Taproots for a New Century: Tapping the Best of Traditional and Progressive Education

Abstract

Each side of the progressivism-versus-traditionalism debate tries to advance its cause by ridiculing the other. Mr. Ackerman looks beyond the caricatures and finds valid ideas on both sides that can be synthesized into a new 10 of education. IN CALIFORNIA, a coalition of mathematically correct parents and university professors campaigns vigorously against progressive-style fuzzy and demands the return of a no-nonsense, basic-skills curriculum. In Massachusetts, the state department of education hires a consultant from New South Wales to argue for the importance of learning science content, thus doing battle with the schools of education and think tanks closer to home and their fervently espoused gospel of hands-on or process science. With such a belligerence evident from coast to coast and with valid insights from one side in these wars canceling out those of the other, might it be time to call a truce and search for common ground? These battles in math and science and in many other areas (e.g., history versus social studies, speaking versus grammar in foreign- language learning) are manifestations of a fundamental debate between progressive educators and traditionalists that has been going on for more than a century. While individual practitioners make pragmatic accommodations (a stiff dose of phonics alternating with fragrant whiffs of whole language), for the profession as a whole the progressivism-versus-traditionalism debate has reached a stalemate. Characteristically, even where one side seems to have the upper hand (for example, progressivism is dominant in most schools of education), the gospel is largely rejected elsewhere (for example, in most actual high schools). It is easy to write off this debate as an all-too-predictable exercise in rhetorical wheel spinning, but to do so would be sad and foolish, for these two traditions represent the best we know about teaching and learning. They are the intertwined taproots of our professional outlook, the warp and woof of the fabric of beliefs that guide us when we walk into a classroom. In the best tradition of traditional education, we need to articulate the content of this debate, and in the best tradition of Deweyan progressivism, we need to work to derive useful insights. Our aim should be to break the philosophical logjam that has been obstructing us as a profession. But how can this be done? While there can be no pat formula, there is a promising pathway, rooted in the intuition that we are dealing not with educational good and evil but with dual virtues that need to be boldly and imaginatively combined. The validity of this intuition would be demonstrated by the hybrid vigor of the synthesis that results. The problem is figuring out how to get to the point where points of view long at war can be recognized as essentially complementary. I see three steps as necessary for depolarizing the debate and achieving a unified outlook. First, those who temperamentally or philosophically lean toward one side of the debate need to resist the temptation to claim the high ground by simply caricaturing the other side. Specifically, traditionalists need to stop ridiculing progressives as anti- intellectual bleeding hearts, and progressives need to stop deriding traditionalists as pedantic, insensitive crushers of freedom. Second, we need to articulate the enduring and valid insights of both camps and engrave them on the two tablets of our new educational 10 commandments. And neither tablet is to be given mere lip service! Third, we need to recognize and imagine educational practices in which all these commandments are alive and well, in which the actions inspired by traditionalism and those sparked by progressivism are orchestrated so as to produce classrooms and schools characterized philosophically by breadth of vision and functioning as learning communities that make us want to sing and shout. …