1: A Historical Perspective of the Reading War: 1940s and 1990s Editions

English educator Lou LaBrant (Thomas, 2001) taught in public schools, for experimental schools, and at the college level over 65 years while also leaving behind a significant body of literacy scholarship from the 1920s into the late 1980s. Her career was nearly as impressive as her demanding attitude. Writing in 1931, for example, LaBrant announced: “The cause for my wrath is not new or single” (p. 245). Her “wrath” was aimed at the rise of the project method in English courses in the early decades of the 20th century.

LaBrant was a strong proponent of John Dewey’s brand of progressive education. Even in the early 20th century, however, Dewey’s philosophy and classroom practices were often misinterpreted—often oversimplified as a slogan, “learning by doing.” Much of the popular response to the project method can be traced not to Dewey but to William Heard Kilpatrick’s “The Project Method,” which was quite popular after it appeared in 1918. Kilpatrick, in fact, distorted Dewey’s version of projects: “As Kilpatrick redefined it, the project was now not simply a way of reorganizing the teaching of, say, science; it became, contrary to Dewey’s position, a substitute for science” (Kliebard, 2004, p. 141).