“The Project Method”: Child-Centeredness in Progressive Education

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4954/

In the early 20th century, progressive education reformers promoted a pedagogy that emphasized flexible, critical thinking and looked to schools for the political and social regeneration of the nation. The founding of the Progressive Education Association (PEA) in 1919 accompanied the growing prestige of leading educational theorists at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Increasingly, however, the movement became preoccupied with methodology and, specifically, with the controversial “child-centered” approach, later criticized by both radicals and conservatives. Imbued with Freudianism and child psychology, the child-centered method asked teachers to position each child at the center of the learning process by focusing activities around the interests of the pupil.

William H. Kilpatrick, a professor at Teachers College, outlined the theory of “wholehearted purposeful activity” by a child as the pinnacle of postwar progressive education in the following, widely-read essay, initially published in the Teachers College Record in 1918.