Historiographic Perspectives of Context and Progress During a Half Century of Progressive Educational Reform

Related waves of contemporary school reform and curriculum critique have revitalized interest in the history of progressive education. Most recently those efforts to improve society through education have centered on the restructuring of schools and classrooms for more equitable educational opportunities and more cooperative forms of learning. Among theorists, there is a resurgent concern about social reconstruction as an ideology of education with a vision and commitment to democratic principles and values. In addition, the poststructural critique has renewed social reconstructionist efforts to dislodge formalism, objectivity, social Darwinism and social efficiency as principle tenets of schooling (see Stanley, 1992). An historiographic understanding of how sociocultural change and the political context of schooling have influenced progressive education would improve our ability to integrate perspectives of the past into contemporary pedagogical thought as well as enhance future research endeavors. Breisach (1983) reminds us in his discussion of the uses of historiography that "Every important new discovery about the past changes how we think about the present and what we expect of the future; on the other hand every change in the conditions of the present and in the expectations for the future revises our perceptions of the past" (p. 2). Since 1960, historians of education have grappled with the fate of progressive reforms. Yet their voices may have been silenced through loss or distortion in the maelstrom of reform-minded rhetoric. The purpose of this paper is twofold: to examine changing definitions of progressive education, reveal the contexts, lenses, approaches, and themes from which historians have reconstructed its past and explore how that informs reform-oriented research efforts. An historiographic analysis of four principal themes — the progress, the vision, the context, and the politics of reform — portrays a complex process that tampered with and distorted the implementation of progressive educational reforms intended to alter the sociocultural conditions of communities/society in favor of maintaining a contextual, structural and pedagogical status quo. In many ways, the historiography of progressive education parallels American historiography as well as the historiography of education. This comes as no surprise when we realize the American Historical Association (AHA) has played a major role in the professional foundations of both. While early twentieth century historians emphasized national unity, homogeneity, and the importance of America's destiny, historians of education, mostly educators, produced inspiring histories that sought to ennoble the new profession of teaching. However academic arguments of relevance, presentism, and utility came to haunt both historical traditions. Academic historians debated the value of presentism while, educators debated the relative merit of functional and non-functional scholarship. The 1930s represented a watershed as the Depression created fertile ground for the functionalists in departments of education and progressive historians with a sense of the present in the AHA (Appleby, Hunt, & Jacob, 1994; Breisach, 1983; Cohen, 1976). The two traditions came together in the thirties for the common purpose of outlining a reconstructed program for social studies education in the schools (Bowers, 1969; Kliebard, 1987). Yet their paths once again diverged. Bernard Bailyn (1960), in the name of professional historians, charged educators were propagating a narrow view of history, and education historians such as Ellwood Cubberley were guilty of using history to promote the glories of the education profession. Bailyn urged historians to think of education "not only as formal pedagogy but as the entire process by which a culture transmits itself across the generations" (p. 14). Lawrence Cremin amplified Bailyn's position in The Wonderful World of Ellwood Patterson Cubberley (1965). Together these invited the attention of educational historians to what Diane Ravitch (1978) refers to as the Bailyn-Cremin critique.