Article #4 >>>>> The Origins and Consequences of Wretched Public Education Throughout the United States

The Unprogressive Consequences of Putatively Progressive Education

John Dewey in the course of the 20th Century became a favorite of those campus embarrassments known as education professors, who transmitted their ideological inclination to the adminstrators and teachers whom they intellectually corrupted.

But if these education edtablishment mainstays had actually spent much time reading Dewey' s works, they would have realized that he was an awkward writer and projector of nebulous ideas who at best managed to communicate that teachers should relate curriculum to student experience and that students should be actively engaged with the subjects learned.

Other promulgators on matters of curriculum and pedagogy associated themselves with Dewey but asserted much more damaging notions: 

William Heard Kilpatrick authored a book dubbed The Project Method (1922) in which he maintained that curriculum need not consist of set bodies if knowledge and skills but should be generated spontaneously.on the basis of student interest and pursued through group projects.  

Harold Rugg coauthored a book entitled, The Child-Centered School that rapsodized over the merits of centering education on the natural curiosity of the child, whose interests should determine curriculum, rather than any well-defined body of knowledge.

William C. Bagley, who like these others taught at Teachers College/Columbia University, mounted a vigorous counter-argument in synchrony with the Thomas Jefferson-Horace Mann vision of commonly shared citizen knowledge, arguing forcefully for the importance of mathematics, natural science, history, government, geography, and literature.

And indeed this view of education as knowledge-based continued to guide curriculum in most United States school districts into the 1960s.  But education professors were relentless in touting their anti-kniwledge creed, for which they misappropriated the appellation, "progressive."

But when this creed found resonance  with the zeitgeist of the 1960s and became dominant thereafter in public schools as a guide to curriculum and pedagogy, the academic and in many cases the actual death knell was struck for students across the nation.

The misnamed ideology of education professors had most decidedly unprogressive consequences for generations of students and the ill-informed citizenry they became.