Complete Coverage

Progressives: The 1950s and the 1960s

Excerpts

Educational Wastelands: The Retreat From Learning in Our Public Schools 1953 / by Arthur Bestor (1908-1994), a professor of history at the University of Illinois. Reprinted with permission from University of Illinois Press .

The economic, political, and spiritual health of a democratic state depends upon how successfully its educational system keeps pace with the increasingly heavy intellectual demands of modern life. Our civilization requires of every man and woman a variety of complex skills which rest upon the ability to read, write, and calculate, and upon sound knowledge of science, history, economics, philosophy, and other fundamental disciplines. These forms of knowledge are not a mere preparation for more advanced study. They are invaluable in their own right. The student bound for college must have them, of course. But so must the high school student who does not intend to enter college. Indeed, his is the graver loss if the high school fails to give adequate training in these fundamental ways of thinking, for he can scarcely hope to acquire thereafter the intellectual skills of which he has been defrauded. ...

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. Regressive education is the direct consequence of the fact that public school educationists have severed all real connection with the great world of science and learning.