Progressive education developed in the first half of the 20th century in Denmark with its new ideas about the child and its potential for development. Child-centred education was to be an innovative and enlightened way of forming society anew, and its foundational notions institutionalised within education and is effective today (Øland 2012). In this paper, I show how the notion of ‘child’ and ‘development’ settled within education, yet as exclusive and racialized notions. Through explorations of thematic text collections about “rhythm, development of the child and mankind”, and “development of the child’s nature, cultural spheres and societies” culled from three pedagogical periodicals in the period 1928-1952, I demonstrate how the new progressive and universal powers of the child projects a narrow Western European ideal, which subordinates non-whites and is related to global exploitation. Despite elements of pluralistic thinking within progressivism, a belief in universal psychological and sociological stages keeps the non-white on a threshold of modernity without sufficient developmental power (cf. also Fallace 2015; Øland 2021; Ahmed 2012). Thus, I will conclude by discussing how progressivism holds epistemological mechanisms that are central to how racism functions; how race, location, and time therefore seem to inform what it means to be human. I will also consider the possibility of decolonising, i.e. undoing and unsettling, the Western European notions of ‘child’ and ‘development’ and thus what it means to be human with agency and power (McKittrick 2015).
References
Ahmed, Sara. 2012. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham ; London: Duke University Press.
Fallace, Thomas D. 2015. Race and the Origins of Progressive Education, 1880-1929. New York: Teachers College Press.
McKittrick, Katherine. 2015. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Durham: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822375852.
Øland, Trine. 2012. “‘Human Potential’ and Progressive Pedagogy: A Long Cultural History of the Ambiguity of ‘Race’ and ‘Intelligence.’” Race, Ethnicity and Education 15 (4): 561–85. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2011.618830.
———. 2021. “Progressivismens barnecentrering: hvide børn og ikke-hvide voksne.” [The child centeredness of progressivism: white children and non-white adults] TIDSSKRIFT FOR PROFESSIONSSTUDIER, no. 32: 20–27.