Modern European Influences on American Education

Beginning in the 17th century, as European powers colonized North America, they brought their ideas on education to the New World. After the colonial period, European ideas on education such as Herbartism (or New Education) began to find fertile soil in the United States, to be followed by the teachings of the truly transatlantic school of pedagogy called Progressive Education. In the 20th century, child-centered European views of education manifested in Montessori schools, as well as European-led theories of child cognitive development from Piaget and others, made lasting impacts on American teacher education and inspired movements such as unschooling and vocational education. For the past century, and continuing to the present, American and European pedagogues have engaged in an ongoing project of comparative educational research, strengthened by advances in technology, making today's educational influences between Europe and the United States truly bi-directional.

Keywords Cognitive Development; Comparative Education; International Education; Montessori Schools; New Education; Pedagogy; Progressive Education; Teacher Education; Unschooling; Vocational Education

Overview

During the colonial era, prominent American thinkers such as Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson carried on a lively, if at times contentious, exchange of ideas with leading thinkers in Europe. A theme that would continue throughout the 18th and 19th centuries was the American admiration for European culture on the one hand and their disdain for European social inequalities on the other. Americans like Jefferson put these inequalities down to anti-egalitarian proclivities within the European society, which he claimed were reinforced through the continent's education system.

While not following every European fashion, Americans sought to take the best ideas of the Old World and apply them in their circumstances in the New World. Beginning in the 19th century, Americans traveled to Europe to see European education firsthand:

After the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Americans were to be found increasingly traveling abroad, chiefly to Western Europe and particularly to Britain, France, and the German principalities. Benjamin Silliman, John Griscom, Calvin Stowe, Alexander Dallas Bache, William C. Woodbridge, and, of course, Horace Mann were among the first successful American students of international and comparative education (Fraser, 1968, p. 301).

But to live in America, to promote its general welfare, one required a distinctly American education -- even if that education retained some largely unspoken European influences. This national pride was evident everywhere, particularly after American independence. Thomas Jefferson put it well in a 1785 letter to an American correspondent living in Europe who sought his advice on the best European schools for Americans: "But why send an American youth to Europe for education? What are the objects of a useful American education?" (cited in Wagoner, 1993, p. 3)

American education began as a heavily modified form of the British system that was its colonial inheritance, but over time, as the nation grew in size and influence, ideas on education from mainland Europe also began to influence American intellectuals. After the Civil War, and for several generations, it became commonplace for American scholars to train for at least a year in German universities, where they absorbed current European ideas on topics including education. These leading German thinkers included Hegel (a great influence on John Dewey), Friederich Froebel and Johann Herbart. Influential British thinkers on education included Herbert Spencer and his ideas about applied Social Darwinism.

Nonetheless, there never was an uncritical American acceptance of European ideas on education:

It should not be supposed, however, that Americans unanimously welcomed foreign ideas either imported by foreign commentators or brought back by returning American educators. William C. Woodbridge, an editor of one of America's first educational journals and an extensive traveler in Europe wryly noted that "we are aware that there is much sensitiveness in our country in regard to foreign improvements-and have received some hints of the danger of exciting it." Accordingly, some limitation must be placed on the efficacy, influence, and acceptance within America of "foreign" reports on its educational system (Fraser, 1968, p. 301).

Education Comes of Age

In the final decades of the 19th century, a movement called New Education took root in America as a reaction against entrenched methods of teaching history and other subjects. First developed in Germany by Johann Friedrich Herbart, supporters of New Education argued that students should be taught to think systematically and to ask questions, rather than memorize lists of facts. For example, supporters of New Education taught that the classroom syllabus should be organized around themes or units to get at common truths common across historical events. According to Herbart and the disciples of his New Education philosophy, education's grand purpose was delivering moral and ethical lessons.

American educator John Dewey (1859-1952) continued this thread in the early decades of the twentieth century with his emphasis on learning by doing. Dewey and other educators introduced a school of thought called Progressive Education, where importance was placed on tapping the life experience and cultural background of students in preparing and delivering lessons. They believed in the concept of learning by doing, and they stressed that students should be active, rather than passive, learners.

By the turn of the 20th century, Progressive Education had pervaded all aspects of society on both sides of the Atlantic, and pedagogic influences became largely bi-directional. "There is no doubt that the turn-of-the-century educational reform was an international phenomenon" (Biesta & Miedema, 1996, p. 2).

Since that time there has been an increasingly fruitful dialogue between American and European educators, helped along in recent decades by the rise of a global communications network that includes email and the Internet. But one would do well to heed Foucault's remark that discussions about influence often tell one more about the individual making such connections than it does about the thinkers themselves.

