The Textbook or a Problem to Solve
In 1920, Sister Domatilla published the results of her experiments with a new kind of pedagogy called ‘the project method’. Writing in The American Journal of Nursing, she explains her concern that “old methods of teaching” do not give students “a genuine interest that is marked by the absorption of powers, an interest that will result in the student engaging herself in a wholehearted way.” She taught nursing students at St. Mary’s Hospital, a part of the Mayo Clinic founded by Franciscan nuns. Her anecdote – part of a critique of her past practice – would easily finds its place in a TED talk about the current ills of education.
“A second mistake that I made was in placing emphasis on the textbook rather than on the problem to be solved. If some one had asked those students at any time during this work what was their lesson in Anatomy and Physiology, they probably would have said ‘Pages 60 to 89 in Kimber and Gray,’ and not that they had a problem to solve.”
In What’s the Point of School (2008), Guy Claxton deploys a similar anecdote to illustrate the pitfalls of not holding the “learning point” above the more superficial aim of passing a test.
“Professor Dylan Wiliam of London University’s Institute of Education tells of asking a student in a maths lesson, “What are you doing?” and getting the reply, ‘Page 38, Sir.’ The teacher acts as if all that is of value is ‘getting through the syllabus’ and ‘preparing for the exam’ – and the students may well get good results.”
Sister Domatilla was also troubled by the situation where students learn to pass exams but fail to consolidate their knowledge into meaningful practice: “The student may learn many things in the classroom and know them in such a way that she could answer examination questions, but she has not learned them in such a manner as to have them available for practical use when the hour of need should arise. She remains almost helpless in the face of practical situations.”
You can imagine why a nursing educator in the years after The Great War would have emphasized the value of effective knowledge. Indeed, St. Mary’s and the Mayo Clinic was itself created in response to an “hour of need” – a tornado that swept through Rochester Minnesota in 1893. The motto – “Enter in to learn — go forth to serve” – captures the central idea behind the project method: purposing. Mere learning was not enough; education requires a problem to solve and a purpose to fulfill.
Fast forward one hundred years and we now call what Sister Domatilla engaged in the “exciting, innovative instructional format” of Project-Based Learning. Sister Domatilla’s argument in favor of purposing - on going forth to serve - has been replaced with the logic of lifelong learning - preparing students for the workforce. David Snedden’s argument for ‘social efficiency’ beat John Dewey’s call to question the capitalist order. A modern counterpart to Snedden, Tom van der Ark argues that project based learning is the perfect way to prepare students for their places in the ‘gig’ economy, for “delivering value” in “the project-based world they will inherit.” “By 2020, about four in ten or about 91 million Americans will be engaged in quick “gigs” and project-based work.“While van der Ark acknowledges ‘downsides’, it’s largely a hedge so that he can ultimately argue that there’s no choice but to go with the gig economy. “The shift toward a new economy does have downsides. The lack of long-term stability of one career can lead to economic insecurity. Many workers can feel trapped in a low-wage cycle (see the left side of the chart below). However, there are benefits of the new economy widely enjoyed by millions of Millennials who appreciate the freedom and flexibility to build their schedule and be selective about their projects. Regardless, the evidence is clear that shifts in the economy will be a driving force for determining careers for many young people, whether by choice or necessity.”
“In both the public and private sector a rule that appears to have sustainability is maintaining a lean core structure that adaptively adds new projects. In addition to fast-paced organizations, a growing number of freelancers make a career of a portfolio of project work. There are already 53 million Americans (34% of the workforce) that fall into this category and that’s likely to increase to 40% by 2020.“
Why did ‘the project method’ resurface in our broader educational imagination as a new and innovative idea aligned with entrepreneurship instead of as a revision of a pedagogy from 100 years ago?
What follows here is neither a guide to project based learning nor a call to action. Broadly, I think PBL is too nebulous to be either for or against, though we’d be wise to reclaim purposing. I am interested in the extirpation of the history of progressive education reform from our modern education imagination, in the branding of pedagogy as ‘new’ when in fact it has a long tradition. Occasionally the white men from the Progressive Era appear as flattened caricatures of the positions they held. During the Progressive Era itself, the main education journals also devoted space to white women educators, like Sister Domatilla, though we are less likely to hear their names now. An honest look at the Progressive Era must also ask why John Dewey is more associated with PBL than Booker T. Washington and why the legacy of African American women like Lucy Craft Laney is even more obscure.
