“Learning by doing”: Schools and Schooling in Progressive Era Kentucky
In our current age of digital learning, it is easy to forget just how much American education has changed over the decades.
How many of us remember building a model volcano to understand how science works? Or quizzing ourselves with flashcards, trivia, and games? How many of us have tried learning a new language through an app? Or sought out other technologies to make learning “fun”? In doing so, we are all indebted to theories of progressive education and the revolutionary concept of “learning by doing.”
By today’s standards, schools and schooling at the turn of the twentieth century appear primitive, inefficient, and downright boring. But for those who lived one hundred years ago, especially in rural America, schooling could be a difficult and costly endeavor. The average school term in Kentucky ran for only six or seven months from July to December—a move designed to avoid unpredictable winter weather and to coincide with the slow season of agriculture, as many students were needed on family farms. In 1900, daily attendance in Kentucky public schools stood at only 36 percent. Students in rural areas nearly always lagged behind their urban counterparts, attending school only two-thirds as long as city children.1
Once students made their way to the classroom, usually a one-room schoolhouse in poor condition, they were typically schooled in the “3 R’s” of “reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic.” Some schools offered instruction in history, geography and civics, but most learning came through rote memorization. Grace Litteral, who attended schools in Floyd County, Kentucky, remembered reciting state capitals, bodies of water, and every bone in the human body.2
Yet, as America industrialized and became more urban and diverse in the early twentieth century, educational reformers argued that the U.S. also needed a modern education system. Recent advancements in technology and industry—combined with the influx of millions of immigrants—demanded a new education system for a new era.
Among the most influential reformers was John Dewey. A philosopher and psychologist, Dewey believed that curriculum should be relevant to students’ lives. A “one size fits all” approach to education, he argued, not only stifled student creativity: it failed to meet the needs of a diverse and rapidly changing society. After all, most students had little use for Latin, Greek, and other “classical” subjects. Instead, decisions about curriculum should be determined by the needs of students and their local community.
John Dewey Bust Portrait (1859–1952). Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.
Dewey’s ideas embodied the ethos of “progressive education,” a movement that overlapped with the larger social and political reforms of the Progressive Era. As the country transitioned from an agricultural society into an industrial one, Progressives sought to reform American life through various means. Some reformers wanted to rein in the excesses of industrial capitalism and urged the government to regulate industry. Others mobilized for political reforms that would make the United States more democratic, culminating in passage of the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Amendments, which respectively stipulated for the direct election of U.S. Senators and extended suffrage to women. Still other Progressives, especially women, pursued reforms in health, sanitation, and welfare through acts of “municipal housekeeping.”
Followers of progressive education both drew from and influenced the reforms of the larger Progressive Era. Above all, they believed that education could cure some of America’s worst social ills and promote a more equal society. Progressive education was born out of the Progressive Era, yet it held influence for much of the twentieth century.
Dewey and other followers of the progressive education movement were especially interested in the school’s role in the community. Dewey wrote in 1900, for example, that schools should foster an “embryonic community life, active with types of occupations that reflect the life of the larger society.”3 Schools should therefore serve as more than places of learning. Rather, they should serve as multi-purpose spaces where students and their communities came together to live out the American democratic experiment.
Educational theorists, such as Dewey, not only questioned WHAT students learned, but HOW they learned. Rote memorization and passive learning, reformers argued, were old-fashioned and needed replacing by experiential learning. In response, a range of new products flooded the market to help students “learn by doing.” Among them was the Chautauqua Combination Drawing Board and Writing Desk. Named for the Chautauqua Movement, a social and cultural initiative that swept America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the desk embodied the larger idea that education should extend beyond formal schooling spaces.
Designed for home use, the Chautauqua Desk combined aspects of traditionalism with progressive education. For instance, students could improve their penmanship on the writing surface, while a series of panels allowed them to practice the alphabet, basic arithmetic, and other formal skills.
Other aspects of the desk, however, encouraged students to be more creative. A drawing board invited children to develop their artistic skills; it was portable, too, thus allowing students to learn anywhere and anytime. Other panels exposed students to science, history, and art by featuring illustrations of flowers, animals, and famous historical figures, such as George Washington. By explicitly mixing traditional education with theories of progressive education, the Chautauqua Desk invoked the spirit of the age—that learning could take place outside the formal classroom, and that work AND play could be seamlessly integrated into a child’s education.
Chautauqua Combination Drawing Board and Writing Desk, 1895. Call Num.: ephKAEE, Diana Korzenik Collection of Art Education Ephemera, The Huntington, San Marino, Calif.
The Kentucky Historical Society holds in its collection a Chautauqua Desk from 1913, which belonged to the Stephenson family of Pikeville. E. D. Stephenson, an attorney, judge, and state senator from Pikeville, purchased the desk for his daughter, Anne. In more remote areas like eastern Kentucky, where transportation could be a challenge, resources like the Chautauqua Desk gave students an alternative way of learning.
On its own, the unassuming desk seems a relic of a distant past, yet it tells a deeper story about this pivotal era in the history of American education. The questions that John Dewey and other educational reformers pondered more than one hundred years ago are still being debated. What should be taught? How should it be taught? What constitutes a well-rounded education? How should technology be used in the learning experience? They are old questions for a new age.
Coming next month:
Interested in a story with real fire power? Read about the odyssey of KHS’s Burgoyne artillery cannon in our next post.
Additional References:
Peter Gibbon, “John Dewey: Portrait of a Progressive Thinker,” National Endowment for the Humanities.
Tracy L. Steffes, School, Society, and State: A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890–1940 (University of Chicago Press, 2012).
NOTES
[1] William E. Ellis, A History of Education in Kentucky (University Press of Kentucky, 2011), 145–46.
[2] Grace Litteral, interview by Glenna Graves, June 14, 1988, Family and Gender in the Coal Community Oral History Project, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky, Lexington.
[3] John Dewey, The School and Society (University of Chicago Press, 1900), 27.