This essay will focus on contributions to American education made by European thinkers who flourished in the 20th century. The thinkers discussed below contributed to the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, enriching the subject of education reform and helping to take pedagogy in new directions. The respective influences of European thinkers on American public education - direct or indirect - can be seen in the discussions and writings of their contemporaries, or sometimes even more clearly in retrospect.

Émile Durkheim: What the Student Owes Society

As a sociologist of education, the French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) believed that education was important to the preservation of the social order because it helps individuals feel a part of something greater than themselves. This feeling, he said, is reinforced through learning about fellow countrymen who made the world a better place.

Durkheim has been criticized by educators in previous decades because of his belief that the role of education is to reinforce social roles. But his thinking that education should be tailored to the abilities and skills of individual students, therefore solidifying a division of labor in society, has been widely adopted, particularly in vocational education.

Durkheim's ideas also have some resonance in the context of today's American public schools, where some attribute relatively poor educational outcomes to a breakdown of order within the classroom. Given this assumption, Durkheim's views seem more relevant than ever. As two recent commentators on Durkheim's work note, "Today there is an increased concern for the teaching of basic morality in schools, as discipline continues to break down. The changes that are now occurring point, certainly indirectly, to the work of Durkeim" (Walford & Pickering, 1998, p. 10).

Jean Piaget & Lev Vygotsky: Stages of Student Development

There is a large and growing body of literature in the field of educational psychology that seeks to apply the work of developmental psychologists to the interactions between teachers and students. In order to achieve a high level of professional success and satisfaction, experts generally agree that it is imperative for teachers to understand that the moral, intellectual, and emotional development of their students occurs in discrete stages.

Though they differ on important details, psychologists such as Jean Piaget (1896-1980) of Switzerland and Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) of Russia stressed that students go through stages of cognitive, emotional, and moral development. Piaget, who began his career in biology, argued that what separates humans from non-human animals is what he called "abstract symbolic reasoning." He suggested, for example, that high school students should be encouraged to work in small groups and use alternative methods of learning because they have reached the third level of cognitive development he called Formal Operational Thinking. Students in elementary school, by contrast, are more literal thinkers who are less likely to think in abstract terms.

The work of European scholars such as Piaget and Vygotsky has played an increasingly prominent role in areas of education such as curriculum design and learning centers. Seymour Papert (1999), in an article for Time naming Piaget one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, summarized his pedagogical accomplishments:

Although not an educational reformer, he championed a way of thinking about children that provided the foundation for today's education-reform movements. It was a shift comparable to the displacement of stories of "noble savages" and "cannibals" by modern anthropology. One might say that Piaget was the first to take children's thinking seriously….

He has been revered by generations of teachers inspired by the belief that children are not empty vessels to be filled with knowledge (as traditional pedagogical theory had it) but active builders of knowledge - little scientists who are constantly creating and testing their own theories of the world (Papert, 1999, par. 2).

Maria Montessori: Children as Natural Learners

A pioneer in early childhood education, the Italian educator Maria Montessori (1870-1952) believed that children were able to concentrate for long periods of time and preferred to have structured activities. She argued that children, as natural learners, could become responsible for their own surroundings and ultimately their own education. In such a situation children would be most likely to learn and thrive, albeit at their own pace.

Montessori said that there were "sensitive periods" during child development in which children were most easily taught educationally beneficial skills such as fine motor skills and pro-social behavior. Although her thinking on these "sensitive periods" was influenced by Dutch geneticist Hugo de Vries, it shares some affinity with the work of Piaget and Vygotsky. Unlike Piaget, however, her work focused primarily on education through the elementary school years.

Montessori opened her first Montessori school in Italy in 1907 and spread her educational philosophy across the globe. Her methods were popular in the United States in the early decades of the 20th century, but they were revived in 1960 when the American Montessori Society was founded. Now there are an estimated 5,000 Montessori schools in the United States alone, and their influence reaches into public and other private schools. A recent study in Science showed that when comparing students in Milwaukee who attended Montessori schools to those who attended public or other private schools, Montessori students more than held their own:

By the end of kindergarten, the Montessori children performed better on standardized tests of reading and math, engaged in more positive interaction on the playground, and showed more advanced social cognition and executive control. They also showed more concern for fairness and justice. At the end of elementary school, Montessori children wrote more creative essays with more complex sentence structures, selected more positive responses to social dilemmas, and reported feeling more of a sense of community at their school (Lillard & Else-Quest, 2006).

