There is no royal road into the new epoch, at the crossroads before which we now stand; there is only the hard way of education and especially of the building of consent among the people. In this process the school can and must provide leadership. Through the study of society and its problems the school must devote itself to the development of sensitive, clearheaded, fearless and confident young men and women who understand American life as it is actually lived and determined to make it a magnificent civilization for themselves and their children. To this end the life and program of the school must be designed directly from the culture of the people, not from a classics-intrenched curriculum. Now is the time to build not a subject-centered school but a truly society-centered as well as a child-centered one.
Harold Ordway Rugg was a leader of the progressive education movement in the United States. Progressive educators shared, in John Dewey’s words, belief in ‘the school as the primary and most effective interest of social progress’. Although Rugg’s educational thought fails to fit readily into any one strain of progressivism, he is chiefly remembered for his social reconstruction perspective and the controversy it engendered.
Rugg’s early life gave scant indication that he would become a world-renowned educator. Born in Massachusetts, Rugg studied civil engineering in college and briefly practised and taught it. Teaching awakened his curiosity about how people learn and he enrolled in the University of Illinois doctoral programme in education. In 1915 he received his Ph.D. and accepted a teaching position at the University of Chicago. At Chicago, Rugg worked with a faculty, most notably Charles Judd, who epitomized the ‘scientific’ strain of progressive education. Both Chicago and wartime testing work for the government in Washington, DC, meshed comfortably with Rugg’s methodical engineering ways.
During his time in Washington, however, Rugg became acquainted with artists and cultural critics who strongly influenced him. After a brief return to Chicago, in 1920 he moved to Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City. He became a professor and director of research for the Lincoln School, an experimental school affiliated with Teachers College. In New York he reinvigorated his wartime ties to creative thinkers in the bohemian neighbourhood of Greenwich Village. As Lawrence Cremin later put it, Rugg joined ‘the group of artists and literati that clustered around Alfred Stieglitz…drinking the heady wine against puritanism, Babbitry, and machine culture’.
Thus, without ever surrendering scientific method in education, Rugg added to it a profound commitment to individual creativity. His admiration for creative self-expression contrasted with the amplified commercialism—‘The chief business of the American people is business,’ President Coolidge pronounced—of America in the 1920s. In progressive education, commitment to individual creativity manifested itself as child-centred education. Rugg found much to admire in ‘activity’ aimed at developing each child’s creativity and intuition rather than marching the whole class through a prearranged standard curriculum. But he also questioned if child activity was too limited an educational goal. In the name of self-expression, Rugg wrote in 1928, child-centred educators ‘have tended to minimize the other, equally important goal of education: Tolerant understanding of themselves and of the outstanding characteristics of modern civilization.’
Rugg’s ambivalence about child-centred education is emblematic of why his brand of progressive education is not easily classified. A comparison of Rugg and Dewey is instructive on the idiosyncrasy of Rugg’s position. While Rugg and Dewey, for instance, shared misgivings about the neglect of substantive subject matter in child-centred methods, Rugg believed Dewey’s experimentalism ‘as the sole method of knowing’ was restrictive,5 devaluing the intuitive and imaginative modes utilized by artists. While Dewey and Rugg agreed that the school should be an agency of social reform, Dewey had reservations about social reconstruction. Dewey doubted the school by itself could, as Rugg’s fellow social reconstructionist George Counts famously put it, ‘build a new social order’.6 Moreover, the overtones of indoctrination in social reconstruction offended Dewey’s sense of intellectual freedom. Nonetheless, when censors attacked Rugg, the characteristically principled Dewey sprang to Rugg’s defence.
Like many other progressive educators, Rugg evinced great concern for the relevance of popular schooling in an industrial society. Unlike many other progressive educators, we do not have to guess what Rugg’s educational theory might look like in practice. During the interwar decades, Rugg developed his ideas into an instructional programme. Rugg saw an urgent need for a programme centred on the rise and consequences of industrial society: that is, a programme based on the demands of modern living.
Rugg declared existing school programmes hopelessly ill-equipped for the task before them: ‘nothing short of genius on the part of a student could create an ordered understanding of modern life from such a compartmentalized arrangement of materials’.8 Rugg’s ideal school programme incorporated the breadth of his educational vision including special attention to ‘body education’ and ‘creative work’. Mathematics ‘and other techniques’ (what, today, would be called ‘skills’) were the only parts of the curriculum not organized in the form of projects or units-of-study.
