In Midwives of Progressive Education, Jeroen Staring explores the role of the New York city-based Bureau of Educational Experiments (BEE) in the birth of the well-known and influential American Progressive Education Association (PEA). As the title suggests, Staring’s thesis is that the PEA in part grew out of the activities and ideas of the BEE, and that the BEE members (all women) and their networks were instrumental in the formation of the PEA. This study adds to the historiography of Progressive Education in the USA in the early twentieth century. The Progressive Era was a significant period which changed the direction of education in America and other countries that drew on ideas from America, and has therefore attracted much critical attention – much of which has focused on the prominent male educators. Although Staring claims the history of experiential learning as his major interest, Midwives of Progressive Education is a welcome addition as feminist revisionist history.
Staring’s motivation for the book, outlined in his Foreword, was that the narrative of Progressive Education in America had, in the main, overlooked the contribution of a group of women who were highly educated, intellectually connected and politically active, and who were both educational and social reformists. For me, this resonates with other current scholarship which is recovering the stories of other groups of women from different areas of the English-speaking world at this time. Examples include Kay Whitehead’s investigation of the lives and work of graduates of the Adelaide Kindergarten College, that shows their activity in both progressive education and social reform (Whitehead, 2014); and Kerry Bethell’s exploration of the international networks formed by early New Zealand kindergarten teachers (Bethell, 2013). These and other studies highlight that change and innovation were created through networks of women rather than predominantly individual female leaders. Analysing such complex networks creates a greater challenge for writing history than focusing on single (male) historical figures, and Staring has risen well to the challenge.
The introduction sets Staring’s work in a modern context by outlining the 2005-2007 debate in the Netherlands regarding “New Learning”. He then draws parallels with American education reform of the early twentieth century with the aim of showing how historical analysis can inform contemporary policy debates. This aim is applicable beyond the USA, to the New Zealand and Australian contexts, with debates around the value of experiential education vs learning that can be tightly measured and recorded.
The main narrative is in four chapters. Chapter 1 outlines the educational and political context from 1890 to 1935 in America in general, and in New York City in particular. This covers many local education reform initiatives, which led to the formation of a nationwide education movement for the professionalisation of progressive educations – the PEA. The chapter also covers the first two decades of the PEA’s existence, which folded eventually in 1954. Staring convincingly argues here that Dewey’s Chicago Laboratory School from 1896 to 1904 was not the beginning of a nationwide movement, nor was it even very well-known at the time it operated. Rather it became famous retrospectively, when Dewey himself became famous and was associated with the PEA.
The next two chapters are case studies of two BEE members, Marietta Johnson and Caroline Pratt. Johnson founded Fairhope School of Organic Education in a “utopian community” in Alabama. As her school became well known, Johnson travelled extensively to lecture on her philosophy and pedagogy as a way of fundraising for the school, before taking a teaching role with the BEE in 1917. Caroline Pratt was an innovative manual and early childhood teacher, who designed the unit blocks which are widely used in New Zealand early childhood. She founded the Play School, which later became the City and Country Experimental School (see also Staring, 2013). As an aside, Pratt was a woman woodwork teacher at a girls school from 1894 to 1901. That would have been unusual then as it ran against conventional gender stereotypes, but more than a century later with feminism so much more advanced surely it would now be commonplace? Alas, not so in New Zealand at least, where there are few – if any – female woodwork teachers, and where some girls’ schools do not offer workshop subjects at all.
Chapter 4 draws the threads together to show how the women that formed the BEE had long histories of social activism and educational expertise, and were skilled at drawing on their networks to maintain independent funding (and therefore a welcome degree of autonomy) and mutual support. They were innovative and willing to experiment, learning from their failures as well as success; in short, they practised the experiential education that they preached. John Dewey was an honorary member of the BEE and became the “spokesman” for the group. As Staring says:
In spite of the mutually beneficial relationship which developed between progressive BEE women educators and Dewey, it seems as if the women needed a man’s voice to get ideas across. The women did not exclusively promote their ideas and practice as their own – but promoted as their spokesperson, a man, articulating their ideas. They made Dewey their champion, and he was happy to contribute. Dewey remained; the accomplishments of the Bureau progressive women educators went into oblivion (pp. 108-109).
An epilogue gives an update of the careers of Johnson and Pratt after 1919. The three page book summary (in English and Dutch) is useful, as are the detailed notes and the index. The signposting throughout the book is very thorough, verging on redundant repetition, but certainly aiding navigation through the myriad of activities in which the women were involved in. I enjoyed delving into the complex network of women reformers, and admiring their tenacity. Scholarship like this work is important because it brings to light these forgotten stories, and highlights a more complex narrative within the history of progressive education.
