2,000 Progressive Guinea Pigs

At the Carnegie Foundation on Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, 20 Progressive Educators gathered last week to draft a momentous report. It was to tell the results of the Progressive Education Association's famed "Eight-Year Study." The study had cost $500,000 of Carnegie and Rockefeller money. On it, Progressive Educators had staked their reputations and possibly the future of Progressive Education. Last week they had a verdict.

Biggest obstacle to the spread of Progressive Education has been college entrance requirements. Progressives claim that these requirements: 1) keep high-school curricula in a strait jacket; 2) are unfair to the five out of six high-school students who never go to college. Because colleges insisted that students could not cope with college unless they had prescribed doses of mathematics and foreign languages, P. E. A. eight years ago made U. S. colleges a sporting proposition: let them admit students without these requirements and see what happened.

Some 250 top-notch colleges of all types agreed to do so. A special P. E. A. commission, headed by painstaking Wilford Aikin, then headmaster of progressive John Burroughs School in Clayton, Mo., set up an elaborate experiment. Colleges were to admit without examination the graduates of 30 selected progressive high schools. Each of these graduates was to be paired, for comparison, with a graduate of a first-rate conventional school, of the same sex, race, age, intelligence, interests, family background.

First batch of the 30 schools' new products went to college in 1936. They were not identified as guinea pigs to their classmates. But selected college teachers periodically interviewed them, watched them closely at work and play. By this autumn, when the Eight-Year Study ended, the Commission had examined the college careers of nearly 2,000 progressively educated students, compared them with an equal number of conventional high-school graduates. Findings:

>The Progressives had slightly better grades in standard college subjects.

>The more extremely progressive the high school, the better its graduates did in college.

>A group of 46 who deliberately avoided mathematics in high school surpassed their classmates in every college subject, including math.

Progressive students went in for more extracurricular activities (except athletics), took a more active interest in politics and art, talked more, wrote more, listened to more speeches and music, read more books, went to more dances, had more dates.

>Conventional students joined more social, religious and service clubs, attended more movies.

>Progressive students did just as much worrying, had as many personal troubles as their fellows.

From these findings Wilford Aikin and his fellow commissioners drew only this cautious conclusion: Progressive schooling is at least no handicap to success in college. But they believed that the implications of their conclusion were revolutionary: if traditional high-school courses had no advantages for the college-bound, why should not every U. S. high school be free to try new ways? Armed with this thesis, the Commission last spring began conferences with college officers. It proposed that colleges substitute simpler entrance requirements. A suggested plan: 1) recommendation of a student by his high-school principal, 2) the student's high-school record, 3) a scholastic aptitude test, 4) a comprehensive English examination (because a student needs to read and write).

Various were the reactions to the Commission's findings. At a Denver conference, a university president exclaimed in happy befuddlement: "I came down to find out what Progressive Education is. . . . We have tried to devise a procedure that leads in the right direction. For example, if a man catches a trout, we give him credit for it."

University of Pennsylvania's Dean Arnold Henry: "What about the cost of this tremendous change in the secondary-school curriculum? Is the effect upon the students worth the cost?"

Smith's Dean Marjorie Hope Nicolson: "It seems to me that such an educational policy . . . would reduce all of our colleges to a general level. . . ."

Despite huffings & puffings, by last week nearly 200 U. S. colleges and universities, among them Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell, had agreed in principle to the Commission's plan. Notable dissenters: Yale, Amherst.

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