Progressive Education

Existing Predominant Theory in Public Schools vs. Theories Used in Alternative Education

Currently, public schools operate predominantly on an entirely different educational philosophy system than free or alternative schools. Teachers employed by public schools tend to function largely under an essentialist philosophy. This philosophy dictates using more traditional settings and teaching styles to teach merely the basic skills to students. Only information considered pertinent to a student’s success in his or her academic career is taught in the classroom. Further supporting this philosophy, information is transmitted to students in the most efficient and quickest way – often in the appearance of lecture and notes format. In order to impart the maximum amount of what is considered by these teachers to be essential, efficient knowledge, order and discipline ought to be maintained (Gutek, 2011).

Free and alternative schools maintain vastly distinctive educational philosophies compared to their public school counterparts. Walking into an alternative school would yield extremely different observations than that of public schools. Teachers and students would act differently, classrooms would be set up in diverse ways, and classes would even sound different. These schools are guided by various sets of philosophies unique from essentialist theory. However, because this study focuses solely on one alternative school, only its educational philosophy will be utilized as the theoretical framework for this paper. As previously stated in the above discussion about Blue Mountain School in Floyd, the school follows a contemplative progressive educational philosophy. By declaring this as their educational philosophy, Blue Mountain ...

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...ssive education theory, this philosophy will become the theoretical framework for this study. As stated above from various sources, progressive education tends to be much more focused on the child rather than the teacher and uses real-world activities to teach students information. Classrooms in a progressive education-based school have the potential to be louder and messier than their public school counterparts with the teacher taking on the role of facilitator rather than dictator.

This chapter outlined the existing traditional public school’s philosophy compared to progressive education theory ascribed to by Blue Mountain School. Progressivism was defined using several references to gain a better understanding of the theory in general and in relation to this study. Chapter 3 will describe the qualitative methods used for data collection in this analysis.