Welcome to The Progressive Educator
EduSanity is no more.
Well, there’s more. But it’s different.
When Chris and I launched EduSanity in 2012 we were pretty angry about the course that public education was taking in the United States. In the three years since our launch we have written lots of posts that take on the forces of privatization that seek to profit off the education of our children.
We won’t be quitting that fight.
But things have changed somewhat. Where we once wanted to simply restore sanity to the discourse of public education in the United States, we now have broader goals. Rather than seeing our blog and related endeavors as a reaction to bad ideas, policies and sometimes people, we want to take our work in a more positive direction.
That doesn’t mean we won’t still fire up the righteous indignation when it is warranted.
As avowed progressive educators, we decided that renaming this site “The Progressive Educator” would be a proper reflection of what we want to do.
It’s important to start off on that path by clarifying what “progressive” means in this context. While we tend to think of “progressive” in political terms – thereby associating the word with others like “liberal” or “democrat” – that’s not how we are using it here.
Instead, we like to think of progressive education in the same fashion as the father of progressive education, John Dewey, did over a hundred years ago. I won’t bog down this post with citations or quotes, but rather with a simple distillation of the theory in terms the average reader can appreciate.
Dewey knew that in order for education to maximize its value to the human experience, it needed to be in a state of constant change – or more specifically – progress. Progressive educators are those who recognize that education is experience, that our educational experiences must change as our life experiences change, and that educational Welcome to The Progressive Educator | The Progressive Educator: