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A
paper titled “American
Progressive Education and Yutori
Kyoiku” elicited interesting responses
at the ACE 2013 Conference.
Immediately after the presentation, an
attendee raised his hand and said, “As
an educator in California for the past
25 years I disagree with everything
you said.” He went on to blame
conservatives for current problems in
California schools. Such comments
from American teachers are not
surprising, but the comments from
two Asian attendees were. During the
break, a Malaysian woman said, “Mr.
Sower, I am agreeing with you in every
particular. I did not know where this
style of education was coming from,
but it is having a very negative eect
in Malaysia. Public schoolchildren
are unprepared for higher education
and it is getting worse.” A Taiwanese
woman agreed, though she thought
the “new” ideas came from Japan.
ese reactions illuminate a divide
between an entrenched establishment
that favors progressive education, and
a growing sense among parents and
teachers that something is deeply
wrong. Objections to progressive
education are not new.
e origins of the movement are
detailed in the original paper, but
the main points are these. American
intellectuals educated in Germany
in the late-1800s were inspired by
the Prussian model of an eciently
organized society under the leadership
of experts backed by the power of the
state bureaucracy. ey returned home
imbued with ideas about an ostensibly
rational Statism and began to advocate
similar changes in America. Leaders
of the movement (Stanley Hall, John
Dewey, Edward orndike, David
Snedden, and W illiam Kilpatrick) were
also inspired by Rousseau. Working
principally at Teachers College at
Columbia University (TCCU), they
replaced traditional curricula with
a dierentiated curriculum that put
the masses on a vocational track
while giving elite students a better
education. ey de-emphasized
reading and dumbed-down courses.
From 1910-1950, academic content
in American schools was slashed by
60% as “life-adjustment” courses rose
ten-fold. ey established an ongoing
hegemony over teacher education
and placed pupils’ self-esteem above
learning facts or developing good
habits. A century later, in Japan,
yutori kyoiku (stress-free education)
reduced the school week from
six days to ve in 2002, and cut
“educational requirements by a third.”
Scholastic performance cratered in
6 | Eye Magazine Third Edition
BY CRAIG SOWER
Progressively
Worse Classrooms
HOW LONG CAN WE TOLERATE DECLINING STANDARDS? BY CRAIG SOWER
FEATURE : Craig Sower
Photograph by Aaron Loessberg-Zahl / Flickr
both countries. Progressive education
results in a two-tiered system with
well-educated elites on top, poorly
educated masses below, and lower
overall academic achievement, as is
demonstrated in the U.S. and Japan.
is is not a bug, it’s a feature.
e results are clear. In America,
the 2011 National Assessment of
Educational Progress tests of 4th- and
8th-graders showed that performance
has at-lined. e 2012 average SAT
reading score fell to 496, the lowest
since data became available in 1972.
Writing, at 488, was the lowest since
being added to the test in 2006. U.S.
scores also declined in the Program
for International Student Assessment
(PISA). In math, the US slipped from
18th out of 27 countries, to 25th out
of 30. In science, the U.S. fell from
14th out of 27, to 21st out of 30.
U.S. students remained number one
in self-esteem. American teachers
blame inadequate support. However,
as performance declined from 1970
to 2009, stang doubled and total
ination-adjusted spending per
student for K-12 public education
increased from $55,000 to $151,000.
In Japan, “declining scholastic abilities
of Japan’s children and university
students—formerly ranked at the top
of the world—is said to be a failure of
the [Ministry of Education’s] policy
of yutori kyoiku.” is occurred as
academic contents were cut and class
size was reduced from a post-war
average of 50 to the current 35. Japan’s
free-fall shocked the nation.
