The school board meetings have been heated. A mother slapped a school board member; a father threatened to beat up another school board member.
There’s been controversy over psychological tests given to students that some parents say are intrusive. A school board member concurred, saying the tests are “sowing seeds of doubt” in children’s minds.
“I think,” the school board member said, “The questions asked would cause children to doubt God, democracy, and individual enterprise.”
Some mothers called a local newspaper to object to test questions that would give students wrong ideas about sex.
Other parents defended application of progressive ideas in the school district, ideas which included the design of one of the district’s grade schools.
The school, designed by the district superintendent in conjunction with parents’ meetings, is described as a “fishbowl” design featuring lots of glass on a one-story spread-out building.
Teachers are not at desks in the school, since desks are seen as barriers to interacting with students. Instead, teachers wander about the classroom, consulting with the students. There are no report cards; rather, student progress is discussed at parent-teacher conferences.
Traditionalists have objected to the lack of teaching of the basics – reading, composition and mathematics. They are concerned about introduction of too many frills and about a lack of discipline in the school.
The school principal and the school superintendent deny these claims. “We teach them by living, by contact with people, by their knowing the reason for what they are asked to learn, instead of the old, blind method,” said the principal.
A school board member, in touring the school, noted that bathrooms were not labeled for boys or girls and that both sexes were sharing the same bathrooms. That was denied by the principal and the school superintendent, although the bathroom doors had not been labeled.
To avoid further criticism, the school decided to label the doors. Aligning with the “functional” form of education, students from the second grade upward were charged with developing their own labels, giving them an opportunity to practice spelling.
Residents near the school are reported to be 100 percent behind the new methods; objections apparently come from elsewhere in the district where there has been controversy at other schools. However, some 600 local parents want the school to be annexed into another school district.
So where is this school district, and what’s the name of the school designed by progressive educational theory?
Actually, a better question is when was this? Because, given what we’ve recently seen in some school districts, it demonstrates there’s nothing new under the sun.
Most of these accounts are from just about 70 years ago, in the last week of January, 1952, as reported in The Detroit Free Press. They came from the Ferndale School District, serving the Detroit suburbs of Ferndale, Royal Oak Township, Pleasant Ridge, and part of Oak Park.
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The progressively-designed school was the Andrew Jackson School of Oak Park. I grew up 100 yards from it and it’s where I attended kindergarten.
In recent days, Jackson School has been on my mind. I learned its building will be torn down at the end of this school year. A new kindergarten-through-second grade school will replace The Center for Advanced Studies and the Arts currently on the site.
Loss of that childhood landmark and the school playground that friends and I for years shared as a hangout prompted me to take a nostalgic journey – reviewing old newspaper accounts of Jackson School.
And I was amazed to find controversies similar to those of today – the battle between traditional and progressive education. Although, in reading a 1959 newspaper account entitled “A Day in a Progressive Classroom,” I’d say there was more foundational learning going on then than in the contemporary nonsense of educational theory and practice.
Having spent some 25 years teaching – elementary school and high school through university undergraduate and graduate programs – I’ve had no use for educational theory. The fact we have remedial classes in college proves my point, although for me, communication theory and cognitive psychology have been useful.
And the battle over how schools operate has been going on a long time. There’s nothing new under the sun. Yet, I wonder what the long-passed Greatest Generation of the 1950s would think of today’s educational shiny objects like transgenderism; Critical Race Theory, and Soviet-flavored concepts of diversity, inclusion, and equity.
The progressive among them might have recoiled at such things. But so are some parents today in what are solidly liberal school districts.
There’s nothing new under the sun.
Retired business professor Mike Landry, Ph.D., has been a journalist, broadcaster, and church pastor. Living in Northwest Arkansas, he writes on current events and history and is a commentary writer for The Western Journal.
