EDUCARE - University of South Africa

A survey and appraisal of progressive education in the USA 43
freedom of action and speech, of manners and lack of
manners. Schools farthest to the left ... carry the thing they
call freedom nearly to the point of anarchy.
It can thus be stated that the moral discipline of the young
generation suffered in these laissez-faire circumstances.
. Progressive educators were reacting against the use of books
as texts and a prescribed curriculum that isolated subject
from subject. Instead they advocated the so-called broad
fields curriculum where courses were organized around
study units or large centres of interests such as general
science and general mathematics. The de-emphasis by the
progressivists of the traditional curriculum and against the
traditional intellectualized forms of schooling left its mark on
American education. To ask teachers, especially teachers of
average endowments, to discard both their traditional
method of teaching and their subject matter in textbooks
could lead to only one result ± uninspired and uninformed
progressive teaching.
The anti-intellectualism of certain extremes of the PEA led
AE Bestor (1953:6) to warn the American people in his book,
Educational Wastelands published in 1953, against the legacy
of these progressivists:
If we take education seriously, we can no more afford to
gamble our safety upon inferior intellectual training in our
schools than upon inferior weapons in our armoury.
The dramatic launching of the Russian Sputnik I on 4 October
1957 shook the USA as leader of the Western world. The
authorities and general public in America were brought to
the realisation by this Sputnik shock that the country's best
brain power had been shamefully neglected up to that stage.
Various investigations were undertaken to find ways and
means of identifying deficiencies in the American education