Maxine Greene on Progressive Education: Toward a Public Philosophy of Education

I have been reading and teaching Maxine Greene’s work for many years. I began teaching philosophy and education classes forty years ago as a doctoral student and have used a Maxine Greene text in every one. I’ve used The Public School and the Private Vision (1965), Teacher as Stranger (1973), Landscapes of Learning (1978), Dialectic of Freedom (1988), Releasing the Imagination (2000), Variations on a Blue Guitar (2001), and many other chapters, articles, and essays.¹ I’ve had several opportunities to write about her work, her standing within the philosophy of education community, and her influence on me as a teacher, colleague, and friend. In every instance, I drew a connection between Maxine Greene and John Dewey. For example, in Bill Pinar’s The Passionate Mind of Maxine Greene (1998), I suggested that the work of Maxine stands out as the most original and compelling response in the latter half of the twentieth century to the fundamental problem of twentieth century educational theory—the problematic relationship between the school and the conscious quest for a public education. Just as Dewey’s work in the first half of the twentieth century tried to address the question “Can schools educate?” in an analysis of the kinds and qualities of interactions across a wide range of social arrangements, Greene in the second half of the twentieth century locates this question in the tension between the analytic and the aesthetic, the treatise and the novel, the center and the margins, and systematic philosophy and imaginative literature.² In Robert Lake’s Dear Maxine: Letters from an Unfinished Conversation (2010), I wrote about how Maxine, as a scholar and as a person, taught me what Dewey meant when he wrote that education is learning to become human. Like Dewey, Maxine taught us that reflective thinking is not about some epistemological correspondence or even coherence between our minds and the given world, but rather about the re-reading of texts from our own vantage points such that the world is a contested, delirious text that is always being re-written and newly read.³ And in a special issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy (2010) devoted to her work, I wrote again about the resonances between Maxine and Dewey, not simply in their philosophical views, but perhaps more importantly on their insistence that choosing to wander, instead of seeking solace in some promised land, and insisting on being “not yet” are essential conditions of a living freedom.⁴

Of course all of these parallels and resonances between Maxine Greene and John Dewey can be examined within a larger context of the relationship between Greene and progressive educational thought. We know Maxine considered herself a Deweyan in broad outline. John Dewey is the single most often cited scholar in her work. We also know that Maxine considered herself part of the progressive educational tradition. I intentionally use a lowercase “p” here to refer to the broad historical progressive education tradition that Lawrence Cremin writes about in The Transformation of the School.⁵ This needs to be distinguished from the capital “P” and more specific Progressive Education tradition that arose in the early years of the twentieth century as a distinctive and complicated educational ideology that eventually became instantiated in graduate preparation programs, professional and scholarly associations such as the John Dewey Society, and academic journals and publications. Maxine’s relationship with that specific tradition is more ambivalent and nuanced. It seems especially relevant to talk about this relationship at a John Dewey Society meeting. Thus, part of my remarks will be focused on an all-too-brief overview of some of Maxine’s published remarks on Progressive Education.

In addition, I hope to bring something new to our conversation today on this same topic. As many of you know, in the mid-1930s and early 1940s, the left or radical or social reconstructionist wing of the Progressive Education movement came together around the idea of an educational or social frontier. W. H. Kilpatrick’s text on the Educational Frontier⁶ was part of this...