School War Progressivists Vs.Traditionalists In Education By: Anthony Pellegrino

In the search for a plausible answer to the charges that public schools are failing our students in providing a quality education, I came across a raging controversy between two philosophies of education and methods of teaching. It appears that there are two camps: the progressivists and the traditionalists. [lDr. Elaine K. McEwan, Ed.D., a former educator for over 30 years, discusses these two schools of thought in her excellent book: Angry Parents: Failing Schools. Its subtitle is: What’s Wrong with the Public Schools and What You Can Do About It. A must reading!

Dr. McEwan explains that the proponents of progressive education view the schools as the means by which to alter the structure, values, and ethics of society. The progressivists believe that children should construct their own learning and truth through realworld projects that build selfesteem. In other words, teachers merely serve as non directive faciliators, and the educational process is far more important than the educational product. Thereby the classroom becomes “learnercentered.”

The proponents of traditional education, on the other hand, want the schools to reflect the values and goals of the community; therefore parental desires and local control should be primary.Traditionalists believe that adults have a body of knowledge worth transmitting to the next generation and that children are capable of scholastic achievement when taught explicitly in a system that holds both teacher and child accountable.

These are the major philosophical differences in a nutshell. These differences are vividly demonstrated in curricular and instructional differences in the current school systems. The fallout casualties of these “school wars” are our children who cannot read and cannot do math as expected.

Most parents dream that their children will receive at school what the progressivists promise, e.g. cooperation, team building, creative problem solving, discovering learning, plus marketable job skills, coupled with what the traditionalists promise, e.g. selfdiscipline, a competitive edge, basic skills, plus all of the academic knowledge that the past has to offer. Unfortunately this balanced performance is rarely attainable. Current “education resembles an imbalanced seesaw, fluctuating wildly between the ups and downs of innovation.”

It appears that discipline, academic knowledge, basic skills, ability to compete, and subject matter competence that students should be acquiring in school are being replaced with critical thinking, marketable job skills, global citizenship, and cooperation. Somehow reading, writing and ‘rithmetic are not “in.”

This subtle change in education started over a century and half ago. It has taken many years to realize the impact we feel today as professional educators fought to take control of the schools. Let me cite an example by John Swett, California state superintendent of instruction, as recent as 1964, which reflects his thinking about parents. This same concept was popular in the 1 860’s. The vulgar impression that parents have a legal right to dictate to teachers is entirely erroneous….The only persons who have a legal right to give orders to the teachers are his employers, namely the committees in some states and in others the directors or trustees… If his conduct is approved of by his employers, the parents have no remedy against him or them.

In the early 1900’S two of the most influential progressivists, William Heard Kilpatrick, at Teachers College, Columbia University, and John Dewey at the University of Chicago, preached to thousands of intraining teachers their philosophy of progressive education. Since 1918 to the 1990’s there has been an insistence on the superiority of naturalistic, handson teaching of cognitive skills over the lectureanddrillandpractice teaching of a defined body of knowledge. The effects of this theory is now being realized as the more traditionalist teachers fade away through attrition. ( to be continued)