‘Wholehearted Purposeful Activity’
In the ultimate act of branding, William Heard Kilpatrick (1918) stuck the term ‘the project method’ on the kind of activity long used in agricultural and manual training, and backed it with his child-centered philosophy of education. Kilpatrick’s diary reveals that he wanted to make a name for himself, not unlike today’s consultants who seek to brand themselves through branding educational ideas. The Twitter educelebrities would have impressed Kilpatrick indeed. In his widely circulated paper from 1918, Kilpatrick wonders if there might be “great gain” if only someone might be able to propose a concept “unifying more completely a number of important related aspects of the educative process.” In his famous phrase, the project method would involve “wholehearted purposeful activity proceeding in a social environment.” Kilpatrick closes his paper by handing the teacher “who but dares to purpose” the challenge of bringing wholehearted learning to life.
Can we reasonably expect any child (or adult) to approach even the most interesting project in a wholehearted manner day in and day out? Kilpatrick’s commitment to being child-centered - something Dewey did not share - led him to put undue emphasis on the child’s attitude in determining what counts as a ‘project’. In Dewey’s criticism (1902) of the dichotomy between the old (curriculum centered) and new (child centered), he recognizes the fickle nature of children as being too fluid to act as it’s own ground:
“Just as, upon the whole, it was the weakness of the ‘old education’ that it made invidious comparisons between the immaturity of the child and the maturity of the adult, regarding the former as something to be got away from as soon as possible and as much as possible; so it is the danger of the ‘new education’ that it regard the child’s present powers and interests as something finally significant in themselves. In truth his learnings and achievements are fluid and moving. They change from day to day and hour to hour.”
Kilpatrick did not heed Dewey’s criticism of the ‘new education’. In Michael Knoll’s analysis (2012) of Kilpatrick, he writes:
“Without a doubt, his definition of the project was “ambiguous,” since it disregarded the conventions of the language in designating the subjective “attitude” of the student an objective “method” of instruction; and it was “provocative,” for it ignored the traditions of the subjects, and – from a sheer wish for innovation and self-aggrandisement – replaced the precise definition of the project as “independent, constructive activity” by the vague phrase “whole-hearted purposeful activity.” It was this break with tradition and convention, introduced unnecessarily and unreasonably by Kilpatrick, that aroused indignation among both friends and foes, caused utter confusion, and for a time plunged the project movement into a profound crisis.”
According to Knoll, around 1930, following the criticism of HE Bode, Kilpatrick stopped using the term and switched to ‘activity’. His letter to Flexner (1950) reveals his thoughts: “I had made a mistake to marry my program to the term.” Later in the 20th Century a new term would rise. A Google N-gram shows the rise of ‘the project method’ in the 1920’s and 30’s, and the increasing popularity of ‘Project-Based Learning’ since the early 1990’s.
What accounts for the demise and resurgence of the project approach?
According to David Tyack and Larry Cuban (1997), during the Cold War educational reformers emphasized:
“science, mathematics, foreign languages, and the other traditional liberal arts. They wanted rigor, a demanding adult world of discipline, and high cognitive expectations for the mostly dull and disorderly young of the nation. Turning back from “life adjustment” to the earlier goal of mental training, critics demanded a revamping of curricula, tougher selection and training of teachers, greater regimentation in the classroom, attention to patriotism, and fewer ‘frills.’”
Michael Knoll (1997) traces a more traditional conception (independent of Kilpatrick’s child-centered, wholeheartedness) of the project back through the 17th Century to technical and arts schools in Europe.
When the ‘project method’ finally resurfaced in the mainstream educational imagination, the word ‘method’, with all the connotations of the attempt to make curriculum and instruction scientific, was replaced with ‘learning’ in the late 20th Century. Ironically, what Gert Biesta calls the learnification of education, the focus on ‘learning’ and ‘learners’ instead of ‘education’ and ‘students’, is both the culmination of Kilpatrick’s student-centered obsession and would have been seen as regressive by Kilpatrick and other educators who lived in the 1920s. Memorizing one’s times tables is surely an act of learning, but for the child, where’s the purpose in it? Writing in The English Journal (1925), Mary Pringle writes: “To every live and growing teacher, education appears as a very different process from what it did a few years ago. The emphasis in education is now placed in purposing rather than on learning.”