Martin Buber: Teachers are more than Cheerleaders

Martin Buber's thinking on education stands as a counterweight to child-centered theories of learning, where the child's experience, and not his or her intellectual development, was most important. While the Austrian-Israeli Buber (1878-1965) was not one to praise authoritarian forms of teaching where students were emotionally (or even physically) abused, he was also wary of educational theories that left teachers without any authority in the classroom:

Buber, for his part, is unable to conceive of such a teacher in the role of an altogether uncommitted bystander. He cannot accept that aspect of the doctrine of the New Education which prohibits the teacher from making demands on the pupil, and limits the teacher's role to guiding the pupil to sources of information and to methods of approach only when the pupil is moved to request guidance. Buber believes that the teacher should adopt the role of critical guide and directing spirit. He argues that in no way can such an approach be regarded as coercive; although the teacher's role is founded on the principle of freedom, his function also expresses a point of view and an orientation (Cohen, 1979, p. 85).

A.S. Neill: Is School a Good Thing?

Writing between the two world wars, Buber's thinking on this subject echoed the work of A.S. Neill (1883-1973), a British educational theorist who founded the progressive Summerhill school in 1921. Neill understood Buber's work as a warning not to confuse freedom and permissiveness. For Neill, as for Buber, permissive education is the antithesis of an education in which a student is given a degree of freedom as he or she develops self-control. Without these limits, Buber argues, teachers abdicate their vital role as a "critical guide and directing spirit" for the young minds in their charge.

But Neill also took Buber's ideas in a new direction. Neill founded Summerhill School with the idea that student happiness required that they not be compelled to attend classes. Neill's 1960 book Summerhill helped spread his ideas to the United States, where they found a receptive audience within the Counterculture movement of the 1960s. Eventually Neill's ideas became the impetus for the "unschooling" movement, which holds that students learn best when they are taught outside of school by their parents. Many homeschooling families also subscribe to Neill's ideas.

Further Insights

John Dewey & Trans-Atlantic Education Reform

American John Dewey (1859-1952) is almost universally acknowledged as the intellectual father of what became known as the Progressive movement in education. Like Buber, however, Dewey expressed concern about the "one-sided emphasis … upon pupils at the expense of subject matter" (cited in Biesta & Miedema, 1996, p. 4).

Dewey is a prototypical example of an intellectual in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where the provenance of an idea - whether American or European or otherwise - was largely irrelevant. He was perhaps first in a line of American educators whose ideas, themselves influenced by European philosophy and psychology, were refined in an American context and then re-imported into Europe, where they exercised varying degrees of influence on leading pedagogues.

Although Dewey himself never visited Europe until he was nearly middle aged, the ideas of leading European intellectuals came down to him through his professors at university. The most prominent of these intellectuals, and the one that would have the most lasting influence on Dewey, was the German idealist philosopher Hegel. Though he later parted ways with Hegel on many issues, Dewey self-consciously embraced Hegel's belief in "the power exercised by the cultural environment in shaping ideas, beliefs, and intellectual attitudes of individuals" (Biesta & Miedema, 1996, p. 7).

As an educational theorist, Dewey entered into a decades-long dialogue with the two prevailing educational orthodoxies of his age -- Hegelianism and Herbartism, both European imports - and, in true Hegelian form, created a synthesis:

He criticized the Hegelians for their failure to connect the subject matter of the curriculum to the interests and activities of the child. Dewey argued that it is psychologically "impossible to call forth an activity without some interest" (Dewey 1972c, p. 115).

But in the very same article Dewey also criticized the Herbartians, and other advocates of a strictly child-centered curriculum (most notably, representatives of the child study movement), for their failure to connect the interest and activities of the child to the subject matter of the curriculum. Here Dewey argued that "little can be accomplished by setting up interest as an end in itself" (Dewey 1972c, p. 146). Dewey's idea that the ultimate problem of all education was "to co-ordinate the psychological and the social factors" (Dewey 1972n, p. 224) (Biesta & Miedema, 1996, p. 8).

Over the course of a life lived nearly to age 100, Dewey had the rare privilege for an academic of seeing some of his ideas on education come into practice. This happened not only in his native United States, but also in Russia and Turkey. The Russian example is perhaps most relevant to our discussion:

Since 1907, when Dewey's The School and Society was translated into Russian, his work had attracted a lot of attention, and a number of influential Russian educationalists such as Shatsky, his colleague Zelenko, Krupskaya, Lunacharsky, and Blonsky had been influenced by Dewey's ideas, especially, according to Passow, by his democratic model of the school and his ideas about the organization of the children's vital activities (see Passow 1982, p. 406; see also Rogatcheva 1993a). During the first two decennia, Dewey's views were brought into practice in the Moscow Settlement Program and in Shatsky's and Zelenko's summer colony, Bodraya Zhyzn (Rogatcheva 1993a; Dewey [1928] 1984a, p. 225) (Biesta & Miedema, 1996, p. 9).

