Progressivism In Education Essay

Progressivism is the belief that education should focus on the whole child, rather than on the content or the teacher. This philosophy and its tenets are based on the idea that the child should be free to develop naturally and learning is based on experiences. This is to promote students to become better citizens, according to John Dewy one of progressivism key figures. Progressivist believe that coursework should be relevant to “real life”. It should be considered useful. Another main point in this philosophy is that the focus should be on how to learn and not what to learn. So progressivism is where the child is the center of gravity of the classroom, this means that instead of focusing on the teacher or the curriculum the focus should be on the individual child’s needs. So if a student is struggling with one subject, but the teacher wants to move on to a different topic then that teacher will have to make sure the student understands the first topic before he/she can move on. I really believe this philosophy to be one that I will draw a lot of what I do in the classroom from. I know I will use other philosophies of time because it would be hard to be a strict progressivist in every classroom because to focus on every child’s needs you would need a small class size and that is …show more content…
After reading the PowerPoint on progressivism and reading the attacks from the perennials and from progressivism I just feel that progressivism is more of what today’s society is about and for a child to get the best out of education then the teacher needs to teach what is relevant to society and to the student’s needs. This is best done with the progressivist philosophy because of the tenet to focus on the child’s needs and the whole child. It also focuses on how to learn rather than what to learn, which a student will need to know how to do in