Solution 3: Progressive Education

A number of educational proposals, old and new, have one theme in common. They make curriculum engaging, and relevant to student lives. Such proposals include various forms of experiential learning, learning by doing, creating something, participating in meaningful projects. They also include various ways of motivating students by example, by being sincere and fair with them, etc.

Progressive education works; it is a well established fact, and not just my opinion. Some of the most successful teachers and schools have been using one or another Progressive approach. Most of really deep thinkers in education in the last hundred years were progressives. Moreover, many ideas of Progressive education have entered the popular culture through such movies as "Dangerous Minds," and “Freedom Writers.” I want to make it clear; we are talking about a whole host of different approaches, only loosely related to each other. The very term “Progressive education” is disputed for being too general. In my opinion, there is a common thread among all these different solutions, namely their take on motivating students to learn by making both the curriculum and the process of teaching interesting, engaging, and relevant to student lives.

Some of the criticism of Progressive education again has to do with faulty attempts to implement it, rather with the core idea. For example, Progressives are often accused in watering down curriculum and lowering the standards. Such regrettable things did happen in the name of Progressivism, no doubt. However, you can imagine education both engaging and rigorous, can’t you? Everyone should understand the difference between criticizing to improve and criticizing to abolish. Sometimes people want to abolish, but in fact bring up only points that call for improvement.

However – as you probably suspected – there is a glitch in the Progressive education solution. Well, there is a couple. First, it seems to work well among middle and upper class students, many of whom are already motivated to learn. With many notable exceptions Progressivism does not seem to be working well among lower class children. Moreover, in poorer neighborhoods, more traditional, more authoritarian forms of schooling combined with high expectations and a lot of testing are working better. This is an awkward fact no one can explain well, but it cannot be ignored.

The other problem is that learning with Progressive methods takes longer than your traditional “memorization and regurgitation,” book-based methods. It does not really matter at elementary level (where Progressive methods are most spectacular and most successful). However, in middle and high school, there is simply no time to learn everything through interesting, engaging, and relevant projects. You can change someone’s life, but you cannot make them learn Algebra AND competent writing AND chemistry AND a foreign language, AND history. While some of schooling can be made very interesting and relevant, no one was able to make all of it interesting and engaging. The truth is, learning involves much hard work, and work is different from pleasure.

Progressive educators often make a very simple thinking error by ignoring the following: just because something is possible does not mean it can be scalable. Just because I can eat a bar of chocolate does not mean I can or should live on chocolate alone.