Our reading by Williamson M Evers of the Hoover Institution offered a modern critique of progressive education from a traditionalist or conservative viewpoint. In this post, I’d like to show how decades earlier, particularly in the years after the USSR launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, US educators had opened an urgent debate about confronting the USSR by assessing the virtues and expediencies of the two pedagogic methods we have studied: Didactic pedagogy vs Authentic pedagogy. They worried that national security would be impacted by which pedagogy was utilized in public education.

As graduate student Ben Ytarri recently pointed out in a University of Montana Scholars Works post, Cold War educators argued that US education was falling behind its Soviet counterpart and that the blame could be placed squarely on Dewey-inspired Authentic pedagogy which catered to the average rather than exceptional students. To these critics, this represented a symbolic retreat from capitalism in which education no longer espoused values of competition nor rewarded individual excellence.

https://scholarworks.umt.edu/gsrc/2021/sshum_oral/2/

This line of reasoning highlighted a socio-cultural analysis of Authentic pedagogy. By seeking to ignore difference through assimilation and catering to the average student interests and ability to learn, the US educational system was allegedly producing uncompetitive and even “socialistic” citizens, they reasoned.

In addition, there was also an implied intersubjective critique promoting the traditional idea that excellence is created by learning from experts, not by students learning from each other. In sum, they posited a position that could be called a moral economy: strong capitalist nations needed a capitalist-style pedagogy to ensure competitiveness in the binary struggle against Communism.

But John Dewey himself had provided intriguing arguments to the contrary half a century earlier in his book Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (1916). Dewey saw progressive education as a training ground or micro-version of participatory democracy. In doing so, he was discussing the Proprietary dimensions of authentic pedagogy – progressive education was not set up as an authoritarian regime of compliance that hampered individual, independent initiative but rather as a pluralistic, participatory democracy of sorts.

US Cold War educators picked up on this aspect of Dewey’s thought. By creating learning environments that encouraged student independence and critical thinking, Authentic pedagogy produced students impervious to Soviet propaganda and able to reason on their own about the superiority of the American political system. In reasoning this way, these educators were addressing how the pedagogic dimension of Authentic pedagogy (active learning, inquire-based learning) was related to its moral economy (education producing truly democratic citizens prepared to defend the nation from ideological attacks).

An interesting honors thesis written by Jennifer Chalmers (University of Maine) in 2014 provides analysis of how these debates were intermingled among various US English teachers of the period:

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1160&context=honors

The Soviet Union ultimately became the boogie man for the purely Didactic Pedagogic method as a kind of totalitarian style of education befitting its political system. In fact, it was thought to reflect the traditional Russian saying that extolled an authoritarian discursive and pedagogic technique: “Repetition is the mother of Learning.”

Many of the Cold War arguments cited above prefigure those in the later text “The Critique of Progressive Education” (1998) by Williamson M. Evers that we read for this course. The main difference is that Evers doesn’t tie his critique explicitly to a national imperative of education as a matter of national defense, technical excellence, productivity, dynamic economy, etc. But this moral economy of education likely is an unstated subtext of his critique of Authentic pedagogy.