The full title of Kilpatrick’s article emphasizes ‘the use of the purposeful act’ and his final sentence is addressed to “the teacher who but dares to purpose.”
In a closely related movement, Problem-Based Learning originated at McMaster’s medical school. In the early 1960’s, Howard Barrows observed that students who had earlier passed “excellent, detailed courses” that he himself taught lacked “basic knowledge they could apply to patient problems” when faced with simulated patients (Barrows & Tamblyn 1980). In other words, they failed to transfer their knowledge. Barrows writes that people seriously debated ‘inverting’ the curriculum “where the students would have two years of patient exposure and then two years of basic science” which would help them to understand “the importance and relevance of basic science.” Sister Domatilla made exactly the same argument about the need for her nursing students to understand the “actual practical value of chlorine in her field of work.” Barrows argues that “students must learn, by working with problems, to develop appropriate problem-solving skills, and must make basic and clinical science learning more memorable and effective through their work with patients.” In a volume about the origins of Problem Based Learning, John Savery argues that Projects represent a more limited kind of learning than Problems: “Although cases and projects are excellent learner-centered instructional strategies, they tend to diminish the learner’s role in setting the goals and outcomes for the problem. When the expected outcomes are clearly defined then there is less need or incentive for the learner to set their own parameters. In the real world it is recognized that the ability to both define the problem and develop a solution (or range of possible solutions) is important.” John Larmer makes a similar point: “Project based instruction often has a problem embedded into the project design but it differs from problem based learning in that the end result of the project is known at the beginning of the project. A project based problem results in a specific artifact; a problem based experience may result in a variety of expected solutions.”
Wilbur Hatfield (1922) links the project method to the development of the “whole child” through a “whole-heartedness” investment in the activity at hand, in school not as merely learning, but “purposing.” “The ideal is enthusiastic, eager adoption and pursuit of a purpose.” Psychologically, Hatfield argues that there is little chance that kids will learn from school unless they have “belief in its value”, and the project method would also add occasion for transfer, as students would learn under conditions “similar to those under which these forms are to be used outside the classroom.” The argument about transfer remains central to the argument for PBL. Education Re-Imagined (2018) argues that “Environments that focus on deeper learning believe the skills learners gain when diving deeply into a project are transferable and will serve them well in every future learning opportunity.”Education Re-Imagined was launched by Convergence and they both have the backing of significant venture philanthropists.
Problem-Based Learning faces objections from the cognitive science ‘evidence based’ community. In Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work, Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark (2006) argue against the idea that we should teach science by asking kids to think like scientists: “the epistemology of a discipline should not be confused with a pedagogy for teaching or learning it.” That is to say, while experts might do a lot of problem solving, that doesn’t mean that problem solving is the best way for novices to learn. At the heart of this paper is Cognitive Load Theory, which the authors argue “suggests that the free exploration of a highly complex environment may generate a heavy working memory load that is detrimental to learning. This suggestion is particularly important in the case of novice learners, who lack proper schemas to integrate the new information with their prior knowledge.” According to Kirschner’s argument, learning information in a specific context might actually inhibit transfer since “once basic science knowledge is contextualized, it is difficult to separate it from the particular clinical problems into which it has been integrated.” Yet, Problem-Based Learning in medical schools does work.Here is a study of PBL in nursing, and one on medical education in China The Minimal Guidance paper mostly relies studies of PBL prior to 1993. What’s more, medical students aren’t anything like ‘novices’ or nor are they simply unleashed for ‘free exploration’.
In both project and problem - based learning, the idea of ‘authenticity’ has replaced ‘wholeheartedness’. The Buck Institute (BIE) promotes a ‘gold standard’ of project based learning, where ‘authenticity’ gives projects a direction. As an example, BIE offers Chaney Mosley’s (an educator from Nashville Metro) account of an authentic project:
“A good way to write an authentic driving question for a project and ‘ground it in a real-world context,” as Chaney put it, is to begin it with, ‘How can we, as _____’ which places students in an authentic role. For example, he told about a project in which students acted as consultants for local entrepreneurs with the driving question, ‘How can we, as graphic designers, communicate a company’s purpose for an entrepreneur?’ The entrepreneur gave students feedback during the project, and actually used the ‘winning’ design.”
