New foundations
The three concerns that guided the development of 20th-century education were the child, science, and society. The foundations for this trilogy were laid by so-called progressive education movements supporting child-centred education, scientific-realist education, and social reconstruction.
Progressive education
The progressive education movement was part and parcel of a broader social and political reform called the Progressive movement, which dated to the last decades of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th. Elementary education had spread throughout the Western world, largely doing away with illiteracy and raising the level of social understanding. Yet, despite this progress, the schools had failed to keep pace with the tremendous social changes that had been going on.
Dissatisfaction with existing schools led several educational reformers who wished to put their ideas into practice to establish experimental schools during the last decade of the 19th century and in the early 20th century. The principal experimental schools in America until 1914 were the University of Chicago Laboratory School, founded in 1896 and directed by John Dewey; the Francis W. Parker School, founded in 1901 in Chicago; the School of Organic Education at Fairhope, Ala., founded by Marietta Johnson in ... (200 of 123,993 words)