Japan PISA Ranking
Math Science Reading
2000 2 2 8
2003 6 2 14
2006 10 5 15
e ideas at issue began with the
French philosopher, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, the enlightened genius who
sent his ve illegitimate children to
foundling homes before sitting down
in 1762 to pen his extended sermon
on childrearing, Emile. Rousseau’s
suggestions of easy, “natural” learning
are seductive. Imagine a world where
children eortlessly learn language
and history, science and math. Imagine
discipline and moral behavior arising
spontaneously. Imagine schools where
teachers need no lesson plans, but
guide students in seamless harmony
with the children’s interests. Imagine
it all, for imagination is as close as you
will get. Regardless, American elites
in the late-19th century embraced
Rousseau’s unproven assertions about
the nature of children, learning and
teaching, and founded an approach
that is “progressive” only in the sense
that it creates progressively worse
classrooms. Since Japan’s yutori
kyoiku follows suit, Japanese parents
should familiarize themselves with
the origins of this philosophy before
deciding if it is good for their children.
Perhaps Malaysian and Taiwanese
parents should, too.
e traditional ideal of a liberal
education rested on three principles:
1) rigorous study disciplines the mind;
2) this benets all students; and 3)
studying the cultural, scientic, and
religious heritage of the nation adds
value to the society and uplifts the
community as a whole. Disdainful
of American social, religious, and
Third Edition Eye Magazine | 7
8 | Eye Magazine Third Edition
political institutions, progressives
pursued their own vision instead.
One person who took issue with the
strange new denitions of democracy
and education being advanced was
William Maxwell, superintendent of
New York City public schools. In a
paper published in 1914, he blasted the
dismal outcomes of the fads, panaceas,
and easy answers pushed by academic
theorists: “It was so comfortable
to imagine that, thru interesting
reading and thru story-telling and
thru counting the petals of owers
and the legs and ears of animals, and
writing about them, children could
learn arithmetic, and composition
and grammar, and that those tiresome
drills to which old-fogy teachers and
superintendents pinned their faith
could be neglected with impunity!
Hence thousands of teachers followed
this new will-o’-the-wisp. e results
were deplorable.”
Another dissenter was Paul Shorey,
classical studies professor at the
University of Chicago. He opined in
a 1917 article: “e things which, for
lack of better names, we try to suggest
by culture, discipline, taste, standards,
criticism, and the historic sense, they
hate…the tendency of their policies
is to stamp out and eradicate these
things and inculcate exclusively their
own tastes and ideals by controlling
American education with the political
eciency of Prussian autocracy and
the fanatical intolerance of the French
anticlericalists. Greek and Latin have
become mere symbols and pretexts.
ey are as contemptuous of Dante,
Shakespeare, Milton, Racine, Burke,
John Stuart Mill, Tennyson [or]
Alexander Hamilton…as of Homer,
Sophocles, Virgil or Horace.” He was
to be proven right. It was not just
that educationists were removing the
classical curriculum from high schools
it was that they sought to remove
scholarship altogether. eir assault
was not only on the education of the
children of the lumpen proletariat,
whom they were apparently willing
to consign to sweatshops and farms,
the progressives were bent on the
diminution of a common cultural
understanding even for would-be
elites.
Shorey’s concerns were echoed
thirty-six years later. In 1953, Arthur
Bestor, a former TCCU professor,
wrote: “Progressive education became
regressive education, because, instead
of advancing, it began to undermine
the great traditions of liberal
education and to substitute for them
lesser aims, confused aims, or no aims
at all.” Bestor dismissed progressives’
claims of innocence about their future
designs on the curriculum: “We must
face the facts. Up-and-coming public
school educationists are not talking
about substituting one scholarly
discipline for another. ey stopped
talking about that years ago. ey are
talking—as clearly as their antipathy
for grammar and syntax permits them
to talk—about the elimination of all
the scholarly disciplines” (emphasis
his).
Nor are Japan, Malaysia, and Taiwan
the rst non-Western countries
progressives have tried to seduce. In
the 1920s, TCCU professor William
Kilpatrick advanced his own version
of progressive education, “e Project
Method.” His variant consisted of
student-led activity for activity’s sake.
Students made newspapers, sewed
dresses, and produced portfolios.
