Traditionally, American teachers had emphasized the three Rs and relied on strict discipline and rote learning. Typical of the pedagogues of the period was the Chicago teacher, described by a reformer in the 1890s, who told her students firmly, “Don’t stop to think, tell me what you know!” Yet new ideas were attracting attention. According to a German educator, Johann Friedrich Herbart, teachers could best arouse the interest of their students by relating new information to what they already knew; good teaching called for professional training, psychological insight, enthusiasm, and imagination, not merely facts and a birch rod. At the same time, evolutionists were pressing for a kind of education that would help children to “survive” by adapting to the demands of their rapidly changing urban environment.
Forward-looking educators seized on these ideas because dynamic social changes were making the old system increasingly inadequate. Settlement house workers discovered that slum children needed training in handicrafts, citizenship, and personal hygiene as much as in reading and writing. They were appalled by the local schools, which suffered from the same diseases—filth, overcrowding, rickety construction— that plagued the tenements, and by school systems that were controlled by machine politicians who doled out teaching positions to party hacks and other untrained persons. They argued that school playgrounds, nurseries, kindergartens, and adult education programs were essential in communities where most women worked and many people lacked much formal education. “We are impatient with the schools which lay all stress on reading and writing,” Jane Addams declared. This type of education “fails to give the child any clew to the life about him.” The philosopher who summarized and gave direction to these forces was John Dewey, a professor at the University of Chicago. Dewey was concerned with the implications of evolution—indeed, of all science—for education.
“Education,” Dewey insisted in The School and Society (1899), was “the fundamental method of social progress and reform.” To seek to improve conditions merely by passing laws was “futile.” Moreover, in an industrial society the family no longer performed many of the educational functions it had carried out in an agrarian society. Farm children learn about nature, about work, about human character in countless ways denied to children in cities. The school can fill the gap by becoming “an embryonic community. . . with types of occupations that reflect the life of the larger society.” At the same time, education should center on the child, and new information should be related to what the child already knows. Children’s imagination, energy, and curiosity are tools for broadening their outlook and increasing their store of information. Finally, the school should become an instrument for social reform, “saturating [the child] with the spirit of service” and helping to produce a “society which is worthy, lovely, and harmonious.” Education, in other words, ought to build character and teach good citizenship as well as transmit knowledge.
The School and Society created a stir, and Dewey immediately assumed leadership of what in the next generation was called progressive education. Although the gains made in public education before 1900 were more quantitative than qualitative and the philosophy dominant in most schools was not very different at the end of the century from that prevailing in Horace Mann’s day, change was in the air. The best educators of the period were full of optimism, convinced that the future was theirs.
World History
