Progressive Educ & Reform efforts to improve Urban Education

Progressive Education and Reform Efforts to Improve Urban Education
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Progressive Education and Reform Efforts to Improve Urban Education
After the United States got its independence from the British, there were calls for reforms as the new nation sought to continue from where the Britons had left. Calls for an end to slavery became widespread and the education of the African Americans was also something that was widely discussed as people like Benjamin Franklin saw it as an opportunity to help the African Americans become more “economically efficient.” However, as noted by Jeynes (2007), even as the efforts to educate African Americans increased, “there was not the progress in schooling that there could have been.” He continues to mention how America at the time had a low literacy rate which made a little more difficult to spread the importance of educating African Americans. The American education system was also quite different at the time but the wave for the adoption of a progressive type or kind of education was just starting. Progressive education changed the American education system and this article seeks to determine its origins as well as the policies or ideas of the pioneers of this movement.
Well, progressive education started with the ideas of Rousseau, Locke, and Bacon who as Jeynes (2007) writes “propounded the notion that children should learn by experience, not by reason.” These three believed in the idea that children should enter a classroom without any “presuppositions about how the world worked but should discover for themselves by using the scientific methods.” The idea here was that children should enter the classroom without any ideas of how the world is. They were to learn and understand their world and see it from their own lens and not the teachers’ or their parents’ lenses.
Rousseau, Locke, and Bacon set the groundwork for progressive education but it was John Dewey’s efforts that brought change to the American education system. Dewey took advantage of a time that he existed to make sure that his ideas spread fast and were eventually adopted. He is considered as the father of progressive education because through his ideas, the American education was changed. Like his predecessors, he “believed that education took place by experience and that people were born inherently good.” Jeynes (2007) notes that “he drew from the foundation for liberalism that Rousseau, Locke, and Bacon established and made a convincing argument that the application of this rubric was appropriate for modern society.” Dewey was shrewd in his proposal and managed to directly link his progressive education proposal to the transformation that was being experienced in America. Dewey’s idea was child-centered and this meant that children knew what they wanted to learn. So, the teachers’ job was to respond to the desires of the children and not...