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Introduction There is currently afoot a simple story of the rise of progressive education, one that has fed mercilessly on the fears of anxious parents and the hostilities of suspicious conservatives. In it John Dewey . . . awakes one night with a new vision of the American school: the vision is progressive education. Over the years . . . he is able to foist the vision on an unsuspecting American people. The story usually ends with a plea for the exorcising of this devil from our midst and a return to the ways of the fathers. This kind of morality play has always been an influential brand of American political rhetoric, used by reformers and conservatives alike. But it should never be confused with history! (Lawrence Cremin, 1961)1 This simple tale of progressive education has not changed much since the publication of Cremin’s The Transformation of the Schools over forty-five years ago. Dewey remains the constant in the morality play— blessed or damned—and accolades or darts are thrown depending upon one’s ideology and understanding of progressivism. Much confusion continues today as educators praise and curse progressive education, embracing certain tenets as justification for their work and ignoring other practices as reasons for supposed failings of the public schools. From this commotion has arisen renewed interest in the Eight-Year Study, a project sponsored by the Commission on the Relation of School and College of the Progressive Education Association (PEA) during the 1930s and early 1940s and staged in twenty-nine secondary school sites throughout the United States. After years of neglect, references both complimentary and critical are appearing in the contemporary literature . No curriculum textbook writer now fails to mention Wilford Aikin, director of the Commission, in a typically brief historical overview of curriculum development, and John Lounsbury and Gordon F. Vars have popularized the Eight-Year Study to generations of members of the 1 2 Introduction National Middle School Association. David Tyack and Larry Cuban present the project as a case study in Tinkering Toward Utopia to show schools’ resistance to change in what they call the “grammar of schooling .” The Commission on the Relation of School and College occupies a prominent place in Ellen Lagemann’s An Elusive Science as an important moment in the history of educational research, setting the stage for the crucial conceptual move from measurement to evaluation. Looking for examples of successful reform involving teachers, Linda Darling-Hammond finds much to praise in the Eight-Year Study as she notes the importance of staff working together and forging shared goals. The project was featured in Education Week’s twentieth century historical overview of schooling in America, Lessons of a Century, and criticized by Diane Ravitch in Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms. Alfie Kohn, writing for the general public in The Schools Our Children Deserve, describes the Study as “the best-kept educational secret of the twentieth century,” while Patricia Graham, in her recent history of American education, Schooling America, dismisses the project as culturally blind.2 Why is the Eight-Year Study drawing increased attention now?3 Does its rediscovery reflect a rekindled appreciation of “democracy as a way of life,” a phrase common in the tenets of 1930s progressive education? Or, perhaps, with today’s emphasis on high-stakes testing and its stranglehold over experimentation, educators are beginning to question the innate weaknesses of standardization. Regardless of the reasons, we hope that examining the Eight-Year Study might spark a reconsideration of secondary education’s purposes and practices. From the outset of our research, we have been struck by the boldness and ambition of its leaders, and we can only begin to wonder what might have happened if educators had drawn upon the insights of this project. Both beguiling and disconcerting, this grand experiment continues to capture our imagination. Not only does the work of the Commission on the Relation of School and College invite a reexamination of taken-forgranted public school practices, the research supports a hopeful and an optimistic view of the ability of teachers to improve schools. After years of examining PEA materials, we now view our scholarship as an act of reclamation: an opportunity to recall what can be accomplished when educators, students, and parents come together to explore values and to develop practices that represent and reflect the desire to realize our national democratic commitments. Cremin notes that “Progressivism implied the radical faith that culture could be democratized without being...

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