Sometimes, though, it would seem that Dewey is given too much credit for influencing education in certain European countries. In Great Britain, for example, Dewey came under fire in recent decades by leading British politicians, including former Prime Minister John Major, and leading educational experts, including Anthony O'Hear, for his allegedly negative influence on the British educational system. This is curious, especially given a recent review by Brehony (1997) of discussions within British educational circles in the first decades of the 20th century, which shows that Dewey's influence was marginal, or at least unoriginal. "Much of what was identified with Dewey might equally have been derived from Froebel or Montessori or any other writer in the child-centred tradition" (p. 429).

Terms & Concepts

Cognitive Development: A term used to describe the progression in mental functioning as a child grows. Pioneering work on the process was done by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget and the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky in the first part of the 20th century.

Comparative Education: A branch of pedagogical studies in which educational systems and philosophies in different parts of the world are examined and compared.

International Education: A term used to describe education within a global context.

Montessori Schools: A series of schools set up to implement the pedagogical philosophy of Italian educator Maria Montessori.

New Education: A theory of education popularized by German Johann Herbart that taught that the classroom syllabus should be organized around themes or units to, for example, get at common truths common across historical events. For Herbart and the disciples of his New Education philosophy, education's grand purpose was delivering moral and ethical lessons.

Pedagogy: A term that refers broadly to the sweep of theories about educational beliefs and practices.

Progressive Education: A school of pedagogy where importance was placed on tapping the life experience and cultural background of students in preparing and delivering lessons.

Teacher Education: A term used to encompass the strategies, theories and philosophies taught to teachers both before and during their teaching career.

Unschooling: A philosophy of education that holds that children are best educated outside of a formal school setting.

Vocational Education: A form of high school education that emphasizes learning a trade so that a student is prepared to immediately enter the job market upon graduation.

Bibliography

Biesta, G. J. J., & Miedema, S. (1996). Dewey in Europe: A case study on the international dimensions of the turn-of-the-century educational reform. American Journal of Education, 105 , 1-26.

Brehony, K.J. (1997). An 'undeniable' and 'disastrous' influence? Dewey and English education (1895-1939). Oxford Review of Education, 23 , 427-445.

Cohen, A. (1979). Martin Buber and changes in modern education. Oxford Review of Education, 5 , 81-103.

Donahoe, M., Cichucki, P., Coad-Bernard, S., Coe, B., & Scholtz, B. (2013). Best practices in Montessori secondary programs. Montessori Life, 25, 16-23. Retrieved December 15, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=87525787&site=ehost-live

Fraser, S.E. (1968). Some foreign views of American education: The nineteenth century background. Comparative Education Review, 12 , 300-309.

Lillard, A., and E. Else-Quest (2006). Evaluating Montessori education. Science 313, (5795), 1893-1894.

Papert, S. (1999, March 29). Jean Piaget. The Time 100: Most important people of the century. Time. Retrieved November 16, 2007 from: http://www.time.com/time/time100/scientist/profile/piaget.html.

Rolstad, K., & Kesson, K. (2013). Unschooling, then and now. Journal of Unschooling & Alternative Learning, 7, 28-71. Retrieved December 15, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=91024648&site=ehost-live

Veloso, L., & Estevinha, S. (2013). Differentiation versus homogenisation of education systems in Europe: Political aims and welfare regimes. International Journal of Educational Research, 62187-198. Retrieved December 15, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=91971317&site=ehost-live

Wagoner, J.L, Jr. (1993). "That knowledge most useful to us:" Thomas Jefferson's concept of "utility" in the education of republican citizens. Paper presented at the Conference on Thomas Jefferson and the Education of a Citizen in the American Republic (Washington, DC, May 13-15, 1993). (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED375052). Retrieved November 16, 2007 from EBSCO Online Education Research Database. http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/contentdelivery/servlet/ERICServlet?accno=ED375052

Walford, G., & Pickering, W.S.F. (1998). Durkheim and modern education. London: Routledge.

Suggested Reading

Berube, M.R. (1993). American school reform: Progressive, equity and excellence movements, 1883-1993. Westport, CT: Praeger.

DeVries, R. (n.d.). Vygotsky, Piaget, and education: A reciprocal assimilation of theories and educational practices. Cedar Falls, IA: Regents' Center for Early Developmental Education, University of Northern Iowa. Retrieved November 16, 2007, from the University of Northern Iowa http://www.uni.edu/freeburg/Publications/Vygotsky%20Piaget%20and%20Edu.pdf

McMurtrie, B. (2006). Europe's education chief seeks transatlantic cooperation. Chronicle of Higher Education, 52 , A39-A39. Retrieved November 18, 2007 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Search Premier. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=19905220&site=ehost-live

Silver, H. (1983). Education as history: Interpreting nineteenth-and twentieth-century education. London: Metheun.