Ever since Arthur Bestor and Rudolf Flesch wrote their famous attacks on progressive education in the early 1950s, blasting this form of education has been a blood sport for certain education critics.

Twenty years ago Progressive Education was a tiny and, in many eyes, a crackpot movement quarantined in a handful of private schools. Today it covers much more territory. Now predominantly a ...

Progressive education last week was compared, by one of its high priests, to Christianity. Burton Philander Fowler, veteran progressive educator and Presbyterian, wrote in the New York Times that the ...

For the past four years, I have been a volunteer tutor in grades 1-4 of a K-5 public elementary school in New York City’s Community School District 2. As in countless other urban schools nationwide, ...

If you are a Progressive in the political sense of the word, here is the philosophy you subscribe to. If you think about public education, you think like John Dewey, the father of a progressive ...

Teachers are frequently reminded during their careers to "meet the students where they are." It's a common-sense idea: there are things students know and can do today, and other things they should be ...

As regular readers of this blog know, I’m an advocate for Self-Directed Education. My research and that of others convinces me that Self-Directed Education works, is eminently practical, and is far ...

North American elementary and secondary schools are based on premises “that have been wrong from the beginning and haven’t become any less wrong for a century’s reiteration.” So argues Kieran Egan, a ...

When I began the first grade in 1942, my mother noticed that I was slow to learn to read and arranged a meeting with my teacher. She was given a lecture on how reading was to be taught in school.

As regular readers of this blog know, I’m an advocate for Self-Directed Education. My research and that of others convince me that Self-Directed Education works, is eminently practical, and is far ...

IN the winter of 1923, a wealthy lady, and a friend, took me to see the Lincoln School in New York. All her four children were in it, and the school’s progressive achievements were her pride and joy.

I have spent much of my career in higher education, as a law professor and college president, but I am also a trustee of a small independent K-12 school in my hometown of Portland. Our school prides ...