Response to article

Dear Folks,
Before our voices die down to faint echoes, I'd like to continue some of the dialogue we started at the retreat. I was as intrigued by the responses to the Inside Higher Ed article as I was with the article itself. They raised some issues that seem worthy of our continued exploration, amongst ourselves if not in that venue (interesting how even normally cantakerous academic debate becomes even more vituperous when disembodied).
I'm not sure we ever agreed on what we mean by "progressive." Is it really, historically and in our own minds, from "the left"? Is that language still useful and persuasive? In the sense of liberatory, maybe yes, but my own experience with left politics, of the sectarian variety, is that they were anything but liberatory. How do we distinguish between progressive education for adults and progressive education for college aged students? between undergraduate and graduate education? I hope that next time we meet, we have time to really tell our stories in a way that shares our actual practices with different learner populations, learning styles and stages of development, as well as different kinds of institutions.
I was most intrigued by the Civil War history (I'm not myself a Civil War History buff) and the implication, however "ironic," that the South was too "democratic" to win the war, and its suggestion that democracy is as passe as the aggrarian society the South was defending. Aside from the equation of "democracy" with lack of discipline (and more than a hint of anarchy), I can't say that my experience of progressive education was that it suffered from too much democracy-- quite the contrary. Does "democracy" mean faculty governance? Has faculty voice in academic affairs really led to chaos, defeat and economic disaster?
The idea of creating our own accrediting agency is certainly something we need to discuss together more fully, its obvious advantages and potential disadvantages. Whether we decide it's a good idea or not, it is certainly an empowering concept, helping us to imagine moving out from the margins into agency over our own affairs. My experience with "outside agitators" has been mostly positive, in terms of Vermont College programs, but for the Union doctoral program, it has been a disaster. Perhaps the issue is how administrators relate to the evaluators and what they expect from the accrediting agency itself.
But what distressed me most within the higher ed communal blog was the suggestion that progressive education has betrayed its own values, abusing students rather than helping them transform their lives. This brings me to some of the questions that emerged in the planning of the retreat, but which weren't directly addressed there. I'd like to share them with you here in hopes of some further fruitful dialogue around them:
1. What are the models each of us have in mind when we think "progressive education"?
2. Would P.E. developed among us today look like the sort we discuss in pursuit of something like a definition? What might P.E. look like if created anew now? (not a plan, not a model, just some ideas, flashing thoughts, notions, visions, quirky but appealing possibilities)
3. What forms of P.E. do we know work really well? For whom?
4. What forms of P.E. don't work so well? For whom?
5. How has P.E. been most effectly undone by unfriendly folks, institutions, values, our own failings, prejudices, or even ideals, etc. (not asking for war stories but for an analysis of the levers used and how they worked)
6. What possible new sources of support are there for current and new P.E. programs and institutions? What can we do to cultivate them?
Hope you are all well and thriving.
Margaret