Parker was one of the earliest progressive educators who conducted progressive education experiments and was called "the father of progressive education" by Dewey.
Parker's educational reform is called "Quincy Teaching Method". The main features of "Quincy Teaching Method" are as follows: First, he put forward the principles that "children must be the center of educational experience" and "education should adapt schools to children, not children to schools". Deeply influenced by Rousseau's naturalistic educational thought, he believed that children had innate ability and could study and work spontaneously. Understand the nature and characteristics of children and provide corresponding education. Secondly, he advocated that school curriculum should be linked with social practice. He abolished the original teaching mode and adopted a more natural method, giving up reciting and advocating understanding. He gave up the traditional fixed curriculum and chose something closely related to students' daily life as a teaching material. He opposes taking the subject curriculum as the center and advocates setting up a comprehensive curriculum with children as the center. Teaching emphasizes children's activities and observation of surrounding things, cultivates students' ability of self-expression, stimulates students' willingness to learn actively, and enables them to link learning content with daily life in real life. Third, pay attention to cultivating children's spirit of self-exploration and creation, and teachers should let students develop the habit of exploring and discovering truth. Fourthly, we should attach importance to the social function of schools. He believes that schools should form an ideal family, which will help children's socialization education.
2. Johnson School of Organic Education
He believes that the purpose of school education is to promote children's development in many aspects, strive to make children healthy, maximize their intelligence, and ensure the truth and nature of emotional life. This kind of education that promotes children's development in many aspects is organic education. In order to achieve this educational goal, he advocates understanding children's nature and needs and organizing different teaching contents and forms according to children's psychological development characteristics. It advocates gaining experience and mastering knowledge through various forms of activity courses, activities and doing. She advocates that the placement should be adjusted by children's natural development rather than the weight of knowledge, and emphasizes that teachers should respect the naturalness and initiative of children's organisms and their interests and needs, and pay attention to children's natural development. Education to meet needs is education to help children grow up. It is not to prepare for the future, nor to limit the natural development of children. She believes that interest is an extremely important factor in education.
3. Walter Grey System
He believes that schools should not only carry out knowledge education, but also carry out physical education, manual training, science education and art education to provide all children with opportunities for multi-faceted development. In order to achieve this goal, he put forward an educational reform plan, trying to combine school curriculum with school organization more. This is a gradual teaching system, also known as dual-school system, two-part system or group system. Based on Dewey's basic theories, such as education is life, school is society, and learning by doing, he takes social homework as school curriculum. Gray schools generally include four parts: sports ground, teachers, factories and shops, and auditorium. The course is also divided into four aspects: academic work, science, craft and family education, group activities and sports and games. As a socialized school, it embodies the relationship between education and society, school and society, and it is a primary social life similar to the professional model in real society, realizing the spirit of education promoting social progress advocated by progressivism. In the later period, because of the different educational viewpoints, educational theories and experiments also showed different orientations, the most important of which were child-centered orientation and social-centered orientation.
1. Child-centered educational theory and experiment
Parkhurst's (1) Dalton System
Dalton system is an organizational system that emphasizes individual differences and personality development, and pays attention to coordinating teaching and learning activities. Students should be allowed to study freely, arrange their studies according to their own needs, budget their time, and cultivate their ability to study and work independently. At the same time, we should also pay attention to the cooperation between teachers and students, and cultivate students' social consciousness. In Dalton school, classroom teaching, curriculum and age system have been abolished, and agreed or contracted learning has been implemented. Teachers must make clear their homework in written form, make arrangements according to the different characteristics of different disciplines and students, and fully consider the special needs and hobbies of each student. Students claim learning tasks in the form of contracts, allocate time freely according to their abilities and interests within the prescribed scope of homework requirements, and determine the learning progress. The laboratory is the place where students study. Different from previous teachers, this is a comprehensive place divided by disciplines, equipped with teachers to guide students, and students can enter and leave freely. Use tabular method to record students' completion of assigned homework, so as to help students check their learning progress and master exercises. Dalton system has three principles, namely, freedom, cooperation and individuality, so it is not only a teaching reform, but also an educational experiment based on the child-centered tendency, trying to achieve various purposes.
(2) China's Wennaka Plan
The purpose of Wienert Card Project is to develop each child's creativity and social consciousness, and to help each child get all-round and perfect development. The Venateka project has five main steps. First, according to the special situation of each child, formulate special goals and standards for individual training. Instead, a comprehensive diagnostic test is conducted to determine children's abilities. The third is to compile teaching materials for children to learn independently and correct mistakes independently. The fourth is the personalization of learning progress. Fifth, collective activities and creative activities. The Winnat Card Program embodies the basic orientation of taking children as the center, but it emphasizes the role of basic knowledge and skills in children's personality development, highlights the cultivation of children's self-education ability and social consciousness, and realizes the organic combination of individual teaching and intelligence test, expressionism and social goals.
2. Social-centered educational theory and experiment
Lager's social curriculum enjoys a high reputation in social-centered educational theories and experiments. The primary task of the experiment is to establish the principle of course selection from two aspects: cognition and social problems. First of all, find out the important concepts used from the works of recognized social scientists with important influence, and analyze the frequency and importance of these concepts. The second is to find some central topics from the major issues in contemporary society. On the basis of the above two aspects, the framework of social science is established with concepts, problems and topics. The basic idea is to further expand the topic into a problem around the central topic. On this basis, the concept is used to analyze and study the problem. In this framework, facts and materials are widely collected from various branches of social science. In this way, a modular social science textbook has been formed. Lager's social course is a unit course in form, a problem-centered course and a child-centered course, but in essence it pays great attention to the formation of concepts and ideas, aiming at letting students understand and correctly understand society. Therefore, children's center and social center, children and knowledge, knowledge update and knowledge structure are taken into account.