Way Out There in Winnetka: Progressive Education, 1941

Article by Andrew Ellison

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We in the classical education movement don’t spend much time studying the playbook of the Enemy, i.e. the Progressive Educationist Establishment (PEE). We much prefer to spend our days classically educating, telling children of Narnia and phonograms and Dostoyevsky and the expulsion of Tarquinius Superbus. We here at ClassicalEd Review do not pore over back issues of journals from Columbia Teachers College (motto: “Apostrophe-Free Since 1893”)—their present website lists no fewer than 96 separate journals under their editorship—nor do we scrutinize the odiously hackish and odiferously partisan¹ pronouncements of the NEA, which, while merely a labor union whose purpose is to advocate for anything and everything that reduces workload, guarantees employment, and increases pay for its members, likes to be thought of as the nation’s leading authority on K-12 education. We are sometimes troubled in our consciences because we own a paperback copy of John Dewey’s Democracy and Education that we purchased at remainder warehouse for $2 (we overpaid) and have never once cracked it open. Aside from our own dimly-remembered experiences of public elementary schooling, we cannot claim to have spent any meaningful time immersed in PEE.

What we have to say on the subject is second-hand, mostly derived from the works of seminal 20^th-century critics like the grand, old-world homme de lettres Jacques Barzun, the old-fashioned Virginia liberal E. D. Hirsch, the Brooklyn-via-Chicago Aristotelian Mortimer Adler, or the careful researcher and MIT professor James D. Koerner, whose The Miseducation of American Teachers (an out-of-print book we once snagged for $2, a real steal) made great waves when it first appeared in 1965 and demonstrated how little actual academic subject knowledge was being required of those taking education degrees in colleges and universities thoroughly permeated by PEE. Soaked in it, we might even say.

We, being of goodwill, and holding ourselves to some minimal standards of intellectual honesty, sometimes ask ourselves: Are we really being fair to the progressives? Are we straw-manning? Is their ideology as crack-brained, anti-intellectual, and frighteningly collectivist as we have heard?

Recently, we came across a pearl of a historical document, and we decided to see for ourselves. The artifact, from the September 1941 issue of The Rotarian magazine, is a pro- and contra- pair of articles on progressive education. Presenting the negative is a youngish Mortimer Adler, probably just starting to get royalty checks in his Hyde Park mailbox from the surprise success of How to Read a Book. The pro-progressive piece is written by one Carleton Washburne, Ed. D., then superintendent of schools in Winnetka, IL, which schools, we are told in the intro, have long been “leaders in progressive-education methods.” They were way out there on the cutting edge in Winnetka back in 1941.

(The same editorial intro above the article tells us that Dr. Washburne is “dynamic”, and also that he is a Rotarian, just to make sure that all the other Rotarians reading the magazine know, if the dynamism weren’t already a dead giveaway, that he is one of their own.)

Washburne begins his piece by criticizing the critics of his movement, claiming that they are “shadow boxing”, attacking a straw man version of progressive education, in part because some of the most prominent advocates of progressivism have themselves been mere theorists out of touch with actual practices in progressive schools. He assures us that, as he is a practitioner, he is grounded in the schools, and he will be describing the genuine article. As Edmund Husserl says: Zu den Sachen selbst!

This is more than good enough for us. Since we will have Washburne’s, a sober practitioner’s and not fanciful theorist’s, words on progressivism in the article that follows, we are confident that, in limiting ourselves to a close reading and critique of them, we will not be accused of shadow-boxing. We are on the high road of intellectual honesty here.

With a clarity and directness that belong to a bygone era of public discourse, and with writing skills he likely learned in a decidedly “traditional” school, Washburne comes right out at the beginning and states the “two basic tenets” of progressive education; he then spends the rest of the article describing practices that follow from them, also offering the reader a high-level account of the benefits of an education so constituted. The first one of the progressive tenets, he says, is “the education of the whole child”.

Now, no one could reasonably be in favor of educating the partial child. No one is out there boasting that “We educate between one-half and two-thirds of the child on any given day, sometimes more.” The most significant act of federal education law in our present century was not called Selected Parts of the Child Left Behind. The phrase “educating the whole child” has become a commonplace and, to a great extent, is now used by a great many classical educators to describe what they do. (This topic is itself worth looking into and writing about.) We shall have to figure out what exactly Dr. Washburne means by “educating the whole child”.