The true test of Rugg’s ideas, however, is his experimentation and programme development in the social studies (i.e., history, geography, civics, economics, and related subjects). Here Rugg’s scientific approach to curriculum development and belief in ‘the new social science’ coincided, resulting in his most remarkable achievement: an integrated educational programme focused on the problems of modern living. Rugg’s impatience with ‘armchair’ (versus ‘scientific’) curriculum making convinced him that the otherwise healthy reaction against a dusty, prespecified curriculum had led progressive educators to unrealistic expectations of what could be accomplished by spontaneous curriculum making in the classroom. ‘The inevitable result of trying to carry out these precepts with a broad curriculum and thirty to fifty young people’, Rugg lamented, ‘has been educational chaos.’10 Rugg was convinced that a defensible programme which would actually be implemented must be planned in advanced (with, of course, due regard for adaptation to special circumstances by users). Developing, field-testing, and refining such a programme in the social studies constituted his major activity in the 1920s and 1930s.
Both friends and foes have recognized that Rugg’s carefully crafted programme is an uncommon instantiation of what a progressive conception of curriculum can look like in practice. Rather than traditional subjects such as history and geography, Rugg’s materials were built on ‘understanding units’ that dealt with current problems such as the corporate economy, agricultural depression, unequal distribution of wealth, the need for economic planning, intercultural relations and international cooperation. Full attention was given the resources needed to implement the programme’s goals and the sequencing, planned repetition and variety of learning activities necessary for optimal learning. Rugg wished youngsters to learn concepts and generalizations rather than the disconnected factual information he saw as the outcome of traditional methods and materials. For example, in the study of civilizations outside the United States he selected nations representative of particular salient features of the modern world rather than become consumed in a superficial, fact-dominated coverage of more nations than youngsters could make sense of.
Arguably Rugg’s very success was, eventually, his downfall. His first materials were for the junior high school, where no other nationally available materials existed for this new set of courses.11 From 1929 to 1939 over 1.3 million copies of Rugg’s textbooks were sold to over four thousand school districts across the United States.12 Although more liberal than radical in tone, Rugg’s materials fitted comfortably with the ideological upheavals of Depression America, especially the spirit of the New Deal. Moreover, evaluations suggested that learning outcomes from Rugg’s materials in traditional subjects such as history, geography and civics compared favourably with subject-centred methods.
Even in the early 1930s some of Rugg’s books were altered because elements of them were considered too radical. By the late 1930s public attacks began on the books. Business groups and self-appointed ‘patriotic’ societies charged that Rugg’s ideas were anti-capitalist and subversive of American traditions and the existing social order. By the beginning of the 1940s, the attacks increased and within several years Rugg’s books were removed from most districts and ceased publication. In retrospect, the demonstrated effectiveness of Rugg’s brand of progressive education may have made it all the more threatening to conservatives and reactionaries. Although flexible to how his view of modern living was conveyed, Rugg was convinced it was an accurate distillation of ‘frontier’ thinking and in time took for granted that educators need to ‘boldly…accept the clear, self-stated truth’14 derived from these clearly liberal-leaning thinkers.
Rugg responded vigorously to the attacks on his textbooks’ focus on modern problems. The problem method, he objected, ‘does not imply, as the self-appointed censors say, that we propose a ‘‘plan for a new social order,” with which to “indoctrinate American youth”.’ Rugg enjoined that ‘young people…must confront the alternatives set out clearly before them. How else can human beings practice decision making than by confronting issues?’15 Nonetheless, the attacks proved decisive in the growing conservatism of the 1940s.
Although Rugg was never to be so influential again, he remained an active scholar—even extending his work to explicit treatment of teacher education and imagination—until his death. Moreover, although beyond the scope of this essay on Rugg’s educational thought, Rugg continued to contribute to progressive social and political thought, writing during the Second World War, for instance, a spirited brief for a liberal, postwar society.
If effect on educational practice is a valid basis for judgement, then surely Rugg was a giant among progressive educators. Few subsequent progressive educators have exhibited Rugg’s enterprise and patience in moving beyond exhortation and distal social critique to construct an educational programme embodying their rationales. Rugg’s work should also continue to inspire teacher educators as a model of the distinction between ‘subjects’ and ‘subject matters’. For those of us who admire and approve Rugg’s educational thought, what he demonstrated about sound, creative pedagogy and curriculum directed at a more caring and socially responsible society still have much to teach in a time of narrowly instrumental educational policies.
Read More : Educator Profile - HAROLD RUGG 1886–1960
