Stories of the Eight-Year Study: Reexamining Secondary Education in America

1. The Educational Context of the Eight-Year Study

25 The Educational Context of the Eight-Year Study 25 Chapter 1 The Educational Context of the Eight-Year Study There is no need to re-present the history of progressive education. Patricia Graham’s Progressive Education, Lawrence Cremin’s The Transformation of the School, and William Reese’s Power and the Promise of School Reform have already done so, and their work proves as insightful today as when first published.1 Yet countless myths still surround both progressivism and the PEA. We wish to discuss lore that affects our conception of the Eight-Year Study as we attempt to broaden the common definition of progressive education in view of current perceptions of the late 1920s–1930s era. We also will examine the societal tensions of the 1930s, particularly those concerning the future of democracy, since public fears greatly influenced the direction of the project. We conclude this chapter with a discussion of the unique type of research conducted by the Aikin Commission staff. Conceptions of the Progressive Education Association Although progressive education has no official creed, it has its distinctive points of view and activities. (John L. Childs, 1939)2 The Progressive Education Association was far from being united in the late 1920s during the Eight-Year Study’s early stages of conception. Formed in Washington, D.C., in 1919 under the leadership of Stanwood Cobb, the PEA, originally titled the Association for the Advancement of Progressive Education, attracted individuals more critical of established school practice rather than those sharing a common vision for bettering education.3 Having witnessed unsuccessful efforts to form a Montessori society in the United States, PEA members believed the association would fail at the national level if founders focused on any specific approach to schooling.4 Throughout its history the PEA would explore many different and sometimes contending orientations to teaching and learning— 26 Stories of the Eight-Year Study the ideas of Pestalozzi, Montessori, Rousseau, the American transcendentalists , Freud, Steiner—and not just the ideas of John Dewey. While Dewey (and the early University of Chicago Laboratory School) defines progressive education for us today, he did not embody the movement for PEA founder Cobb and other PEA members who instead turned to eighty- five-year-old Charles W. Eliot to lead the organization. Eliot, emeritus president of Harvard University, declined the PEA presidency due to failing health but agreed to serve as the honorary first president, proclaiming his belief in the principles and aims of the organization.5 Years later, after Eliot’s death in 1926, Dewey would serve as honorary president. The PEA is also often viewed as a small, obscure organization of Dewey disciples centered at Teachers College, Columbia University, or a group of “dauntless women” who started private, elite elementary schools centered on developing the interests and fostering the creative spirit of children. Historical narratives continue that the PEA turned to a more political, social reform agenda, sparked by George Counts’s 1932 “Dare Progressive Education Be Progressive?” speech that led to great turmoil and fragmentation within progressive education circles.6 The tale of the PEA concludes with the association imploding in the late 1940s and disappearing in the 1950s in what follows a general organizational biography: birth, growth, maturity, and death. These impressions implicitly assume that progressive education was the nearexclusive domain of PEA members. This story of the PEA, similar to the morality play of progressive education described in the introduction, is not necessarily wrong— merely too simple. As is commonly believed, the PEA was indeed small. Yet its membership was not quite as modest as some assume and certainly larger than many well-known educational organizations today. From the first meeting in 1919 with eighty-six in attendance, membership rapidly expanded, increasing fourfold between 1924 and 1930 to 7,600 members. By the late 1930s membership peaked at approximately 10,000, although according to Harold Rugg, the association was more than twice this size based on conference participation.7 PEA meetings were not small gatherings either, and regional conferences were often as popular as national events. For example, the 1934 PEA Southern New England Conference attracted over 2,000 attendees.8 Neither were these all private school educators, as some may assume. It is true that the PEA was first composed of an elite, East Coast private school constituency , yet Cobb maintained that this merely reflected opportunities for educational innovation, since private schools were freer to experiment than were public schools...