Progressive education

Progressive education is an educational movement that emphasizes active learning, student interests, experience, and democratic participation over rote instruction and rigid curricula.

Experiential learning: Learning through direct experience followed by reflection and application. Students learn by investigating situations and reflecting on what those experiences reveal.
John Dewey: An American philosopher and educator who argued that learning grows through experience and democratic social life. Dewey's writings gave progressive education one of its most influential philosophical foundations.
Traditional education: An approach to schooling centered on teacher direction, established subject matter, and structured instruction. It represents the teacher-led, content-first model progressive educators criticized.
Laboratory school: A school organized partly as a setting for developing and studying educational practices. Dewey's University of Chicago Laboratory School tested progressive ideas in a working school.
Common school: A publicly supported school intended to provide shared education to children across social groups. Progressive reformers inherited the common school's public mission while challenging its standardized routines.
Project-based learning: An instructional approach in which students investigate a sustained question or problem by creating a public product. Projects let students organize knowledge around meaningful problems rather than isolated drills.
Francis W. Parker: An American educator who promoted child-centered, activity-based teaching in the late nineteenth century. Parker helped establish practices later associated with progressive schools.
Rote learning: Memorization through repetition, often without emphasis on understanding or application. Progressive methods reject repetition as the main route to durable understanding.
Waldorf education: An educational approach founded by Rudolf Steiner that integrates arts, practical activity, and developmental stages. It offers a distinctive school model sharing progressive interest in development and active experience.
Hidden curriculum: The implicit lessons about norms, authority, and social roles conveyed through schooling's routines and structures. Progressive educators questioned how conventional classroom routines taught obedience alongside academic content.

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