‘Authenticity’ functions as a norm for what is valuable. While ‘wholeheartedness’ located the value of the project in the psychology and emotional life of the child, ‘authenticity’ - for better or worse - grounds the values of the project in ‘the real world’. Sometimes this grounding appears in vocational terms, but in other cases it is used to invalidate school life and the people within its walls:
“‘Not authentic’ means the work students do does not resemble the kind of work done in the world outside of school or it is not intended to have an effect on anything apart from an academic purpose. A not-authentic project would involve the kind of assignment students are typically given in school: compose an essay, create a poster or model, write and present a book report, or make a PowerPoint presentation on a topic they’ve researched. Beyond their teacher and maybe their classmates there’s no public audience for students’ work, no one actually uses what they create, and the work they do is not what people do in the real world.”
The real world is full of valuable essays, models, and presentations. What’s more, we fail to appreciate the labour that goes into being an audience for student work - especially when this involves giving feedback - if we invalidate teachers as ‘inauthentic’ audiences. When students have meaningful relationships with their teachers, they often very much value what their teachers think and are proud to show them their work. The classroom and all of the students are very much part of the ‘real world’, and possibly constitute the most relevant world for much of our educational lives.
We should always look for more opportunities to connect students to the broader world and local community, to help them prepare for life after school, but pressing the word ‘authenticity’ into service as a norm for what counts as a ‘project’ - or valuable learning - only undermines education. As we work to expand opportunities for children to publish and share their work, we must not remove the equally meaningful possibilities inside the classroom.
Haven’t we always done projects?
In the Peabody Journal of Education, M.L Roark (1925) considered what if any contribution the ‘project method’ made to pedagogy. Compared with the historical ignorance of many writers today, Roark goes to lengths to draw out the history not just of the project method, but of the more general collective amnesia surrounding past educational movements. He notes how though the Monitorial System “dominated the schools of America as well as England less than a century ago, it is doubtful if ten per cent of American teachers now could tell what the system was. There have been other methods and theories also that spread through the country like an epidemic and disappeared as suddenly.”
Roark links the history of the project method with the rise of vocational education, quoting FE Heald who wrote that “For many years the term ‘project’ has been used to designate carefully planned investigations in agricultural science covering a considerable period of time, frequently demanding several years for their completion.” Roark concludes that “the project method is not, strictly speaking, a new method, but rather it is a combination and reorganization of many older methods into a larger unit.” Wilbur Hatfiled (1922) agreed: “The project method turns out to be merely the organization into an effective procedure of the best things the best teachers have already been doing.”
In the years immediately after Kilpatrick gave a name to the use of projects, educators across a range of subjects wrote about the ways that Kilpatrick’s typology of projects might fit into their subject areas. Most obviously, the vocational subjects could take up projects by having students imitate the actual work. In a course on salesmanship, H.E. Stone (1919) drew on the ‘interests’ of students to have them create sales pitches. Boys who were ‘naturally’ interested in automobiles talked about the “relative merits of Firestone or Fisk” tires, while girls - “whose backs have ached more than once” while doing the laundry for the family - “expounded the merits of the ‘Electric Flat Iron’ or the ‘Simplex Ironer’”. Current investigations into PBL have found that gender, unsurprisingly, plays a strong role in the power dynamics of groups. In Jennifer Langer-Osuna’s (2011) analysis of PBL in a math classroom, she found that two students who entered the project positioned as smart, experienced different outcomes based on gender, with Brianna being labelled as ‘bossy’: “What became problematic for Brianna was not the validity of her ideas but her right to be, in some ways, an authority over her group members as manager and leader, a problem that Kofi did not face.”
In courses such as civics, students more directly addressed problems in the community rather than role-play for each other. In a course on civics at the Theodore Herzl School in the Lawndale district of Chicago, Annie Jilek’s (1920) students took on a community issue: “The cycle of time brought into our district a population many of whose members were not overparticular in keeping their premises clean and sanitary”. Jilek’s coded language to describe immigrants - and to turn them into a problem for her class to solve - is the opposite of the kind of social justice we might hope goes hand in hand with purposing. In the end, the class launched campaigns for people to keep their yards clean and made signs. In a more constructive gesture, they also wrote to the Department of Agriculture to get free seeds for people to plant in their gardens and held vegetable growing contests. Their project also included a piece of drama: “With persistent effort a play was produced called ‘The Reform of a Bad Boy.’”
