I read with interest Daniel Buck’s recent piece, “The agonizing individualism of progressive education.” In his view, progressive schools fail to uphold communitarian values by overemphasizing individualism. He worries that they lack direct instruction, rich group discussions, and clear behavioral expectations. On each of these charges, I think he is wrong.
I have a unique vantage point from which to make this claim. I am a public school graduate, a progressive-high-school alumnus, and current board member of one of the best-known progressive schools in the country. I have spent my career working to increase the number of high-performing public schools serving kids from low-income families in cities around the country. I have a deep appreciation for both urban charter schools and progressive education leaders like John Dewey and my own college thesis advisor, the late Theodore Sizer.
In his critique of progressive education, Mr. Buck paints a picture that bears no resemblance to progressive schools I’ve attended or visited.
He contends that progressive schools “do not impose a curriculum or knowledge worth knowing. Rather, let [students] discover their way into whatever interests them most.... Never do they discuss together, read out loud together, practice problems together, or sit silently struggling through the same task together.... Never mind an expectation that students master...any common body of knowledge to bind us closer together.”
This was not my experience. I attended my neighborhood public elementary school, but my family moved when my stepfather lost his job. Because we relocated to southern Vermont, my sister and I ended up going to The Putney School on scholarship. Putney is one of the nation’s oldest progressive independent high schools.
Was Putney an educational lord of the flies with students following their individual interests without guidance from adults or adherence to group norms? Nope. We had a core curriculum in math, science, English, history, and the arts. We had rich group discussions of canonical books. I’ll never forget lugging around the massive, hardcover volumes containing the complete works of William Shakespeare from which we read and discussed one play every three days in my senior English class.
We had direct instruction in math and science, Socratic discussions in history, and a student-led, faculty-advised Standards Committee that adjudicated student discipline cases on behalf of the community.
But we also had project week instead of final exams. During project week, students had to design and execute capstone projects in both the academics and the arts. Each project took a minimum of twenty-four hours to complete. One year, I wrote and performed a musical score for the winter theater production of As You Like It. One of my fellow students retrofitted a farm tractor to run on bio-diesel. (That student went on to found and sell a successful farming technology company fifteen years later.)
Granted, there is immense privilege in attending an independent school like Putney. But many of the progressive public schools that I’ve visited—whether they be Expeditionary Learning, Deeper Learning, Montessori, or members of the Coalition of Essential Schools—share common commitments to the instructional, pedagogical, and communitarian values that Mr. Buck practices in his own teaching.
I agree that “our public schools are one of the few unifying institutions that we have left.” But I was left flummoxed by the next sentence: “If we allow progressive educational principles to continue to individualize and atomize the classroom, we shouldn’t be surprised if our culture and political climate follow suit.”
Rarely have I had such whiplash when reading two adjacent sentences. Progressive educational principles are not driving the culture wars. Legitimate (and manufactured) flashpoints over Covid policies, partisanship, race, gender ideology, and guns are the real drivers. If you’re looking for threats to public schools, don’t point your finger at John Dewey; look at the polemicists in the cynical political class who use fear to splinter us into warring tribes.
Mr. Buck ends his piece with a description of a wonderful closing activity that he does in his classroom. It is an example of the kind of classroom ritual I experienced many times in my progressive high school, and have seen in many visits to progressive schools over the years. While I think Mr. Buck is deploying and assaulting straw men in his critique of progressive schools, I think he’d love teaching at one.
