How Progressive Education Gets It Wrong

Matthew Hill

ET

Evers, W. M. (1998).  How Progressive education gets it wrong.  Website.  Retrieved Nov. 1, 2016, from http://www.hoover.org/research/how-progressive-education-gets-it-wrong.

In this excerpt from a larger book (adapted for website presentation) Williamson Evers discusses the educational reformer and theorist John Dewey and the Progressive educational movement in general from the perspective of the late 1990s.  Evers is a proponent of what he calls direct or explicit teaching and he details the original progressive movement of the early 20th century with more recent iterations of this philosophy and how he disagrees with some of the major tenets of Progressive education.

Evaluation: 

I find this article useful as a counterbalance to many of the theories we've been learning in class, a different perspective if you will.  I do not agree with everything Evers writes here (and as an excerpt from a longer book, it is obvious that we only get a portion of his argumentation), but one thing I definitely agree with his description of his role of the teacher: "Teacheras are expected to know more than the students and should seek to transmit that knowledge."  I also like his emphasis on the necessity of disciplines and the necessity to emphasize content as the focus of teaching beyond simply "learning how to learn," though this also has merit, in my opinion.