He says this:

Essentially this is a recognition of the fact, well known to psychologists, that learning is an integral process in which the child’s body, emotions, intellect, and life experiences all contribute. The progressive school, therefore, concerns itself with the child’s health and happiness—his physical well-being and his emotional and social adjustment…

This quite characteristic of progressive educationism in action: the busying of the school with all aspects of personal development and life. The school is to be the neighborhood health center, de-lousing clinic, and dispenser of all useful knowledge about diet, bathing, dental hygiene, infectious disease prevention, and, while he doesn’t say it but you can see where the movement is leading, instruction in the biology and mechanics of human sexuality. The progressive school will also be a center of psycho-therapeutic attention to children’s emotions as a primary object of concern, not just as part of the background of human existence; the very soft science of psychology (which psychology? Freudian? Jungian? Gestalt? Behavioralist?) will have the entire school as a laboratory in which teachers can carry out experiments in manipulating children to achieve states of “adjustment,” meaning value-neutral, peaceful coexistence and conformity, deemed to be desirable by…the progressive educationists, I suppose.

But there’s more—the progressive schools will also concern themselves with the child’s “happiness…with giving him opportunities for self-fulfillment—for finding his special talents and interests, for developing his initiative and originality”. Now, one might be inclined to think that these human goods could only be the fruits of many years of adult living, of trial and error, of discernment, a lot of good fortune, and rational self-mastery. Our desire for these goods may be tempered by the sober conviction that not all men are guaranteed to attain them. We might, like Aristotle, think of happiness in its fullest sense as something that can only be found in a complete life; like Solon said to Croesus of Lydia, we might hold it wise to call no man happy until he is dead. But Washburne is undaunted. His progressive schools promise happiness and fulfillment for all the children.

And there is much, much more that the progressive schools will do. The school will “(provide) the greatest possible variety of concrete experiences…children will go out (into the community) to gather firsthand information”. Unspecified “people from the community (will be) in the schools, sharing knowledge and experience.” The schools will “make continuous use of public libraries and newspapers.” They will “not infrequently work closely with the churches… likewise with the so-called character-building agencies such as the Scouts”. Teachers will “participate in the community council.” The schools will also teach parents through “classes in child study”, enlightening them with the latest findings of psychology about integral processes and the like; the teachers, although they are quite busy participating in the community council, will pay visits to parents, “often in their own homes.”

Dr. Washburne is not afraid to ask some tough questions about the breadth and boldness of the progressive school’s territorial claims: “Does this broadened scope diminish the responsibility of the home? Does it give the schools too heavy a responsibility?”

His answer to the first question essentially amounts to the progressive OmniSchool will definitely not encroach upon the territory of the family, and it’s a good thing that it will, because a lot of parents don’t have a clue. Washburne of Winnetka is not this forthright, but this must be what he is thinking when he writes that “Homes differ widely in what they do for their children” and “The community is a hodgepodge of good and bad influences.” But the light of the progressive school shines in the darkness, and the hodgepodge shall not overcome it, for the school “alone…has all the children for a large part of their waking lives”; the school alone can “systematically provide instruction for them under teachers trained for their jobs.” The public school teachers are trained experts, you see. They are not like the Sunday school teachers in the churches, “volunteer teachers for the most part untrained for their exceedingly complicated and difficult task”. Washburne does not explicitly say the same of parents, but since he has already told us that “homes differ widely in what they do for their children” and has cast a vision of schools organizing classes for parents and sending teachers into their homes to tell them what to do, it is easy to infer that he is also concerned about how all those unpaid volunteer mothers and fathers, for the most part untrained for their exceedingly complicated and difficult tasks, can possibly raise their children.