In nursing, Dorothea Yens (1936) wrote about using dramatization, or what we might call simulated patients, to help nurses learn about “the care of the patient as an individual rather than as a ‘case’.” Rather than drill into nurses that they must instruct their patients in home care, the nurses would engage in a dramatization with a patient who forgets the proper hygiene. “When she demonstrates the preparation of her insulin, she drops the needle on the floor and is about to wipe it off on her sleeve and proceed.”
In mathematics, teachers created projects through relying on the social pressure of peers instead of the authority of the teacher to motivate students in their studies. Joseph Jablonower (1928) writes that:
“The child who has lived the school life in which purposive learning is the dominant activity will continue to learn even in the absence of the traditional school agencies and agents; the child who has shared experiences with his fellows in the realm of school activities will find such sharing normal in his adulthood. The counting house ethics, which dominates the school room in which the child purchases the good will of the teacher through recitations that are satisfactory to the teacher, must be replaced by a social ethics so that the peculiar abilities of each member may be realized and valued as precious contributions to a collective endeavor.”
In the Latin classroom, Wren Jones Grinstead (1921) argues students can engage in the project method via role play, being an interpreter between two characters: “I believe that the project point of view is not inconsistent with thorough and frequent drill, provided the drill be so conducted that the pupil at every moment sees in it a direct bearing upon his daily problem as interpreter between Romanus and Barbarus .” In Biblical instruction, Ellen Webster (1925) writes about students who eagerly stage the story of an obedient daughter: “One student had been greatly moved by the story of Jephthah’s daughter and desired to try to interpret the emotions of the maiden during the various episodes by means of pantomime, music and dancing. She selected beautiful girls and dressed them in colors which would give the most pleasing effects.”
In the early 1920s, The English Journal took up ‘the project method’ as a matter of concern in several articles and a four-part series. An anonymous author (1924) quipped that “The project is so well established that one wonders at the frequency of articles recommending its adoption.” Before digging into the historical literature, I was not aware of just how ubiquitous the push for projects was. As I read on, I felt that I identified with many of the concerns raised by educators who worked nearly a century ago. Marietta Hyde (1920) addresses the fundamental question about what counts as a project. Given that a project is a “purposeful unit of work”, the project does not need to be “something concrete, objective, tangible”, but could be “a new set of thoughts and feelings, a new focus on what seemed an ugly world.” Such an expansive view resonates with my intuitions: reading a book can be a project, as can re-organizing the kitchen, or caring for a puppy.
Both Wilbur Hatfield (1922) and Marietta Hyde (1920) explicitly link pedagogy to politics, arguing that students should be “allowed to participate like a plain citizen in a democracy.” (Hatfield) “Studying a lesson because we teachers say so is not a democratic enough procedure for the new generation.” (Hyde) However, the insincerity of the teacher can act as an obstacle to genuine democratic participation. Melissa Jones (1922) writes that “The teacher must not dictate either the purpose or the plan of the pupils’ activity, and yet it is rather shortsighted to feel that projects should always originate with the pupils.” That is, it would be insincere to argue that we should let students do whatever they want and that the teacher has no role in setting the project. Teachers have educational aims. An anonymous author (1924) is worth quoting at length because of how they capture the conceits, which are often a kind of role-playing, that often proceed projects:
”One of these dangers is insincerity. I feel as I read articles on how to introduce a project to a class that the teacher is assuming a pose, that she is deceiving her students by the elaborate concealment of the real end of the work. The impression is made that the children must be tricked into learning; the teacher slips up on them unawares and ensnares them in a network of projects before they realize they have been caught. Exposition is to be taught; the teacher brings some violin records to class; the children respond with suggestions from their own musical careers; before they realize the seriousness of their chance voluntary responses, the trap is sprung and they are ‘in’ for a project on the ‘Modern Orchestra.’ Sometimes the more sophisticated pupils recognize our bait and groan, ‘Another project!’ It seems against the code to allow the students to suspect that the teacher knows the outcome of the task. Such methods seem insincere. They are liable to foster a disrespect for our job and our method of handling it. A high-school student realizes that there is work to be done, work as such, necessitating concentration, monotony, sacrifice of the present for an end.”
