A Feminist Legacy: The Rhetoric and Pedagogy of Gertrude Buck

2. Progressive Education, Feminism, and the Detroit Normal Training School

k} 2 progressive education, feminism, and the detroit normal training school For the construction of an inner organic world, one which will enable him to live in organic relations with the outer world, the child’s dominant interests must be noted, and as they appear they must be satisfied. Further, they must not only be satisfied but also organized, and this means a wide experience of his environment, wide enough to determine their most fundamental relations. —Harriet M. Scott and Gertrude Buck, Organic Education: A Manual for Teachers in Primary and Grammar Grades The main aim of education should be to produce competent, caring, loving people. —Nel Noddings, Educating Moral People: A Caring Alternative to Character Education uck began her professional career not at an elite institution but at the Detroit Normal Training School working with Harriet M. Scott, the school’s principal and the older sister of Fred Newton Scott. Buck further developed her progressive ideas by coauthoring a textbook for teachers of primary and secondary grades with Harriet Scott. Unlike composition, which drew on the rhetorical tradition, normal schools, the postsecondary teacher-training schools of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were influenced by European learning theories (Fitzgerald 244). In The Young Composers: Composition’s Beginnings in Nineteenth-Century Schools, Lucille M. Schultz contends that school-based writing instruction “is a site progressive education and feminism k where what we think of as personal or experienced-based writing began; it is a site where the democratization of writing was institutionalized; it is a site where some of our contemporary composition practices were prefigured ; and it is a site where composition instruction, as we understand it today, began” (4).1 Since the normal schools were instrumental in shaping the public school curriculum, they are a significant site to explore in terms of their development and implementation of democratic teaching practices. In addition, in examining Scott and Buck’s textbook, significant overlap between their feminist approach and progressive education is evident. These similarities include a student-centered pedagogy that underscored students’ interests and experiences, a focus on cooperation and inductive learning, and an emphasis on human relationships over abstract principles in the education of moral individuals. In particular, Scott and Buck’s ideas anticipate aspects found in Nell Noddings’s care ethics and her discussion of its significance to education. Scott’s stress on cooperation and developing egalitarian relationships is also a significant aspect of Buck’s feminist ethics. In addition, it is integral to Buck’s understanding of the metaphor and her social theory of rhetoric, discussed near the end of the chapter. Scott and Buck’s efforts to democratize teaching practices parallel those of other women during this period. For instance, the collection “Bending the Future to Their Will”: Civic Women, Social Education, and Democracy (1999) explores a group of women “who forged a distinctive tradition of social education from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century, one that offered an alternative set of ideas about its means and ends to those propounded by mainstream educational theorists” (Crocco 1). Among the late-nineteenth-century women in the collection are Lucy Maynard Salmon, Buck’s colleague at Vassar; Jane Addams of Hull House; and Mary Sheldon Barnes, who, like Salmon, advocated the inductive use of sources to teach history. Collection coeditor Margaret Smith Crocco explains that she uses the term “social education” to indicate that education concerned with democracy has occurred not only in universities but in various settings including “women’s clubs, settlement houses, and activist and professional organizations” (1–2). In defining social education, Crocco explains that it “seeks to address the issue of what skills and knowledge individuals need to live effectively in a democracy, the definition of which we borrow from John Dewey, who considered democracy ‘a mode of progressive education and feminism k™ associated living’” (1). Like the women in this collection, Scott and Buck were part of this tradition of social education, which stood in contrast to mainstream educational approaches of the times. Scott and Buck’s goals focused on developing “social individuals,” or individuals possessing a deeper understanding of the interconnected nature of society. These individuals would then use this knowledge to improve society. Gendered Histories and the Normal Schools One significant reason the contributions of the normal schools and the efforts of women like Scott and Buck...