Taproots for a New Century: Tapping the Best of Traditional and Progressive Education Each side of the progressivism-versus-traditionalism debate tries to advance its cause by ridiculing the other. Mr. Ackerman looks beyond the caricatures and finds valid ideas on both sides that can be synthesized into a new "10 commandments" of education. By David B. Ackerman

IN CALIFORNIA, a coalition of "mathematically correct" parents and university professors campaigns vigorously against progressive-style "fuzzy math" and demands the return of a no-nonsense, basic-skills curriculum. In Massachusetts, the state department of education hires a consultant from New South Wales to argue for the importance of learning science content, thus doing battle with the schools of education and think tanks closer to home and their fervently espoused gospel of hands-on or "process" science. With such a belligerence evident from coast to coast and with valid insights from one side in these "wars" canceling out those of the other, might it be time to call a truce and search for common ground?

These battles in math and science and in many other areas (e.g., history versus social studies, speaking versus grammar in foreign-language learning) are manifestations of a fundamental debate between progressive educators and traditionalists that has been going on for more than a century. While individual practitioners make pragmatic accommodations (a stiff dose of phonics alternating with fragrant whiffs of whole language), for the profession as a whole the progressivism-versus-traditionalism debate has reached a stalemate. Characteristically, even where one side seems to have the upper hand (for example, progressivism is dominant in most schools of education), the gospel is largely rejected elsewhere (for example, in most actual high schools).

It is easy to write off this debate as an all-too-predictable exercise in rhetorical wheel spinning, but to do so would be sad and foolish, for these two traditions represent the best we know about teaching and learning. They are the intertwined taproots of our professional outlook, the warp and woof of the fabric of beliefs that guide us when we walk into a classroom. In the best tradition of traditional education, we need to articulate the content of this debate, and in the best tradition of Deweyan progressivism, we need to work to derive useful insights. Our aim should be to break the philosophical logjam that has been obstructing us as a profession. But how can this be done?

While there can be no pat formula, there is a promising pathway, rooted in the intuition that we are dealing not with educational good and evil but with dual virtues that need to be boldly and imaginatively combined. The validity of this intuition would be demonstrated by the hybrid vigor of the synthesis that results. The problem is figuring out how to get to the point where points of view long at war can be recognized as essentially complementary. I see three steps as necessary for depolarizing the debate and achieving a unified outlook.

First, those who temperamentally or philosophically lean toward one side of the debate need to resist the temptation to claim the high ground by simply caricaturing the other side. Specifically, traditionalists need to stop ridiculing progressives as anti-intellectual bleeding hearts, and progressives need to stop deriding traditionalists as pedantic, insensitive crushers of freedom.

Second, we need to articulate the enduring and valid insights of both camps and engrave them on the two tablets of our new educational "10 commandments." And neither tablet is to be given mere lip service!

Third, we need to recognize and imagine educational practices in which all these "commandments" are alive and well, in which the actions inspired by traditionalism and those sparked by progressivism are orchestrated so as to produce classrooms and schools characterized philosophically by breadth of vision and functioning as learning communities that make us want to sing and shout.

To illustrate what I am suggesting, let me identify a double-barreled set of foundational principles -- two tablets with five commandments each -- and sketch an example or two of what school would look like if both the traditional and progressive ideas were powerfully, synergistically alive.

The Traditional Tablet

The traditionalist insists, rightly, that a developing mind deserves not intellectual junk food but the most nourishing repast we know how to serve. The traditionalist draws our attention to hierarchies of curricular importance and academic competence; the focus of instruction is on mastery of material that can ennoble a student rather than on concern for the frustration students may feel when their efforts fall short. A set of traditionalist commandments would include the following five.

1. Thou shalt teach that which is of deepest value. Not all topics and questions are equally worth pursuing. And, even though the idea of a canon fixed once and for all time is illusory, we must not duck the responsibility of choosing texts that will pass along to young people what Matthew Arnold famously described as "the best which has been thought and said in the world."

We obey this commandment not to show fealty to the past and certainly not to indulge in high-minded puffery but in order to be as respectful - and as educationally generous -- as possible to our students today. We therefore invite them to partake of a cornucopia of ideas, perspectives, and vicarious experiences that have the power to lift them beyond themselves, to spark a desire to live not a commonplace existence but one that has been, as Robert Maynard Hutchins said it, "transfigured and seen through the eyes of wisdom and genius." "Thinking skills" and "learning how to learn" may have their place in the overall curriculum, but they are hollow vehicles if they are not harnessed to the "good stuff" -- the novels and plays, poems and paintings, essays and sermons, and stories of mathematical and scientific discovery. These treasures, the best of the whole world's opus, must be internalized to become part of each student's sensibility and vision of life.