Like other progressives, he adamantly
opposed academic curricula. In 1925,
he wrote of “activity leading to further
activity” (emphasis his) and of “growth
in richness of life and growth in control
over experience…If we can each day
get him [the child] to do better than
the day before, we can gradually build
up a ner quality of living. e details
of doing it are as innite as there are
children and situations.” Almost any
activity one could imagine would
t his model so long as the teacher
had nothing to do with planning
it. It mattered only that students
be enthusiastic. In 1928, Kilpatrick
and Dewey traveled to the U.S.S.R.,
meeting with educators including
Soviet People’s Commissar of
Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky,
professor Albert Pinkevich, and S.
T. Schatzsky. e Russians praised
e Project Method eusively. Knoll
writes, “Viktor N. Sulgin, head of the
Institute of Educational Research
in Moscow, called the concept the
‘withering away of the school’ and
declared the ‘metod proektov’ to be
the one and only truly ‘Marxist’ and
‘democratic’ method of teaching.”
e Russian reformers planned to
implement the method throughout
the country.
Alas, they acted too hastily. Knoll
writes that on September 5, 1931,
shortly after the adoption of Sulgin’s
new curriculum, Stalin, “condemned
the ‘ill-considered craze for the
project method’…declaring [it]
was not suited for teaching the
knowledge and skills necessary to
increase industrial production and
strengthen communist consciousness.
Indeed, there was considerable risk
that…progress achieved in the eld
of general and scientic education in
recent years would be jeopardized.”
One searches in vain for further
mention of the hapless Mr. Sulgin.
Other advocates of progressive
education also seem to have “withered
away.” Commissar Lunacharsky was
purged the year after he met Dewey,
his name dropped down the memory
hole during the Great Terror of 1936-
38. According to Ravitch, “In the
mid-1930s the reformer Schatzsky
committed suicide. Professor
Pinkevich was arrested in the regime’s
mass purges of intellectuals and
died in a forced-labor camp.” While
anyone who has sat through a faculty
meeting can understand the impulse
to send academic gasbags to Siberia,
one wishes today’s progressives better
luck.
Today, progressive educators dress up
Third Edition Eye Magazine | 9
Photograph by AJARI / Flickr
10 | Eye Magazine Third Edition
their weak curriculum with happy-
talk about critical thinking and
interdisciplinary problem solving, but
the results prove Rousseau and Dewey
were wrong. Many parents now use
their wallets to get around dumbed-
down public education. In the U.S.,
there have always been private schools
for those with money or connections.
In Japan, families rely on juku (private
cram schools) to prepare their
children to enter elite institutions.
Unfortunately, this does not help the
vast majority of children who are
trapped in public schools that fail to
prepare students for anything beyond
low-level jobs. e result is a system
in which a few lucky students receive
a high-quality liberal education, and
everyone else receives mush. In other
words, it produces precisely the kind
of statist society Bismarck had in
mind: clever shepherds tending a
pliant ock.
ere remains, however, the problem
of culture. Do Americans really
want to be herded by their betters?
If not, then perhaps schools using
more traditional methods may yet
prevail. ere are some hopeful
signs. At Georey Canada’s Harlem
Children’s Zone Promise Academy
charter schools (featured in Waiting
for Superman) students do daily
homework, drills, and other eective,
old-fashioned activities. Similarly,
students at traditional Catholic high
schools—many in inner cities—
are twice as likely as public school
students to graduate from college.
Japan poses a dierent challenge
to progressives. While top-down
decision-making is familiar to most
Japanese, radical change is not. After
all, Confucian and Zen Masters are
bywords for tradition. Finally, how
might Malaysia and Taiwan react to
progressive academic failures?
Elites have pushed progressive
education in America, and yutori
kyoiku in Japan, based on false
assumptions about children, learning,
and teaching. Under their leadership,
academic performance has collapsed
in the U.S. and will continue to
deteriorate in Japan unless these
practices are changed. Japan’s decline
in scholastic achievement followed
a course similar to the decline in
American academic performance
when progressive “reforms” were
enacted. Empowering experts over
the objections of parents and teachers,
reducing contents, and shortening
study time inevitably results in poorer
performance and a two-tiered system.
Prof. Craig Sower is a Professor
of English at Shujitsu University,
Okayama, Japan, where he
has taught writing and teacher-
education at graduate and
undergraduate levels since 1998.