“The Progressive School should be ... a laboratory where new ideas if worthy meet encouragement; where tradition alone does not rule, but the best of the past is leavened with the discoveries of today, and the result is freely added to the sum of educational knowledge.
“(The Association is not committed, and never can be, to any particular method or system of education. In regard to such matters it is simply a medium through which improvements and developments worked out by various agencies can be presented to the public.)”
FOOTNOTES:
[1] It will, I hope, be clear that these remarks apply specifically to the grammar school teacher who does have to teach everything. The case is less desperate in the higher reaches of our school system.
[2] Except in Dutch New York, and in Massachusetts.
[3] “The one dominant feature of this labour movement [1824-1836] was the almost fanatical insistence upon the paramount importance of education. In political platforms, in resolutions of public meetings, and in the labour press, the statement is repeated over and over, that the fundamental demand of labour is for an adequate system of education....
“To this movement, more than to any other single cause, if not more than to all other causes combined, is due the common school system of the United States.... When the movement died out in 1835 to 1837 ... Horace Mann was leading the ‘educational revival,’ and the common school was an established institution in nearly every state.”—A. M. Simons: “Social Forces in American History.”
[4] In which some of these chapters originally appeared, and to which my thanks are due for the privilege of republication.