2. Thou shalt teach with rigor. The moment of temptation comes when our students -- out of ignorance, laziness, or immaturity - express unclear thought, as they inevitably will. The temptation will be to let it slide, but our duty is to criticize -- not heartlessly and certainly not disparagingly or compulsively, but with tactful insistence. The same high degree of plain-spoken rigor is, of course, to be applied to oneself as explicator of subtle or complex ideas and as respondent to students' questions. The motivation for rigor is not puritanical righteousness or dry-souled pedantry. The aim of rigor is joyous illumination, which is experienced by students when a powerful but initially blurry idea comes into luminous focus and subsequently helps open their minds to further enlightenment.

3. Thou shalt uphold standards of excellence. The same principle that requires rigor in classroom discourse manifests itself in a teacher's adherence to high standards in the evaluation of student work. While earnest effort ought to be admired, it must not be conflated with authentic achievement. Low grades may discourage a student or hurt his or her feelings, but inflated grades cheapen that same student's cultural inheritance by seeming to pass on precious intellectual goods at discount prices. The desire to encourage thus metamorphoses insidiously into acts of degradation.

4. Thou shalt not kill time. In evaluating alternative instructional methods, effectiveness -- not ideology -- ought to be the central criterion. And effectiveness cannot be gauged without considering the time required to achieve the results. Thus there is nothing intrinsically "bad" about a lecture or "good" about cooperative learning. The overriding question must always be: In the time available, which pedagogical pathway is likely to lead students to the biggest pot of educational gold?

Methods that require a considerable amount of time must be assessed not just in terms of their effectiveness in teaching a concept but also in light of the opportunity cost incurred when students do not learn whatever else they might have learned during the same time slot. The "depth versus breadth" argument simply cannot be decided on principle alone. Each teacher must decide between particular sets of tradeoffs, between small bundles of large nuggets and large bundles of small ones.

5. Remember the disciplines and keep them holy (even though they are partial). If there is such a coherent educational aim as "knowledge integration," then the road to holistic heaven is paved with disciplinary knowledge. And discipline-based knowledge is the firm foundation of any imagined ascent into the transdisciplinary firmament. The subject disciplines provide powerful, indispensable perspectives and tools of inquiry as well as intrinsically important knowledge about the nature of human beings and the world. Pursuing knowledge integration when the knowledge base is meager is always a fatuous undertaking. An inescapable test of the validity of "thematic" approaches to curriculum, whatever their potential to motivate and spark children's imagination, is whether the disciplinary ingredients in the interdisciplinary stew maintain enough of their own flavors to become robust parts of the students' mental apparatus.

The Progressive Tablet

The progressive educator insists, rightly, that adroitness in accommodating, both psychologically and intellectually, what the student brings to the classroom is at least as important as wise selection of the most sublime material. Each student embodies a unique sensibility formed by years of interaction between genetic endowment and life experience.

At a macro level, a student's life history affects the degree to which she sees what the teacher asks of her as being desirable, interesting, attainable, applicable to her present and future life, and worthy of strenuous effort. At a micro level, each element of the common curriculum is being assimilated within individual educational histories, resulting in classrooms characterized by multiple degrees of subject-matter mastery and a spectrum of optimal instructional levels or "zones of proximal development." Each student's mind has evolved along an idiosyncratic trajectory of learning; each student makes meaning for himself in the context of his personal history. These unique, evolving sensibilities must be cherished at least as much as the instructional content. The commandments that flow from these and related considerations might include the following five.

6. Remember that children are whole people, not deficient adults. Children have lives of their own, on a plane of existence more fundamental than that of the institutionalized functioning of the school. Children do not depend on teachers to be able to think, pose questions, investigate, or engage with aspects of life that interest them. Each child owns her own sense of truth and desire for meaning. The task of the school is to nurture positive traits and natural proclivities, while discouraging their opposites. While students' minds may be "blank slates" on a particular topic, students are always full-fledged subjects of their unfolding life experience. Children and adults differ in accountability for their actions, but they resemble one another in desiring to understand the world and in displaying ignorance when they do not know any better.

7. Thou shalt not try to make one standard fit all. While standards of excellence may be regarded as absolute, the performance standard for what can reasonably be expected of a particular learner at a particular time, in any given domain, may differ from that which is reasonable to expect of another learner, even one of the same age. In sports, the performances of the club pro and the average weekend golfer are benchmarked both against Tiger Woods (the best in the game) and against each player's personal best. We rightfully expect more of the club pro (and he does of himself) than we expect of the amateur. Scholastically, performance standards and expectations naturally differ for the math prodigy and the average weekday math student and, more subtly, from one math prodigy -- and even one "average math student" -- to the next. For, fundamentally, we teach individual young people and not categories of them.

8. Thou shalt not treat the mind of a child as though it were a receptacle. Classroom teaching would be a breeze if a lucid explanation were sufficient to bring about a solid grasp of the material -- if the teacher's knowledge could somehow be deposited into the students' minds in the way valuables can be deposited into a safe deposit box. In reality, the teacher's words alone amount to noise, not knowledge.

