Old Progressive

Progressive education last week was compared, by one of its high priests, to Christianity. Burton Philander Fowler, veteran progressive educator and Presbyterian, wrote in the New York Times that the trouble with the two systems is that they have not been tried.

Fowler has had almost twoscore years of educational experience, in public high schools in three states, as a college (Sarah Lawrence) and library trustee and, for 18 years, as headmaster of well-equipped, successful, Du Pont-backed Tower Hill School at Wilmington, Del. He is still as firm in the progressive faith as when he was president of the Progressive Education Association.

Progressive education has lately come in for many a hard word ; its foes say it has done irreparable harm to the manners, morals and minds of the generations now supposedly grown up or growing. Fowler took up the cudgels for his faith, named such progressive educators as John Dewey and Charles Austin Beard as leaders in the one pedagogical group which "saw exactly what was happening to our youth" during the flaming ' 20s, warned that "unless our whole educational system was reorganized and brought into harmony with a rapidly shifting world scene, we were headed for disaster."

If catastrophe got ahead of education it was partly, said he, thanks to educators who clung "to a 17th-Century pattern," adding to that pattern only "the latest features of the Prussian gymnasium." It is "reactionary education," said Fowler, not progressive education, that should be blamed for the sins of youth--which he sees as much exaggerated "in the light of the performance of ... millions" in the war.

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