Pedagogical Peace?

Progressive education was enjoying a boost last week from the ranks of its professional enemies--the Essentialists. Widely known are the aims of the Progressives: informal learning through active experience; the development of initiative, responsibility and the mastery of basic subjects by encouraging pupils as individuals, with teachers acting more as guides than as formal instructors. Less familiar is Essentialism, although hosts of U.S. citizens lean toward the Essentialists. This educational wing would give pupils systematic training in traditional subjects; discipline is stressed and informal learning strictly subordinated.

But now the Essentialist chairman was talking strongly out of school. Wrote Fred Alden Shaw, founder-headmaster of the flourishing Detroit Country Day School, in School & Society:

". . . These are heydays for the Essentialists, for hardly a week passes without a dart being cast at Progressive doctrines. Now it is J. Edgar Hoover commenting on child delinquency; now it is an admiral complaining about inadequate preparation in mathematics. . . . The public is now Essentialist-minded. [Its] attitude . . . has been largely formulated in the fiery furnace of war. . . . Now there is the danger that the public will swing too far. . . Progressive education . . . proclaimed that traditional education had become a ritual ... a mold into which the enthusiasm and idealism of youth were poured with unfortunate results.

"Now we are all for discipline. Subject matter is imposed. ... In the Army, if you haven't 'what it takes,' you 'wash out.' The Essentialists now have hosts of allies, but therein lies the danger. . . . The Progressive point of view deserves recognition . . . can claim some enduring values. . . . After the war . . . Progressives should have an important part. . . . Essentialists may feel justified [but] should avoid . . . throwing out the baby with the bath."

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