Who We Are
	The Power of Progressive Education at LREI

October 18, 2004

From its inception, LREI has been at the forefront of the progressive education movement, a source of new ideas and an impetus for school innovation and reform.  The school was established in 1921 as an experimental program within the public school system. Elisabeth Irwin’s goal was to demonstrate the applicability of progressive ideas - tried up until then mainly in small private school settings - to public education in the nation’s largest city. Educational researchers conducted important studies of learning and child development at LREI. Every major university in New York sent student teachers to train here. This laboratory school spirit and public mission continued even after the school became a private institution in 1932. When the High School was founded in 1941, it too was understood as part of the original “experiment” in progressive education. In a curriculum unique for its time, challenging college preparation was combined with attention to adolescents’ developmental needs and creativity. It emphasized community service, social responsibility and civic involvement. 

Sound familiar? Today’s LREI remains a vital, mission-driven progressive school. Our teachers engage in a critical and collaborative process of reflective practice. And, once again, progressive education is the focus of attention among researchers and school reformers. Three recently published doctoral dissertations, the research for which was conducted at LREI during the past few years, examine the school’s core values and principles and shed light on the degree to which those guiding precepts inform education in the school today. 

Professor Randi Dickson’s Confirming Testimonies: Conversations with Three Women Educators deals in part with the life and work of Grace Cohen, legendary third grade teacher at LREI from 1958 to 2001.Dickson explores Grace’s philosophy and in doing so lays out many of the values and core assumptions of the progressive approach to education. One theme that emerges is the importance of empowering and equipping children to be bold, confident inquirers and learners. According to Grace, student-centered education starts with encouraging children to ask questions. By validating children’s own inquisitiveness, we tell them they are respected and trusted enough to create their own answers. In her discussions with the author, Grace Cohen emphasizes how critical it is for children to wonder about things and for teachers to somehow model that wonder for students.  Good teaching, she believes, always starts with what children know, with letting them first “explain how they do it.” Children, she observes, are “ready and willing and able to listen to each other and such learning becomes the essence of community and democracy.” 

The final dissertation is Barbara McWilliam’s The Ideals of Progressive Education at Work in which the author describes her two-year search for the persistence of John Dewey’s philosophy of progressive education at LREI. Dr. McWilliams observed Lower School classes, interviewed teachers and met with faculty and administration. She looked for evidence of core principles of progressive pedagogy. These included education for citizenship and democracy grounded in children’s interests and experiences, and organized around "real life enactments” and active occupations.  Her conclusion: “If Dewey were alive today he would continue to be impressed by the ideals of progressive education…that continue to inform the school’s spirit and program, in which children’s basic instincts – communication, building, investigating and expressing - are the basis for learning and personal growth.” She writes, at LREI “children’s individual capacities, interests, learning styles, aptitudes and experiences are respected, happiness is cultivated and communication is of highest value.”

These three works are testimony to the continuing power of progressive education at LREI and, in particular, a remarkable tribute to the superb education offered in our Lower School division.  Today we face a situation similar in many respects to the one faced by pioneers of the progressive education movement. Not since the turn of the twentieth century has the progressive tradition stood out in more vivid relief against the background of contemporary educational discourse and policy. LREI continues to be the school Elisabeth Irwin envisioned  - a leader that seeks to foster and sustain the progressive “voice” in the national conversation about education. 

Nicholas O’Han
School Historian