The project method easily comes to grief on the division between the child’s interests and the fact that there’s value in the accumulated knowledge and experience of adults that gets codified into a curriculum. Dewey (1902) argues that we need an “effort of thought” to get past this dichotomy: “It is easier to see the conditions in their separateness, to insist upon one at the expense of the other, to make antagonists of them, than to discover a reality to which each belongs. The easy thing is to seize upon something in the nature of the child or upon something in the developed consciousness of the adult, and to insist upon that as the key to the whole problem. When that happens a really serious practical problem - that of the interaction - is transformed into an unreal, and hence insoluble, theoretic problem.”
In Individuality and Experience (1926), Dewey explicitly rejects the metaphor of a pendulum swinging back and forth between freedom and tradition, instead calling for “a change in the direction of movement.” Dewey argues that “personal mental growth is furthered in any branch of human undertaking by contact with the accumulated and sifted experience of others in that line.” Carpenters do not start from a “clean sheet” because of a fear that “knowledge would ‘cramp their style’, limit their individuality”, but nor are they trained with “dinky tasks of minute and technical nature…wholly independent of really making anything”. In learning as purposing, children participate “in something inherently worthwhile” where they can perceive “the relation of means to consequences”. Thus, through the “experience of the meaning of certain technical processes and forms of skill there develops an interest in skill.”
The obstacle to dismantling the dichotomy between freedom and tradition lies in the “hard and narrow and, we may truly say, uneducated habits and attitude of teachers who set up as authorities, as rulers and judges in Israel. … Suppression of the emotional and intellectual integrity of pupils is the result.” The problem lies not with “bringing to bear the results of previous experience”, but when “the habits of the teacher are so narrow and fixed, his imagination and sympathies so limited, his own intellectual horizon so bounded, that he brings them to bear in the wrong way.” Dewey’s criticism are strikingly on point for the Doug Lemov’s and neotraditionalists who almost rejoice in narrow, fixed habits and teacher authority (see Layla Treuhaft-Ali’s insightful analysis). While Kilpatrick would have embraced Kirschner’s caricature of PBL as ‘free exploration’, Dewey rejected the rigid dichotomy that both Kilpatrick and Kirschner operate in.
Freedom and The Enterprise Method
The project method may as well be called the enterprise method, a term which spread in Canada in the 1930s and suggested by Wilbur Hatfield (1922) because of the role it serves in “social efficiency, developing what the ‘businessmen critics’ demand “: “Not knowledge, but the social spirit” and workers who have the “power to choose ends and the means of attaining them and to stick to a task until it is completed”, to perpetuate what’s distinctly American -“the land of initiative” - and to stave off those who would “schoolmaster this glory of our people out of existence.” Hatfield would likely have been surprised to hear Tom Van Der Ark or Thomas Friedman celebrating the ‘flexibility’ demanded of workers by Capital because it runs against the ‘social spirit’ where workers choose means in any real sense.
In the mythical America (or Canada) as the ‘land of initiative’, it makes sense to argue that the school classroom should replicate the broader democracy. But in practice, that democracy, like the classroom, has always been built on exclusion and violent expulsion. For several decades before Kilpatrick decided to brand ‘the project method’, Booker T. Washington practiced it at his Tuskegee Institute (1881). Washington used the same theme that Hatfield would pick up on - America as the land of initiative - to argue African Americans needed to begin “at the bottom of life” and work their way up, which is why Ibram X. Kendi (2017) argues that Ida B. Wells may have been a better replacement for the leadership of Frederick Douglass: “but she was a woman, and too anti-racist for most Americans.”Quoted in Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning Donald Generals (2000) observes that “Washington’s projects were real life projects. His projects consisted of building the buildings for the institution versus Kilpatrick’s simulated projects for classroom activities.”
As Alain Locke (1925) argues, Washington’s approach was “in advance of American educational reform”, fitting closely with the “naturally popular doctrine” in America “of economic independence and self-help”.See Alain Locke, Negro Education Bids for Par, in the volume of his essays edited by Leonard Harris Locke, “the dean of the Harlem Renaissance”, adds context to Washington’s need to ‘build the buildings’: “The stock of Negro education has a heavy traditional discount, and is chronically ‘under the market.’ Whatever the local variation, one can usually count upon a sag in both standard and facilities for the education of the Negro.” If the project method was an act of ‘self help’ for African Americans, it was similarly supposed to be good for Native pupils because they ‘naturally’ learned in the context of helping their families with real work.
