In this intellectual history, the author traces the refashioning, fall, and re-emergence of the reception of Dewey's work between 1960 and 1988 by student-centred radicals, de-schooling advocates, neo-Marxists, critical educators, and feminist pedagogues--scholars collectively known as the New Left. New Left scholars rejected the assimilationist,…

Background/Context: Historical studies of this volatile period in educational history (1960-2003 tend to focus on educational policy and/or curriculum, but rarely address changes in learning theory. Numerous historical studies have traced how psychologists, psychometricians, policymakers, and social scientists have dismissed the intellectual…

This article offers a critical review of the literature on how race played into the historical development of pedagogical progressivism in the late-19th and early-20th-century United States. While many historians have focused on the overt/covert racism inherent in much of progressive pedagogy as espoused by White educators, others have highlighted…

Background/Context: Over the last century, perhaps no school in American history has been studied more than John Dewey's Laboratory School at the University of Chicago (1896-1904). Scholars have published dozens of articles, books, essays, and assessments of a school that existed for only seven and a half years. Purpose/Objective/Research…

In this historical study, the author traces the contents of classroom materials and methods textbooks published between 1916 and 1966 that endorsed the discussion and deliberation of social issues to demonstrate how these materials consistently evaded racial justice as a social issue. As a result, the materials designed to inspire classroom…

This historical study explores how educators in the United States responded to the rise of fascism between the World Wars. By considering and then ultimately rejecting the fascist approach to education and philosophy, American educators defined democratic education in contrast to fascist/totalitarian approaches to education by rejecting…

In recent years, researchers have questioned the legitimacy of the so-called myth of learning styles and expressed confusion about exactly when and why the idea first emerged. This historical study traces the origin and emergence of the learning style idea. The author argues that the learning style idea originated in the 1960s as part of a broader…

In this historical study, the author reexamines the relationship and role of social efficiency and scientific curriculum making in the early years of the social studies (1916-1929). The author argues that historians have applied the term "social efficiency" too bluntly to label and ultimately dismiss a variety of educational reformers in…

In this historical study, the author offers a reading of Dewey's "Democracy and Education" in the context of the two other books Dewey published the year before, German "Philosophy and Politics" and his coauthored "Schools of To-morrow." Having published three books in two years, "Democracy and Education"…

A century ago, John Dewey and his daughter Evelyn published "Schools of To-morrow" to nearly universal acclaim. However, over the course of the 20th century, critics of Dewey have drawn upon "Schools of To-morrow" to accuse him of being an uncritical disciple of French philosopher, Jean Rousseau, of being opposed to the…

Child-centered pedagogy is at the ideological core of progressive education. The simple idea that the child rather than the teacher or textbook should be the major focus of the classroom is, perhaps, the single most enduring educational idea of the era. In this historical study, the author argues that child-centered education emerged directly from…

In this historical study, the author traces the evolution of Dewey's vision for a democratic curriculum. Prior to 1916, Dewey was a linear historicist, meaning that he conceptualized culture as moving linearly through three distinct stages--savagery, barbarianism, civilization--that corresponded with stages of child development. Dewey's suggested…

In the historiography on curriculum reform during the progressive era, one interpretive lens has dominated the study of 20th-century reform for more than 40 years: the idea of the "social efficiency" doctrine. In this historiographical essay, the authors briefly trace the rise of social efficiency as an idea in curriculum history, identify the…

In this historical study the author argues that the most influential pre-World War I educational theorists subscribed to different forms of the recapitulation theory that conceptualized non-White cultures as childlike, prior steps toward the more advanced, industrialized West. The author demonstrates how the pedagogies of William Torrey Harris,…

Despite the vast literature on Dewey and his laboratory school, most scholars have failed to contextualize Dewey's pedagogical ideas in the intellectual currents of the period, particularly the historicist concept of social development known as recapitulation and/or correspondence theory. In this article, the author explores how and why history…