Mindful learning requires a mindful learner. Pearls of wisdom cannot adorn the life of the mind, nor can the next generation cash in these receivables from its inheritance, until their meaning has been extracted and understood. For students to achieve understanding, they need to do more than press the record button in class and subsequently play back the teacher's words. Students need to think about what they have heard or read. If they are successful in their efforts to learn from instruction, they will be able to paraphrase the material, draw inferences from it, and interweave it with other threads in a descriptive or explanatory tapestry. A lecture can be an effective method if students respond with acts of comprehension. If a student responds mindlessly, he will not understand the material. The extent to which the teacher or student is blamed is an ideological question, but, if the intention of the teacher is to educe understanding and that of the student is to learn, then the bottom line is that both have failed.

9. Honor what children bring to the text. This commandment does not mean endorsing or being obsequious about the beliefs and attitudes that students bring to the classroom. Rather, it means taking these beliefs and attitudes respectfully into account. The moral obligation for a teacher to do so can be derived from the rather traditional philosophical premise of "respect for persons." (See Commandment 6, above.) On a practical level, it is not wise to ignore the students' background knowledge because that knowledge may systematically distort the intended meanings of the teacher's words. Students do interpret new information in terms of what they already believe to be true. Conflicting claims will either be rejected as invalid or stored in a special compartment of statements that are true in school -- and false everywhere else. Why, except out of indolence or arrogance, should we ignore the relevant characteristics of the knowledge receivers and indulge in the myth that their minds are blank slates?

10. Thou shalt honor the student's search for holistic knowledge. Discipline-based learning is necessary, but it is not sufficient. It is true that a student can tune in to a wide range of intellectual wavelengths that emanate from the subject disciplines. And it is important to acknowledge that each subject discipline has the potential to contribute to a student's search for truth, beauty, goodness, meaning, refined pleasure, and self-realization. But a student is a unitary being whose sensibility does not change when the bell rings and it's time to change classes. At day's end, a student wants to know not what's true in science and what truths can be gleaned from literature. But, more comprehensively, she wants to know what's true; she desires to fulfill her potential not as a mathematical thinker or an artist, but as a person. She wants a belief system that includes the lessons learned in school and those learned through everyday living. It is narrow-minded and spiritually stingy to absolve the school from its responsibility to assist students in the elusive challenge of knowledge integration, for it is the school's job to help translate the cacophonous and fragmented disciplinary babel into a versatile and ultimately harmonious and coherent set of lenses on the world.

Take Two Tablets and Bring Them to School in the Morning

Imagine a set of schools in which all 10 of these commandments or basic principles of curriculum and instruction were robustly and accountably alive. While individual teachers and schools might tack a little to the right or left, the range of tenable variations would be limited by virtue of the strength of commitment to the opposite-pulling tablet. (Of course, in the school culture, it is not the rhetorical pose that matters but the pedagogical power; it is important to recognize, for example, that some "traditional" teachers communicate tremendous personal caring and some "progressive" teachers manifest steely rigor.) The phenotypes generated by the two-tablet genotype would thus range from, say, the best "Dewey schools" to the best versions of E. D. Hirsch's "schools we deserve." Dewy-eyed progressive schools and "back-to-basics" schools that revolve around rote drill and memorization would both be rejected as unworthy caricatures.

If this set of guiding principles (or some alternative containing compelling additions, deletions, or substitutions) is valid, it can be tested, at least at the level of thought experiment. The test would be to describe a school that has eliminated one of the principles or watered it down practically beyond recognition and then to assess whether or not the educational value of the resulting program would be significantly reduced. Less globally, dialogue with this decalogue can be used to inspire good programs to become even better -- to spark the creation of a science program, for example, in which hands-on investigation, superb teacher explication, and inspiring stories from the history of science are elegantly combined.

Framed more generally, the argument I am advancing here is that schools that try to impart sublime content while being largely inattentive to student individuality (and their converses) offer substantially less value than those that propel learners through a powerful synthesis of both sets of ideas. To use a biological metaphor, the argument is that the philosophical form of an outstanding school is akin to the double helix of DNA; both the progressive and the traditional strands intertwine, reinforcing and amplifying one another. These are the kinds of schools on which we ought to set our sights.

Let us imagine, then, school programs in which

• "active learning" is understood as mentally active and not something necessarily requiring hopping around the classroom;
• strong disciplinary pillars exist within a set of structures that foster knowledge integration;
• the value (and limitations) of both "depth" and "coverage" are understood, and a balance among the tradeoffs between scope and intensity has been artfully maintained;
• students are grouped by ability when unwillingness to do so would waste their time unconscionably and grouped heterogeneously when each participant has something of genuine value relative to the subject matter at hand to contribute to his classmates; and
• students are evaluated on the progress they have made toward achieving personal excellence, the standards for which have been derived from and point toward standards of absolute excellence.

Who would not want to teach or learn in such a school? Who would not want to send a child to such a school? Who but an utter ideologue would disparage a profession that, far and wide, produced schools that beautifully exemplified these 10 commandments?

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Last updated 2 January 2003
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