With its strong focus on life skills, community, inclusivity, and learning through experience and play, the children in progressive schools are active participants in their own education and seem genuinely happier to learn in an environment in which they are respected and motivated by their personal passions, rather than pitted against each other. And yet, in the US, pilot programs have been successfully implemented to improve educational opportunity for the city’s most vulnerable students, producing outstanding results. In the words of John Dewey, psychologist, educational reformer and American founder of progressive education, “Education is not preparation for life education is life itself.”Īn increasingly popular choice for preschool and primary education, progressive education has been viewed in the past as the choice of well-off and alternative parents, or the parents of children with special needs. There is no homework or testing, and the development of the children’s social and emotional skills are seen as endemic to their growth as their academic skills. Indeed, it produces (and in some cases surpasses) the academic results of traditional education, whilst allowing its children to develop at their own pace in a more relaxed, multi-disciplinary learning environment. This approach to education includes all of the NSW Board of Studies Key Learning Areas and the requirements of the NQS, while loosening the traditional, rigid framework for learning. Progressive education offers a child-centred, project and community-based approach.
Progressive education offers children the opportunity to develop these important life skills from an early age.” Problem-solving, critical thinking, emotional resilience, and working as a member of a team, have all been identified as skills and dispositions needed in a changing world.
A progressive approach to learning is supported by close, authentic relationships within the school community. The starting point for learning often reflects the interests and passions of the children themselves. Kay Matthews, Nominated Supervisor and Pre-School Teacher at Kinma School in Terrey Hills says, “Every day, teachers in progressive schools are encouraging and supporting children of all ages to actively participate in and engage with the learning process. As opposed to traditional education, “progressive education” offers a child-centred, project and community-based approach to teaching, where its “teachers serve as guides rather than experts… and children are empowered to take charge of their learning.” (Aaron Cohen, The Advantages of Progressive Education).
Peter Groff from The Progressive Policy Institute. Not all children learn the same, so why should all education work the same way?Īs countries grow more diverse, “one size-fits-all educational models have become profoundly unfair to the majority of children,” says the Hon.
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