ABSTRACT
Only in the past thirty years has American historical scholarship begun to question the social impact of various forms of education and schooling. For example, prior to the 1960s, Progressive Education, the most dramatic reform movement in American educational history, was seen as a liberal set of school reforms designed to change the way American children were taught. Most scholars described Progressivism as a response to the urbanization, industrialization, and immigration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Based on a rejection of old psychological theories and the traditional, classical curriculum with its tendency for rote memorization, Progressive Education embraced forms of teaching that focused on student interests and their relationship to the larger culture.. Educational historian Herbert Kliebard (1987) has written that the term "progressive education" was "not only vacuous, but mischievous" (p. xi). Nothing existed that deserved a single name; instead, several educational reform movements evolved in the early twentieth century, each with a different social vision and set of goals. To understand the Progressive Education movement, we must be aware of what particular form of progressive education we are observing. To understand vocational education, we must grasp its relationship to the various strands of the movement.
