Articles From The Classical Teacher

Progressive vs. Classical Education
Martin Cothran
Classical Teacher, Summer 2007

At the beginning of C.S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Eustace Clarence Scrubb, a spoiled and troublesome child, finds himself at a “progressive” school called, “Experiment House.” His parents had sent him there because they too are “progressive”: Eustace calls his teetotalling, non-smoking, vegetarian parents by their first names, and they wear a special sort of underwear.

Experiment House is an interesting place. The subjects all have familiar names. They are taught differently, and Bibles are “not encouraged.” The instructors do not consider children who bully other children as “bad,” but rather as “interesting psychological cases,” and think that “children ought to be allowed to do as they like.”

Sound familiar? If not, it should (well, everything except the underwear anyway).
Lewis was obviously lampooning the permissivist education of his day as it manifested itself in schools like Summerhill in Suffolk, England, which became a mecca for progressivist educators in the 1920’s, 30’s, and 40’s.

But these permissivist theories of education didn’t die when, in the late 1950’s, the Progressive Education Association had to literally shut its doors after a veritable revolt by angry parents who blamed the movement for the ills of American education.

Books like Why Johnny Can’t Read (1955) assailed the abandonment of phonics instruction. And What Ivan Knows and Johnny Doesn’t (1961) capitalized on the perception that the Russians were ahead of the United States in learning, as evidenced by the fact that they had beat us in getting the first satellite into space with the launch of the Sputnik spacecraft in 1957.

The principles of progressivism were spelled out in books like John Dewey’s Democracy and Education and Boyd Bode’s Progressive Education at the Crossroads. They were likewise pilloried in Arthur Bestor’s Educational Wastelands and Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.

Progressivism was a conglomeration of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s romanticist notions of the child as an inherently good being who would learn naturally and easily once certain environmental impediments to learning (which often included the teacher) were removed, and the pragmatism of thinkers like William James, who believed that if education did not have a direct, practical impact on society, then it had no value.

Expressions such as “child-centered,” “activity-based,” “real life choices,” and “practical knowledge” still populate the academic vocabulary of modern progressives who, after being chased out of schools in the '50s, made a brief comeback in the late '60s with “open classrooms” and the “New Math,” and then again in the 1990s with the now discredited “outcome-based” education.

Progressivism is still the reigning paradigm of education in the nation’s teachers colleges, where it periodically gets chased into hiding, only to reappear in some new guise every 20 or 30 years like the creature in the movie It.

To their credit, not all of the progressives’ complaints against the educational practices of their time were misguided. The spectre of Thomas Gradgrind, the megalomaniacal schoolmaster in Charles Dicken’s Hard Times who lectures his students into submission, is a perennial danger.

But modern American education incorporates the worst of both approaches—the progressivist and the traditional—in its efforts to make all children equal and in its fevered emphasis on the teaching of information for information’s sake.

Classical education rejects both extremes because it holds that, on the one hand, children, like all human beings, suffer from original sin and therefore should not simply be allowed to “do as they like,” and, on the other, that education isn’t about more information—education is about what William Bennett has called the “architecture of the soul.”

Martin Cothran is also the author of Traditional Logic I and Traditional Logic II, as well as Material Logic and Classical Rhetoric with Aristotle.