Any good definition of Progressive education must take into account the fact that what a Progressive education has signified has changed somewhat over time. 

The Progressive education movement began in the 18th century as a reaction against what was conceived as educational practices that focused too narrowly upon intellectual development alone.   These early Progressives wanted to educate the person entire, and to include physical and emotional development.

In the United States, John Dewey broadened this perspective still further, seeing the purpose of a Progressive education lying in its preparation of the student for participation in a democracy.  He thought, too, that the student should be an active participant in his/her education, not

 

a passive receptacle for facts.

Today, the nature of a Progressive education remains controversial.  This is partly because any adequate education must simultaneously satisfy several urgent needs, and partly because the best means of satisfying these needs are also controversial. 

Significantly, however, two of the leading philosophers of the 20th Century were in substantial agreement concerning the aims of a Progressive education in believing that it should center on the development of good values.  Also significant is the fact that they were broadly agreed upon what comprises good values. 

The philosophers in question were Brand Blanshard and Mortimer Adler. 

Adler: "Children should be prepared and motivated to make

 

themselves the best human beings they are capable of becoming."

Today, we simultaneously face a number of urgent problems, including global warming, as well as resource depletion issues such as imminent oil shortages.  The decay of democratic insitutions is also a critical problem.  Resolving these issues will require enormous political and economic changes over the next 25 years.  This implies that to the development of good values must be added an understanding of how to act upon them effectively so as to bring about the greatest possible good both for the individual and his society.

Preparation for a career is also essential; and, finally, the social dimension of education, the objective of which should be preparation of the student for participation in his/her

 

society, must not be neglected.  Clearly, then, the task before Progressive educators is immense; equally clearly, there can be no civilization, and still less a genuine Democracy, until such time as this task has been carried out adequately.

Adler:  "The reason why universal suffrage in a true democracy calls for universal public schooling is that the former without the latter produces an ignorant electorate and amounts to a travesty of democratic institutions and processes."

On the whole, then, the original conception of a Progressive education remains crucially important, as do Dewey's ideas.  Yet, more urgently now than ever before in human history, a meaningful education requires not only cultivation of good values but also cultivation of the capacity to effectively act upon them.