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Progressive Education

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The key components of progressive education centered around the progressive movement of the late 19th and 20th century. This educational style embraced industrial training, agricultural education and social education. “In the late 1940s, progressive education focused on ‘the whole child’ concept with the most prominent educational reform being called ‘Life Adjustment’ from a group called ‘the Adjusters.’ It was believed that students needed lessons in practical matters such as friendships, hobbies and family life more than the lessons acquired in college or vocational school.” John Dewey, who was one of the main advocates of progressive education and became known as the “father of Progressive education,” created a “Laboratory School” in Chicago. The curriculum at Dewey’s Lab School was described as two-dimensional: 1. The child’s side that focused on activities, and 2. The teacher’s side that focused on “logically organized bodies of subject matter” (Tanner 102). Students learned subject matter through familiar events and social activities: they cooked, sewed, wove, wood-worked, explored farming, etc. (Benson 30 ; Tanner 109). Critics of his school and his philosophy argued that “Dewey isolated children from the real world by creating an imaginary world with curriculum that gave students experiences with the sole aim of acquiring subject matter.” Maria Montessori was an Italian physician and educator who developed an educational philosophy that focused on independence, freedom, and respect for a child’s natural development. Montessori’s education spread to the United States in 1911, received criticism and went away in 1914, and returned in 1960. “Thousands of schools throughout the country embrace this style of learning as a model of human development.” However, the traditional approach to education, which prevails today, remains focused on the transmission of prescribed blocks of knowledge. The Montessori approach focused on giving support to the natural development of the human being.

REFERENCES

* Benson, L., Harkavy, I., & Puckett, J. (2007). Dewey’s Dream: Universities and Democracies in an Age of Education Reform. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. * Tanner, L. N. (1991). The meaning of curriculum in Dewey’s Laboratory School (1896-1904). Journal of Curriculum Studies , 23 (2), 101- 117. * http://www.absorbentminds.co.uk/acatalog/What_is_Montessori_.html * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education

* blog - http://experientialcontinuum.com/2010/10/26/dewey’s-experiment-in-education-the-laboratory-school/

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