The Progressive Era, 1893-1914 by John D. Buenker

Author:John D. Buenker [John D. Buenker]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780870206313
Publisher: Wisconsin Historical Society Press

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Less publicized, but of equal importance to advocates of the New Education, was the expansion of secondary education. Between 1890 and 1906, the number of high schools in Wisconsin increased from 169 to 288; the enrollment, from 11,449 to 27,768; and the number of teachers, from 376 to 1,334. Between 1895 and 1910, the number of schools offering a three-year diploma jumped from 128 to 286, the pupil-teacher ratio declined by one-third, and the number of subjects a teacher was required to teach was reduced. The state had only 939 high school graduates in 1890; in 1910 there were 4,154. The state superintendent estimated in 1908 that more than half the 271 high schools had either been built or wholly rebuilt since 1900.20

The dropout rate was more than 65 per cent at the beginning of the century. To curb it, officials added courses in agriculture, manual training, and domestic science, and they redesigned other courses to meet pupils’ needs, making high school more meaningful and useful. This plan worked. Ten years later, the dropout rate had been reduced to 57 per cent, and most dropouts occurred during the first two years. School officials attributed the change to manual training, domestic science, agriculture, and commercial courses in which half the state’s eligible students enrolled. Another tactic in some high schools awarded academic credit for work done outside the classroom, emulating the university’s “extension” concept. High school was indeed becoming the “people’s college,” where social classes mingled and learned democracy firsthand.21

The expansion of kindergartens also reflected the advance of the New Education. Nearly a hundred cities added kindergartens to their schools between 1890 and 1912. Under Wisconsin law, free public education theoretically was available to everyone between the ages of four and twenty. But the state’s first tax-supported kindergarten did not open until 1873 in Manitowoc, and it was 1887 before the legislature empowered local school districts to establish kindergartens. Progressive to the core, kindergarten substituted “happy activity” for rote learning and the three R’s. In 1907 and in 1909, kindergarten supporters beat back legislative proposals that would have prohibited spending public money on educating children under six.22

Of all the educational innovations of the period, none was more quintessentially “progressive” than the use of public school buildings as community social centers. The social center movement was pioneered by Edward J. Ward, a Social Gospel minister and college professor who established a social center network in Rochester, New York, in 1907. Ward’s notion was to bypass the existing political structure by using public school buildings, after hours, as a home for a civic movement based on the example of the direct democracy of the New England town meeting. He envisioned citizens assembling in public buildings to discuss, debate, and educate themselves on a broad range of topics affecting public policy. In 1910, the university’s Extension Division hired Ward as an advisor on social and civic center development. The following year, the legislature authorized school boards to establish, at public expense, “evening schools, vacation

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