Abstract

In their influential book, The Child Centered School, Harold Rugg and Ann Schumaker wrote that, in traditional schools, students found “that behind each classroom door lurked a deceptive Pandora’s box of fears, restraints, and long, weary hours of suppression” (Rugg and Shumaker 1928, p. 4). The American child-centered, romantic progressives were known to quip that educators of the old, traditional education did not care what students were taught, as long as students didn’t like it. Isaac Kandel, the longtime critic of child-centered progressivism, retorted that, for progressives, “it does not matter what a student studies, so long as he does like it” (Kandel 1943, p. 49). And so a debate took root about several fundamental educational questions: just how important is it that students enjoy themselves, that they are self-motivated, and that they are interested in what they were doing? What role is left for the curriculum, discipline, and students’ intellectual inheritance? So the debat