Progressive education was an important innovation to the schools and overall education of children through elementary and high school.

In the first part of Robert M. Stamp’s article of progressive schooling, the elementary school is discussed through progressive lenses. This article was helpful in connecting a personal experience of schooling at this time, to the knowledge of explanatory articles about progressive schooling. The shift of curriculum and how schools ran is an interesting part of history to study because schooling in the beginning was all about getting the children to school instead of work. Now having the schools more focused on what education was best for the students is compelling in terms of the similarities and differences to schooling now. This article adds to the historiography of this topic because the personal experience allows for readers to have a better idea of what it would be like to have gone through the progressive transition as well as the transition from elementary school to high school simultaneously. Stamp highlights the idea that classrooms in the younger grades were more interactive and the teachers had more freedom in how they presented the curriculum opposed to how it is presented in high schools. The connection this article has to the course and other readings we have done is that females were seen in the elementary schools as they were less likely to disciplinary.

In the second article of Robert M. Stamp on progressive education, high school education was discussed and how through the shift in education there was a more specialized curriculum for both students who were going to continue in education and those who were going to go right into the workforce. These two streams of education gave the students a choice of whether they were going to continue their studied opposed to going into the workforce. This specialized curriculum also helped with the dropout rate. Disciplinary actions and having male teachers in the high school opposed to females, who were considered unable to discipline, can be connected to previous articles we have read in this course. This article adds to the greater historiography of this topic because it allows adds an experience focused view of progressive education and shows the shift through a student’s eyes.

In Amy von Heyking “Selling Progressive Education to Albertans, 1935-1953”, the theme of progressive education looked at is the idea to “renew society through schools.”1 This idea shows prominent through how the curriculum was more geared towards allowing the children to be successful outside of the school, but also learning what was needed at school. Connecting this article to both of Robert M. Stamp’s articles works well because the experiences written about in both articles links to the main ideas expressed by Heyking. This article is important in the overall understanding of the topic because it outlines the purpose and the process of implementing this new progressive education. These ideas of having more discipline and more parent involvement in the new curriculum that linked to the new ideas being researched in child psychology, were crucial to what education looks like now.

All of these articles show importance of progressive education and what it tried to accomplish and how it was successful.

Bibliography

Heyking, Amy von. “Selling Progressive Education to Albertans, 1935-1953,” in Sara Burke and   Patrice Milewski (Eds.), Schooling in Transition: Readings in the Canadian History of  Education, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012: 340- 354.

Stamp, Robert M. “Growing Up Progressive? Part I: Going to Elementary   School in 1940s          Ontario.” Historical Studies in Education vol. 17, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 187-98.

Stamp, Robert M. “Growing Up Progressive? Part II : Going to High School in 1950s Ontario.”    Historical Studies in Education vol. 17, no. 2 (Fall 2005): 321-31.

[1] Amy von Heyking, “Selling Progressive Education to Albertans, 1935-1953,” in Sara Burke and Patrice Milewski (Eds.), Schooling in Transition: Readings in the Canadian History of Education, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012: 340