We finally got to an American educator! Harold Rugg was interested in education as tool of social progression. He said

“the life and program of the school must be designed directly from the culture of the people, not from a classics-entrenched curriculum. Now is the time to build not a subject-centered school but a truly society-centered as well as a child-centered one.”

A good idea? Not sure. Here’s my initial reaction after reading this quote and none of the rest of the article yet: Uh, what? But what about learning, well, actual things? This sounds like we’re going to hand kids a stack of magazines that came out this week then send them on their way.

As it turns out, Rugg’s ideas weren’t as crazy as that quote made them sound. He actually did use relatively “standard” curricula for math and the other hard sciences. It was in the social sciences that he implemented his ideas – and in a pretty interesting way. Instead of having the standard geography, history, etc., Rugg implemented a series of problem-focused units like global agriculture, industrialization, corporate economy, and wealth distribution inequalities. Now if these units involved learning about the history of those subjects and how the problems came about, I think that might actually be a really interesting way to learn about those subjects – as well as the problems in them that society was facing at the time (in this case, around the Great Depression).

Unfortunately (I think) Rugg’s educational materials came under attack in the 1940s for being too liberal. Within several more years, they’d been pulled from almost all of the school districts they’d been implemented in. But what a great idea. It’s so much easier to remember a lot of material when it’s all tied back to one thing – think of teaching an immunology class based solely on the problem of cancer or HIV…or even a neuroanatomy class based on the deleterious effects of Alzheimer’s! I like it.