The term progressive was engaged to distinguish this education from the traditional curricula of the 19th century, which was rooted in classical preparation for the early-industrial university and strongly differentiated by social class.
Christian Gotthilf Salzmann (1744–1811) was the founder of the Schnepfenthal institution, a school dedicated to new modes of education (derived heavily from the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau).
[5] Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel (1782–1852) was a student of Pestalozzi who laid the foundation for modern education based on the recognition that children have unique needs and capabilities.
In order to develop a child to lead to a consciousness of social responsibility, Herbart advocated that teachers utilize a methodology with five formal steps: "Using this structure a teacher prepared a topic of interest to the children, presented that topic, and questioned them inductively, so that they reached new knowledge based on what they had already known, looked back, and deductively summed up the lesson's achievements, then related them to moral precepts for daily living".
[7] John Melchior Bosco (1815–1888) was concerned about the education of street children who had left their villages to find work in the rapidly industrialized city of Turin, Italy.
He called it an 'Oratory' where they could play, learn, share friendships, express themselves, develop their creative talents and pick up skills for gainful self-employment.
With those who had found work, he set up a mutual-fund society (an early version of the Grameen Bank) to teach them the benefits of saving and self-reliance.
The principles underlying his educational method that won over the hearts and minds of thousands of youth who flocked to his oratory were: 'be reasonable', 'be kind', 'believe' and 'be generous in service'.
[12] The American teacher Helen Parkhurst (1886–1973) developed the Dalton Plan at the beginning of the twentieth century with the goal of reforming the then current pedagogy and classroom management.
During her first experiment, which she implemented in a small elementary school as a young teacher in 1904, she noticed that when students are given freedom for self-direction and self-pacing and to help one another, their motivation increases considerably and they learn more.
In the same year, to test his ideas, he gathered 21 boys of mixed social backgrounds and held a week-long camp in August on Brownsea Island in England.
[27][28][29] The focus of progressive pedagogies on fostering 21st-century skills may also explain why these schools maintain their appeal, particularly among a segment of highly-educated, middle-class parents.
[30] Hermann Lietz founded three Landerziehungsheime (country boarding schools) in 1904 based on Reddie's model for boys of different ages.
[31] Edith and Paul Geheeb founded Odenwaldschule in Heppenheim in the Odenwald in 1910 using their concept of progressive education, which integrated the work of the head and hand.
[34] The Quaker school run in Ballitore, Co Kildare in the 18th century had students from as far away as Bordeaux (where there was a substantial Irish émigré population), the Caribbean and Norway.
In Sweden, an early proponent of progressive education was Alva Myrdal, who with her husband Gunnar co-wrote Kris i befolkningsfrågan (1934), a most influential program for the social-democratic hegemony (1932–1976) popularly known as "Folkhemmet".
[4] The most famous early practitioner of progressive education was Francis Parker; its best-known spokesperson was the philosopher John Dewey.
In 1875 Francis Parker became superintendent of schools in Quincy, Massachusetts, after spending two years in Germany studying emerging educational trends on the continent.
He replaced the traditional curriculum with integrated learning units based on core themes related to the knowledge of different disciplines.
In 1894 Parker's Talks on Pedagogics, which drew heavily on the thinking of Fröbel, Pestalozzi and Herbart, became one of the first American writings on education to gain international fame.
Moving away from an early interest in Hegel, Dewey proceeded to reject all forms of dualism and dichotomy in favor of a philosophy of experience as a series of unified wholes in which everything can be ultimately related.
The Lincoln School built its curriculum around "units of work" that reorganized traditional subject matter into forms embracing the development of children and the changing needs of adult life.
Each of the units called for widely diverse student activities, and each sought to deal in depth with some critical aspect of contemporary civilization.
As varying interpretations and practices made evaluation of progressive reforms more difficult to assess, critics began to propose alternative approaches.
The launching of Sputnik in 1957 at the height of the Cold War gave rise to a number of intellectually competitive approaches to disciplinary knowledge, such as BSCS biology PSSC physics, led by university professors such as Jerome Bruner and Jerrold Zacharias.
For example, the work of Zacharias and Bruner was based in the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget and incorporated many of Dewey's ideas of experiential education.
Bruner's analysis of developmental psychology became the core of a pedagogical movement known as constructivism, which argues that the child is an active participant in making meaning and must be engaged in the progress of education for learning to be effective.
At the same time the influx of federal funding also gave rise to demands for accountability and the behavioral objectives approach of Robert F. Mager and others foreshadowed the No Child Left Behind Act passed in 2002.
The Open Classroom movement, led by Herb Kohl and George Dennison, recalled many of Parker's child centered reforms.
He expanded Santiniketan, which is a small town near Bolpur in the Birbhum district of West Bengal, India, approximately 160 km north of Kolkata.