestalozzi and Montessori too have given emphasis on the student-centered education at different times.

ROUSSEAU ON CHILP-CENTEREP EDUCATION

Rousseau's principal contribution to education was the 1762 novel Emile, which influenced many later educational pioneers.

The theory that Rousseau primarily attacked in his philosophy of education was that of child depravity. The theory stated that children are born with a tendency to evil, and are naturally, therefore, inclined to misbehave. The only way to combat this is to instill authoritarian teachers that rule their classroom with an iron fist. Rousseau was certainly not the first to attack this theory, but he was one of the greatest champions of anti-child depravity. A child, he believed, must be free from "society's imprisoning institutions" and free to explore the environment and learn from direct experience of the content being taught. The encyclopedia of Informal Education breaks down his suggestions for teaching in bullet form:

The instructor has to keep control of what the child is learning. Things that are beyond the developmental capacity of students shouldn't be taught to them. (This principle is important to Rousseau)

• Children are naturally good, they are innocent and pure.
• Children develop in stages.
• In order to teach a child, you have to consider what stage that child is in terms of his development.
• Keep in mind that individuals vary in stages: not every kid is going to be completely mature in each stage.
• Kids are going to want to move around. If this is encouraged, the physical activity will lead to mental activity.
• The student should be aware they are being socialized for public citizenship, but they should place equal importance on their personal education.
• People should develop ideas for themselves, and reason through tasks to the end, drawing their own conclusions. This as opposed to simply taking the word of the authoritarian teacher.
• The environment the child is in is a factor in how much he learns.

Friedrich Froebel on Child-centered education

Froebel's philosophy of education was based on Idealism. He believed that every human being had a spiritual essence and that every person had spiritual worth and dignity. Like Idealists, he also believed that every child had within him all he was to be at birth, and that the proper educational environment was to encourage the child to grow and develop in an optimal manner. This was the basis of the Kindergarten - a place for little ones to grow and blossom and be what: hey were destined to be.

One of the important contributions made by Froebel was to see play as a means by which children externalized their inner nature - and a way of imitating and trying out various adult roles. He was of the view that mothers and KG teachers needed to be fully educated about the child's development stages.

The kindergarten designed by him had a lot of gifts and occupations. A gift was given to a child to play with such as a ball or a cube which enabled the child to understand the concepts of shape, dimension, size, and their relationships. The occupations were items such as paints and clay which the children could use to make what they desired. Through the occupations, children externalized the concepts existing within their minds. Froebel thought that the whole aim of education was to prepare the human being for his immediate life. Froebel states that in nature we allow plants and animals space and time to grow because their internal laws suggest they will develop properly only in this manner. He wanted to apply the same rule to the education of children. Froebel's works included his theory of education, his idea of what good education is, his ideas on the stages in the development of the child, his development of the play-way method and the process of education-dealing with the subjects to be taught and how teaching can be made effective,

The Pedagogy of Froebel

According to Froebel, the teacher was to clear all obstacles to the self-development or "self- activity" of the child, as well as correct deviations from right and best. A teacher should not intervene and impose compulsory education, but when a child, particularly a child of kindergarten age is restless, impatient, tearful, the teacher must look for the underlying reasons and try to do away with the hindrance to the child's creative development. Froebel thought children were instructed in things they did not need. The lessons should appeal to the pupil's interests. It is clear that, in Froebel's view, the school is to concern itself not primarily with the transmission of knowledge but with the development of character and the provision of the right motivation to learn.

He emphasized the importance of games for the holistic development of a child. Froebel was particularly interested in the development of toys for children for stimulating learning. The toys he was interested in were balls, dice, globes, cylinders, shapes of wood, strips of paper, beads and buttons. The objective was aim was to enable children to distinguish between form, color, separation and association, grouping, matching, and so on when, through the teacher's guidance, the gifts are properly experienced, they connect the natural inner unity of the child to the unity of all things For example, the sphere gives the child a sense of unlimited continuity, the cylinder a sense of both continuity and limitation. Even the practice of sitting in a circle symbolizes the way in which each individual, while a unity in himself, is a living part of a larger unity.

The Montessori Method

Maria Montessori was a physician, an educator and a humanitarian known for her philosophy of education. Dr. Maria Montessori believed that no human being is educated by another person. He must do it himself or it will never be done. A truly educated individual continues learning long after the hours and years he spends in the classroom because he is motivated from within by a natural curiosity and love for knowledge. Dr. Montessori felt, therefore, that the goal of early childhood education should not be to fill the child with facts from a pre-selected course of studies, but rather to cultivate his own natural desire to learn.

In the Montessori classroom, this objective is approached in two ways: first, by allowing each child to experience the excitement of learning by his own choice rather than by being forced; and second, by helping him to perfect all his natural tools for learning, so that his ability will be at a maximum in future learning situations. The Montessori materials have this dual long-range purpose in addition to their immediate purpose of giving specific information to the child.

How do children learn?

Montessori frequently compared the young mind to a sponge. The mind literally absorbs information from the environment. The process is particularly evident in the way in which a two year-old learns his native language, without any formal instruction and without the conscious and tiresomely long effort which an adult makes to master a foreign language. Acquiring information in this way is a natural and delightful activity for the young child who employs all his senses to investigate his interesting surroundings.

She was of the opinion that a young child can learn to read, write and calculate in the same natural way that he learns to walk and talk. In a Montessori classroom, the equipment invites him to do this at his own periods of interest and readiness. Dr. Montessori always emphasized that "the hand is the chief teacher of the child". In order to learn there must be concentration, and the best way a child can concentrate is by fixing his attention on some task he is performing with his hands. AH the equipment in a Montessori classroom invites the child to use his hands for learning.

The importance of the early years

According to Maria, "the most important period of life is the period from birth to the age of six. For that is the time when not only man's intelligence which is his biggest implement but also his psychic power is being formed. Parents should understand that a Montessori school is a unique learning place designed to take advantage of the child's sensitive years between three and six, when he can absorb information from an enriched environment. A child who acquires the basic skills of reading and. arithmetic in this natural way has the advantage of beginning his education without drudgery, or boredom. By pursuing his individual interests in a Montessori classroom, he gains an early motivation for learning, which is the key to his becoming a truly educated person.

According to Montessori/ children should be given considerable freedom. But this did not mean that they did what they felt like. She insisted that children ought to conduct themselves properly and treat others with respect. "The first idea that the child must acquire," she wrote, "is that of the difference between good and evil; and the task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility, and evil with activity, as often happens in the case of old-time discipline. And all this because our aim is to discipline for activity, for work, for good; not for immobility, not for passivity, not for obedience.... A room in which all the children move about usefully, intelligently, and voluntarily, without committing any rough or rude act, would seem to me a classroom very well disciplined indeed."

Montessori disliked conventional classrooms, where "children are tied, each to his place." She sought, instead, to teach children by supplying concrete materials and organizing situations suitable to learning with these materials. She discovered that certain simple materials aroused in young children an interest and attention not previously thought possible. These materials included beads arranged in graduated-number units for pre-mathematics instruction; small slabs of wood designed to train the eye in left-to-right reading movements; and graduated series of cylinders for small-muscle training. The age group between three and six years old would work -pontaneously with these materials. Towards the end, they would not seem tired, but fresh and; composed. Troublesome children became settled through such voluntary work. The materials used were designed specifically to encourage individual rather than cooperative effort. Group activity occurred in connection with shared housekeeping chores.