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Definition of a Classic Education: The highest standard of learning, because learners have read and critiqued what others know in order to expand or replace it through rational means. Learners adjust their behavior patterns to fit whatever is required in order to repeat, critique, elaborate, and use the subject developed by another person.
Definition of a Progressive Education: A social movement holding an experimental view emerging from political theories that curricula center on individual learners, not the subject to learn, in order to restructure society as a democracy.
Classic and progressive education have represented two extreme philosophies of schooling since the early 20th Century. A pendulum indicating public interest in each philosophy swings between these two. Proponents in and out of schools appear to have accepted one position or the other as an article of faith. At the same time, most public school educators use mixes of procedures derived from one or the other position.
Proponents share few efforts to join these extremes. Classic educators see few reasons to work with progressives who appear anti-intellectual and have historic roots in play schools. Progressive educators refer to classic educators as elitists from whom they must wrestle school leadership for the sake of human dignity and democracy.
Measured student learning appears to increase and decrease as teachers increase use of chassic or progressive education procedures.
Classic Education
Classic education represents the most rigorous academic studies. Students learn what the most informed people know. Proponents argue that learning occurs one student at a time through individual learner’s efforts. They demonstrate that classic learning results in measurably more literate people sharing a common intellectual legacy than through other schooling.
Progressive Education
Progressive education represents less defined, more comfortable, individual learner centered pedagogies and learning venues. Proponents argue that learning occurs, for example, through projects addressed by groups of students. These, they point out in manifestos and other opinions, lead to restructuring society. Many proponents consider experimental empirical data of school learning irrelevant. They argue no one can measure what anyone else learns.
Shared and Distinguishing Assumptions
Classic and progressive education share a common assumption that learning can occur in schools. They differ in definitions of learning, education, and schools.
Classic educators use assumptions that allow adjusting instruction to fit scientifically constructed data about what the word learning means and how to increase it promptly. They argue that progressives do not have a coherent philosophy of education that leads to a finite set of observable learning procedures, instruction, or results.
Progressive educators use in Hegelian argument style a political class warfare view to underpin their interpretation of education and its place in society. They assert that school administrators and policy makers don’t understand what happens in classrooms. Therefore, practicing teachers and their supporters must take over school operations and education policies in order to help restructure society as more democratic.
A highlight of distinguishing classic from progressive education occurred in 1936 and 1937. Robert M. Hutchins and John Dewey debated their respective philosophies of education in The Social Frontier, the periodical later titled Frontiers of Democracy sponsored by the Progressive Education Association.
Observable Differences
Observers can distinguish classic and progressive education by listening to the vocabulary used to describe schooling practices and results.
Classic education. Classic educators infer that they offer a chance for learners to expand their life-choices by knowing what the most informed people know.
They describe the use, for example of classes, lesson plans, individual’s academic study, textbooks, facts, rationale, evidence, probabilities, citine sources, reading, calculating, lectures, discussions, memorization, recitations, homework, prerequisite skills, and testing in order to confirm that intended at least minimum literacy and other learning standards occur as planned.
They assume everyone can perform to standard, if they study to do so, and if teachers follow known instruction to yield these results faster than through each individual’s trial-and-error.
Classic educators accept that learners’ academic test and achievement results will likely approximate a Gaussian (normal) curve distribution. That means that 85 percent of students will receive grades ranging from A-D, depending on their individual academic performance. They also accept that remedial, theraputic, and special education programs will address other students.
Conversational references to classic education include: You alone have responsibility for what you learn. Learn as much as you can as fast as you can, so you understand nuances of life. Do your best, always. Learn from the best. Study with the people who write the textbooks and conduct the research. School is the easiest time in your life to learn the fastest and the most of what other people know. The liberal arts prepare you for a first step toward any career.
Progressive education. Progressive educators say they are practical and caring.
They describe the use, for example of schools serving individual differences and interests, through beliefs, feelings, emotions, creative expressions, and opinions, addressing human development needs through project-based learning activities in collaboration with others in order to solve problems cooperatively in preparation for exercising humane practices that restructure society as more democratic. They use student portfolios of classroom artifacts to represent student learning.
Progressive educators accept that students enter classrooms with different backgrounds, learn at different rates, make different levels of effort depending on their motivation resulting in unassessable meaningful learning through achievement testing.
Conversational references used by progessive educators indicate that a reason other than instruction exists why students do not learn as someone else expects. They use such terms as belief, caring, child-centered, class size, disinfranchised, equity, inadequate funding, inappropriate public policies, multiculturalism, scientific pedagogy, teaching, teacher experience, teacher professional development, and whole language.
Middle Ground
Experimental child psychology and special education emerged during the first third of the 20th Century as middle ground between classic and progressive education. Both have endured strongly while other middle ground efforts have not, except eclectic classroom practices that each teacher chooses to use.
Experimental child psychologists. Experimental child psychologists used scientific methods and reductionist logic to identify and codify those observable behavior patterns of the learning process that a teacher or clinician can manage. They assume that any person can learn anything given enough time and appropriate instruction.
Special education. Special education started with four psychologists and classic educators. They recognized that use of formal intellectual and behavioral tests plus experimental child psychology research findings would likely lead to increased learning by students with disabilities. Public policy for education of students with specific disabilities accepts the assumption that anyone can learn anything given enough time and appropriate instruction.
Early special educators used scientific methods to assess various ways to implement experimental child psychology research findings. They also developed individual education plans, small classes with a mix of individual instruction and tutoring, special curricula and learning material geared to each student’s skill level, and assessments of each student’s academic and life skill performance with individual and group tests.
Mass market of mobile learners. An emerging mass market of mobile learners appears to offer a possible third identifiable middle ground. This is the only learner initiated option widely used. Tablet and other mobile PCs as well as smart cellphones make learning available online without schools as mediators. It remains unclear how learners will shape this learning form and how school-based educators and others will respond.
Classic and Progressive Education in the 21st Century
The pendulum has continued to swing in the 21st Century. However, most public school educators appear to operate with an eclectic vocabulary and set of practices drawn unevenly from classic and progressive education. Some will argue that this mix represents progressive education.
For several decades, classic education has increasingly thrived in private and in a growning number of charter public schools. A relatively small percentage of mainstream public schools and a smaller percentage of their teachers give priority to classic learning.
However, anecdotal blog posts by public school teachers online indicate that they relunctantly use classic instruction for a small part of class time to prepare students to pass minimum state standards tests. Federal public education policy gives priority to measuring academic results of schooling against state standards, a classic education expectation.
Progressive educators in teacher unions continue to claim that state standards and related tests inflict an unfair bias against urban and certain demographic aggregates of students. While they oppose these measurements, they want more Federal funding for themselves and their schools without accounting for its impact on student learning.
Related Reading
Bestor, A. (1953). Educational Wastelands. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Counts, G. (1932). Dare the School Build a New Social Order? New York: John Day.
Dewey, J. (1900). The School and Society. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and Society. New York: Macmillan.
Graham, P. (1971). Progressive school movement. In L. Deighton, ed., The Encyclopedia of Education. New York: Macmillan and Free Press, Vol. 7, 249-255.
Hartman, G. & Shumaker, A, eds. (1932). Creative Expression. New York: John Day.
Kilpatrick, W. (1918). The project method. Teachers College Record. 19(4) 319-335.
Hitchens, R. ().
Rugg, H. & Shumaker, A. (1928). The Child Centered School. New York: World Book.