The Dynamic Doctor does not for one instant think that the progressive school’s involvement in all aspects of children’s lives—their churches, their communities, their families—is a necessary evil, a temporary measure that can be discontinued at some point in the future when homes and communities are no longer a hodgepodge of good and bad influences, when we have entered a utopian (lice-free) Golden Age of Psychology and Social Adjustment and Personal Fulfillment for All. No, there will be no withering away of the progressive school; the new golden age, already dawning upon us, is the era of the school-centered community: “The schools therefore become the coordinating and unifying center of all the educational elements in the community. What other organization can do this?” Families, churches, Scouts—all will revolve in elegant and stable orbits around the shining sun of the government-run progressive school, each satellite keeping to its own place as together they sing the Music of the Spheres in cosmic harmony.

Now, one might be wondering at this point: what about “academic” subjects? Readin’, ritin’, and ‘rithmetic? With the truly awesome societal responsibilities that the progressive school must take on, how in the world will the progressive educators attend to all the important academic subjects as well?

Washburn’s answer is “don’t worry about it.” He does place “intellectual development” among the things the school must attend to. And when all the health education and social adjustment is done, there will still be plenty of time for the student to learn all that is fit to learn about all kinds of academic subjects. Plenty of time, that is, provided the school restricts itself to

helping him to achieve mastery of the useful aspects of reading, writing, arithmetic, history, geography, science, and so on, in connection with their use, and at a time when his maturity and experience are sufficient to make the learning real.

The italicized in connection with their use is Dr. Washburne’s own emphasis, and he seems to be at pains to get it across, because just a line before, he already assured us that the progressive schools will only teach “the useful aspects” of traditional academic subjects.

This is the essence of the progressives’ view of liberal learning and traditional academic subjects: that they are mostly useless to the masses and should be severely reduced to only what has immediate utility “to life”. L’chaim. For traditional education “concentrated on certain phases of intellectual learning, often quite disjointed from the life of the child.” The problem with all that history, literature, higher mathematics, fine arts, theoretical science, and foreign languages is that “they have no meaning in the child’s experience”. It is hard to argue with that fact. Few are the children who arrive at school having real-life experience of, say, the late Byzantine Empire under their belts, or who have even seen a platypus or a pangolin and are thus ready to learn about them in school. That’s the trouble with these academic subjects—they’re replete with things kids have never even heard of before.

Speaking of foreign languages, Dr. Washburne, who has a doctorate in education, a degree which, unlike the Ph.D., nowhere and never requires competency in any foreign language, does not hesitate to deploy a linguistic analogy to make his point:

Let the reader…try to memorize the following set of syllables: “shim landi mo witchi waugon tonga shinga hong.” Now let him try to memorize the following: “It is interesting to read about progressive education.” Why is the second very easy and the first hard? The answer is, of course, that the second makes sense. It all hangs together. It is related to experience. Much of what is taught in the traditional school tends to be of the nature of “shim landi mo witchi waugon”—a group of meaningless, unrelated symbols to be memorized. Learning in the progressive school interrelates home, community, and school experiences. It hangs together. It makes sense.

This passage is highly illuminating of the way Dr. Washburne’s mind works. He makes no distinction between “meaningless to me” and “meaningless in itself”. Knowing no foreign languages, he does not understand the difference between “mo witchi waugon”, which is gibberish of his own invention, and S’il te plait, passe-moi mon revolver, which, while gibberish to the non-French-speaker, does in fact “hang together” and “make sense”. It is also “related to experience,” inasmuch as the French words correspond to commonly known things (and the shared human feeling of wanting to put someone out of his misery, but unsure exactly if it will be self or other). It is essentially intelligible, if not immediately so, and that quality is what makes it learnable, what makes any learning of any kind possible.

Washburne cannot see this. He cannot distinguish sense from nonsense. In his learned judgment, honed by years of doctorate-level education courses, “witchi waugon” is equally worthy of being taught to the schoolchild as the Peace of Westphalia: equally UNworthy, that is, because both are “useless” and “have no meaning in the child’s experience,” since the average child has neither settled the Thirty Years’ War nor honged the tonga shinga when the shim wongas were ever so landi under the witchi tree, nor will he need to.

If “intellectual learning” is to be limited to what is, in Washburne’s judgment, connected to life and useful, then there will be plenty of room in the school program for health, happiness, and the pursuit of social adjustment. LOADS of room. Goodbye, history. Adios, astronomy and anything more advanced than “consumer math”. Fare thee well, Shakespeare: don’t let the door of progress hit thee on thy way out of Winnetka.