Ruth Underhill (1943) wrote about Papago children:
“The youngsters learned through activity, in a system surprisingly like our modern project method. The difference was that Indian projects were not made of whole cloth with education as their sole aim. Usually they were necessities, where the child’s work had real value.”
Gordon MacGregor (1948) wrote about Sioux children:
“The project method is exceptionally well suited to educating the Dakota because it follows their own method of learning by doing and following the example of others. By bringing the children to participate and to share in the work and the responsibility for completion of a project, this method also reinforces the training for cooperative work already begun in the family.”
We cannot separate calls for project-based learning and vocational education from the historical inequalities in the education system, from the tracking of pupils, and from the desire to build self-reliance and industrious habits among people who were racialised. I’m not arguing that we push PBL to the side, but to make sure that in adopting it, we don’t limit the scope of education by forcing it through a narrow vocational lens by seeing PBL as a means to prepare students for ‘gigs’. Alain Locke’s (1925) main criticism of Tuskegee was that “the Negro, like any other constituency, needed all types of education that were not actually obsolete in American educational practice.”
In A Forgotten Sisterhood: Pioneering Black Women Educators in the Jim Crow South (2014), Audrey Thomas McCluskey argues that educator Lucy Craft Laney resisted the philanthropic pressure to replicate Booker T. Washington’s model:
“… Laney did not strictly adhere to the industrial education philosophy that was favored by the Slater Fund and the General Education Board, prominent funding organizations for black education. These philanthropies wanted the Hampton-Tuskegee model of industrial education, installed and popularized by Booker T. Washington, to be the model for their support.”
Laney also defied the terms of debate set up between W.E.B Du Bois and Booker T. Washington:
“In their advocacy and sense of mission, black women educators embraced and echoed W. E. B. Du Bois’ call for a “talented tenth” to arise and lead. They also endorsed the “boot-strap philosophy” of Booker T. Washington. The overlap evident even between Du Bois and Washington was easily discernible in curriculums of the schools founded by these women. Because they believed that rejuvenation of the race would be led by women, and that their needs had been neglected by male leaders, they placed emphasis on women. They especially emphasized the need to remove the stigma of immorality, branded upon their persons by mainstream culture. This concern, coupled with the economic motive of preparing women to be self-supporting, remained a paramount consideration among the school founders. They had an implicit understanding of the “multiple jeopardy” that the mass of black women who were subjected to gender, race, and class oppression faced, and found no contradiction in advocating both for black women and the race as a whole.”
There is, I would suggest, a difference between a call to future-proof students for the gig economy which refuses to situate itself in an understanding of oppression and multiple jeopardy, and Laney’s economic motive which is rooted in such an understanding. The danger we must avoid is a direct legacy of the Progressive Era’s colorblind call for ‘social efficiency’, for preparing students for the future, however bleak and dystopian the future looks. In Stamped From the Beginning (2017), Ibram X. Kendi writes:
“Though it is popularly remembered as a time of heartfelt social concern and awareness, in reality the Progressive era was rigged by elite White men and women. It was dominated, at least from the standpoint of its elite funders and organizers, by a desire to end the social strife caused by industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and inequality in the 1880s and 1890s.”
The enterprise method has resurfaced as innovative during a time of social strife - precarious work, underfunded schools, underpaid teachers, and the violent exclusion of racialised people from the classroom and social order - and been branded as a way to future-proof students for the coming hardships of the ‘gig’ economy. Can we recover a sense of purposing that holds forth a critical analysis of precarity in a way that lifelong learning has failed to?
header image by Ryan Franco
A comment via email by Frances Bell:
“Thanks for this Benjamin. I particularly value the focus on gender and race issues throughout the piece. I was speaking about Active Learning last week, and remembering what I learned about gender when teaching Maths in school. I was educated in a single sex secondary school, that provided some degree of haven from late 1960s society. This became clearer to when teaching later in a mixed comprehensive school where girls did defer to boys who generally assumed a position of authority in the subject, in the higher sets at least. They certainly occupied more conversational space, even with my best efforts.
And in my experience teaching IT/IS in HE, project work was lauded for reasons you describe. UG students undertook a multi-year team project but project roles fell prey to stereotyping. The admin role was invariably done by a young women. I campaigned, to no effect, for optionally all-women teams.
I think one of the opportunities in education is to create havens in which structural inequalities can be challenged. Hard questions in a soft play area.”