What Progressive Education Means to Me — by Chris Kruger To me, progressive education differs from traditional education in both the tiniest and yet the most profound way. Oftentimes, when discussing these differences, we focus on the scenery, differences in how a concept is presented or how it can feel to teach or learn in that discipline. These conversations are useful, but I think these conversations miss the point. Progressive education is far more transformative and radical than these surface differences. For traditional education, the goal is commodification. The commodification of knowledge, of experience, of children themselves. Children are not the purpose of traditional education, they are the product. The goal is to create standardized and graded (like an egg or a road) human machines, ready to be slotted into the larger economic apparatus that is industrialized capitalism. Students are assessed, sorted, and channeled into jobs designed to suck value from them like juice from an orange. In progressive education, there are neither students nor education. Not because students don’t matter, because they do. Not because content, material, curriculum, all of these things are unimportant; they are the core of all we do. No, in progressive education there are no students, just a student. A child that must be approached on their own terms, at their own pace, to their own ability. No general education exists to be doled out in standardized dosages to faceless students. Instead, progressive education recognizes those tools and ideas which help each individual student flourish. Progressive education is radical. It’s subversive. It’s a threat to the status quo and our best chance to make the world a better place. Progressive education is liberation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Chris Kruger is a teacher at Plato Academy in Des Plaines, Illinois. He has taught pre-kindergarten through middle school and loves all of them. He feels education is best approached holistically and that teaching students to ask the right question is more important than memorizing facts. Chris founded the Chicago Progressive Educator’s Forum to give teachers a place to connect and talk about education from a progressive perspective. Email Chris at mrkrugerchi@gmail.com
Spring 2020 The Journal of the Progressive Education Network PEN 13
