Article 1: Boyd Henry Bode, John Dewey, And The Problem Of Subject Matters

In The Transformation of the School, Lawrence A. Cremin contended that World War I marked an important turning point in progressive education. With the founding of the Progressive Education Association (PEA) in 1919, advocates had an organization that stood against what Cremin called pedagogical formalism. To illustrate this new approach, Cremin pointed to the ideas that Harold Rugg and Ann Shumaker expressed in The Child-Centered School. Cremin contrasted Rugg and Shumaker’s work to John and Evelyn Dewey’s Schools of Tomorrow, which also made observations about various progressive schools. On the one hand, writing in 1915, John and Evelyn Dewey found the importance of those schools to be their contributions to social transformation. On the other hand, writing in 1928, Rugg and Shumaker asserted that the contribution of the progressive schools was the increased opportunities they provided children to engage in creative self-expression (Cremin 1964, 179-183).