Progress and progressive education: A plea for domain specificity

‘Education after progress’ is a historical argument because it declares the end to a period in which human beings believed in progress. On the question of origins, the discourse is right to locate the emergence of progress in eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought and, in particular, a philosophy of history of inexorable progress. On the question of endings, however, the discourse is fundamentally mistaken. ‘Education after progress,’ I argue, is as old as progressive education itself. Progressive education came into being when the concept of progress, after a brief hiatus in abstract universalism, reclaimed its former domain specificity. The article distinguishes progress from developmental improvement, absolute progress from relative progress, progress from progression and progressivism, all while elucidating the importance of approaching progressive education in domain-specific terms. A key feature of present-day progressivism is a confusion over its progressive intellectual inheritances. I call on progressive educationalists to regard progressive education as a form of social transformation and to identify the sites in the social world where gains can be evaluated alongside losses.