There is still the second principal tenet of progressive education to consider, what Dr. Washburne calls “education for the democratic way of life.” And based upon what the author has already said about the uselessness of “intellectual learning”, it is easy to understand what he means when he says that educating for the democratic way amounts to “helping each child to a participative understanding of democracy” (emphasis mine). This is a unique kind of understanding discovered for the first time in human history by progressive educationists. We had long been under the impression that the word “understanding” always indicated an operation of the intellect, that it had something to do with knowing a thing as a whole, as a composition of its parts, and knowing the principles and causes of its selfhood.

But this is hidebound traditionalism which must yield to the up-to-date insights of the progressives. You thought understanding was all about KNOWING, did you? Well, get with it. You see, it is not through obscure academic knowledge of meaningless dates and places the child has never visited, nor learning a disjointed list of unfamiliar persons with strange names like “Josiah” and “Gouveneur” and “Swamp Fox”, nor through matters unconnected with their own experience, such as articles and amendments, writs of habeas corpus, and British soldiers sleeping in their beds, that the children shall be educated for the democratic way of life.

No: they need know nothing of their Constitutional Convention, their Bill of Rights, their Federalists and Anti-Federalists, their Electoral College, their unionists and secessionists and Whigs and Democratic-Republicans. It is not by intellect alone that the children shall be educated for citizenship. What we shall do in the schools is play pretend democracy. This is, after all, a school of real life.

The progressive schools themselves will be “organized as democratic communities…(this) means the active participation of children in planning”, even in the organization of the school day and in rule-making, e.g. “whether snowballing shall be limited to a certain section of the playground.” It is not through intellectual learning about the Constitution and American history that students will be prepared for citizenship—that would be “absurd”, for simply to fill their heads with knowledge in school and send them off into the world “is to suppose that a person just springs into full-fledged citizenship at age 21,” like Athena bursting out of Zeus’ head, without “practice in citizenship.” To illustrate the point, there is a single photograph printed in this article: two girls are behind a makeshift counter with a sign on it that says “BANK TELLER”, while clean-cut boys queue up, each holding a dummy paycheck, which they are presumably about to cash and go blow at the pretend saloon. “LEARNING by doing,” the caption states, telling us that, thanks to bold thought leaders like Carleton Washburne and others, “Winnetka students own and staff bank and other enterprises.”

If this all sounds a long way from the Founders’ assumption of an educated and responsible citizenry participating in politics, an “aristocracy of merit”, and from Aristotle’s description of the duties of the democratic citizen, namely, “to rule and be ruled in turn,” it certainly is. For the progressive educator, “democracy” has absolutely nothing to do with political self-government, with ordered liberty and its blessings, with the rule of law, the separation of powers, or republican checks and balances. The progressive educationist defines democracy very differently, and proudly, with nothing to hide:

Fundamentally democracy is a way of life in which each individual has the maximum possible self-fulfillment as a participating member of an interdependent society…the kind of coordinated living which gives as much independence to the individual as possible, combined with responsibility for the well-being of all.

…patriotism, citizenship, and character are all combined in a genuine social consciousness, in an identification of one’s own well-being with that of one’s fellows.

Get that? Democracy is not a form of government. It is not a legal or political structure. It is a form of “coordinated living,” not characterized by liberty or freedom, but by “genuine social consciousness” and a sense of “responsibility for the well-being of all.” And now we know what kind of “social adjustment” Washburne was speaking of earlier: the individual is to be shaped into a part of the collective. He speaks of “self-discipline…the discipline of democracy”, but what he means is not the classical restraining of the individual passions and appetites through reason and will, but something ominous. What the progressive calls self-discipline is in essence obedience to those in charge:

(the progressive teacher) does a far better job of educating when she guides children to see the values of what may be proposed for them…We obey the traffic officer…and obey those above us in authority in our jobs. But the worker in field, factory, or office who only does what he is told under the eye of the boss is not worth his salt. It is toward self-discipline that progressive education is primarily directed.

