Progressivism is a contemporary American educational philosophy. Since its establishment in the mid-1920s, progressivism has been the most influential educational view in America. Progressivisms are basically opposed to authoritarianism and favour human experiences as a basis for knowledge.

The progressivism believes that all things are in a state of flux; therefore, no stress is given to absolute knowledge. Progressivism favours the scientific method of teaching and learning, allows for the beliefs of individuals, and stresses programmes of student involvement that help teach students how to think with the rise of democracy in America, the expansion of modern science and technology, and the need for all people to be able, to adjust, change, contemporary America needed a new and different approach to the acquisition of knowledge to solve problems.

Evaluation of Progressivism:

Progressivism is the educational expression of the “liberal road to culture”. Influenced deeply by the fertile and eager American environment, it is grounded philosophically in pragmatism-instrumentalism- experimentalism as developed primarily by three emancipating thinkers: Peirce, James and Dewey. Its beliefs about reality focus on the concept that natural experience in dynamic, temporal, spatial, and pluralistic.

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Its beliefs about knowledge revolve around intelligence as the scientific method operating in every area of experience. (Thus, the act of thought-awareness of obstacles, analysis, suggestions, inference, and active testing-becomes central to logic as a theory of inquiry into problems significant for living). Pragmatic beliefs about value, related always to nature and intelligence, crystallize in:

(1) Such interactive principles of conduct as intrinsic and instrumental and personal and social values;

(2) A philosophy of art that stresses the rhythm of aesthetic expression between the doing or mediate phase of experience and the undergoing or immediate phase;

(3) the supreme value of democracy both as critique of the shortcomings of our culture and as norm of the possibilities for growing and sharing richly in the creative opportunities of natural and cultural life.

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In recent years the flexibility and cultural and continuity that characterize liberalism, although extremely popular in progressive education and in liberal politics, law and economics, have faced determined opposition. Progressive education has become a term of repugnance to great numbers of educators and laymen who have been influenced by well-organized, widely publicized, heavily financed attacks.

Although progressivism meets many of its critics effectively, they continue to the articulate and often influential. Ultimate reasons for the strength of the attackers, however, are not to be discovered merely in critical evaluation of educational beliefs and practices. And they are not to be found only in the fact that some progressivism leaders fail, because of their own eclectic tendencies, to recognize the actual unity between their educational methods and the philosophic principles that underlie these methods.

If we are not to turn back from liberalism-progressivism to either the conservative-essentialist or the regressivist-perennialist alternative (both of which have strong appeal for some individuals and some powerful groups, both of which deserve to be heard with the care and respect), our task is not to reject but to re-examine, correct, and supplement liberalism-progressivism as fully and forthrightly as possible. Basic to our task is the diagnosis of two spheres of tension that are, we believed, chronic to this theory and program: one, the tension between means and ends; the other, the tension between individuality and sociality.

The task is supremely difficult, and we may fail. But it must be undertaken if we are to maintain and advance the richest single contribution thus far made by American philosophy and education to the welfare of mankind.