World War I marked an important turning point in progressive education. With the founding of the Progressive Education Association (PEA) in 1919 advocates had an organization that stood against pedagogical formalism. This essay provides a discussion of this new approach to education, the possibilities of the contributions progressive schools made…

This essay will discuss two educational programs to improve the living conditions of students from low income families that Pedro T. Orata conducted during the middle years of the twentieth century. The question this paper will investigate is whether Orata considered the people he was trying to help as being trapped by the conditions of poverty to…

This paper will examine the attitudes of progressive educators toward poverty in developing countries. The reformers who formed the New Education Fellowship (NEF) in 1921 will be the subjects. They expanded their thinking from concerns about student freedom to efforts to encourage social reform, and by 1946 they participated in the creation of…

Arthur E. Morgan and other self-made business leaders opened Moraine Park School in 1917 to provide a form of character training that they feared had ended in the United States. These men believed that young people gained the best social education when they had to run their own companies because such opportunities enabled students to acquire the…

UNESCO formed the concept of fundamental education in hopes that the programme could end poverty, bring world peace and serve indigenous people. When UNESCO's first pilot project appeared to fail, the organisation developed centres where fundamental education workers learned to use such techniques as libraries, museum displays, films and radio,…

In this article, the author revisits the changing fortunes of Native Americans with respect to their experiences in the three types of government sponsored schools: industrial vocational boarding schools located outside the reservations, vocational boarding schools located on the reservations, and day schools on the reservations that stressed…

Seeking to distance themselves from the educational patterns they dislike, some contemporary advocates of academic studies overlooked an important problem that they share with the progressives they criticize. For example, Diane Ravitch blamed the absence of academics in schools on what she called the progressive educators' efforts to provide…

A review of the scientific movement in education in the early twentieth century: its origins in the scientific management and industrial efficiency theories of Frederich Taylor; its effects on administrative organization and educational research; and the reactions of its critics, who favored the child-centered school. (SJL)

From 1932 to 1940, the Progressive Education Association (PEA) conducted its Eight-Year Study. At first, the study appeared to be a poorly funded comparison of two groups of students in secondary schools. During the last four years, as more financial support became available, the Eight-Year Study became a broadly based demonstration of a wide…