Democracy, you see, is not about freedom. It is the cheerful obedience of subjects who willingly do what those in authority command—er, “propose for them”. The progressive school, “the coordinating and unifying center” of the community, will make sure of it. “Free to obey” is the motto. Having been guided by their teachers to always “see the value of what is being proposed to them” by authority, these new citizens will be self-guiding, habitually and autonomously seeing the value of anything and everything proposed to them by the authorities in their lives: traffic cops and supervisors at work, for sure, but also public health officials, scoutmasters, psychologists, and school superintendents. The progressively-educated citizens will care nothing for national politics, remote from life and irrelevant to their everyday experiences of clocking in and out of work, getting and spending, performing bodily functions (in healthy bodies, thanks to the schools), and viewing their own good as identical with the good of the collective. Their schooling has taught them only “useful” things—so that they can be useful to the collective. They have learned nothing in school that will make them curious about the past, about places they haven’t visited, about cultures and ways of life different from their own, nothing at all about the real nuts-and-bolts of how their society is governed, nor about the principles according to which its workings demand to be judged, nothing that might make them disruptively wonder whether things now are entirely as they should be. They will work, consume, and send their children to progressive schools, and the cycle will continue.

Given this definition of democracy, it is curious that Dr. Washburne sets up as his educational and social nemesis “autocracy”, which he associates with “the German schools” and which, he says, is a form of life in which subjects obey only because they fear “penalty of some form of reprimand or punishment,” a fear which they learned in their non-progressive schools where rules are imposed, where the natural, harmless activities of “whispering and note-passing are forbidden,” where children are compelled to learn all kinds of things unrelated to their everyday lives, and where the future soldiers of the Kaiser’s Kriegsheer and Hitler’s Wehrmacht are trained to invade France, apparently only out of fear of reprimand or punishment.

The democratic and progressive schools are superior, you see, because they train the children to obey willingly.

The progressive says that education must pertain to life, but he has a cramped, myopic, leveled-down conception of “life” in which there is no place for the cultivation of the individual mind, for informed political deliberation, for curiosity, contemplation, courage, competition, or excellence. “Life” is doing your job, getting along well with others (“genuine social consciousness”), not worrying about what your far-away, unrelated-to-life government is doing, and cooperating with the progressive school at the center of your community and its employees knocking at the door of your home.

All education begins with an idea of the human person: its ends flow from that conception, and its means work towards those ends. If, for instance, we hold that the human person by nature desires to know, that it is a rational and language-using animal, that it can develop moral and intellectual virtue, that it is made not just for subsistence and labor but for civilized life, and if we hold that the highest form of human activity is the contemplation of eternal things, with direct participation in government and political rule a close second, then education should aim at the acquisition of knowledge, the development of the powers of reason and language, the pursuit of virtue, and preparation to live a life not just of labor but of leisure and cultivation; and it should have as its highest aims the preparation of persons for philosophy, theology, and leadership. If we hold that the purpose of the human being is not just to live, but to live well, in the formulation of Socrates, then education must aim at that good life. Its end is its beginning.

If we take Carleton Washburne’s account of the purpose of progressive education and trace it backwards, what conception of human nature do we find as its first principle? If the aims of progressive education are social and emotional adjustment of the individual to the collective, the acquisition of useful skills, and the habit of docile, voluntary obedience to authority, what is the idea of man standing at the origin of it all? What is the “good life” for such men? In the beginning, what was the Word in Winnetka? What was with Washburne in the beginning?

We think we know.

The Word was witchi waugon, and the tonga did not shinga hong it.

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Andrew Ellison has been a leader in the classical liberal education movement since 1997, having served as a high school teacher, headmaster, and charter school administrator for 26 years in two states before moving into higher education. He is a Senior Writer for Cana Academy and posts regularly about classical education and other topics on LinkedIn. Ellison is currently Vice President of Enrollment Management at the University of Dallas. He writes from Irving, Texas.

1. True story: when our mother, a public school teacher, once asked her building’s NEA rep why a teachers’ union should be officially pro-choice, why it needed an abortion position at all, she was told “Oh, hun, we all know some of these kids never should have been born!”