Livia Gersho — The 19th-Century Activist Who Tried to Transform Teaching

The daughter of a union worker and activist, Margaret Haley became a teacher at age 16. A few years later, she found her way to teacher education classes based on John Dewey’s ideas of progressivism and teaching as a profession.

Haley criticized the “factoryizing” of education that turned the classroom teacher into an “automaton.”…

Haley harnessed the progressive idea of democracy as the central purpose of schools.

“Haley argued that unionization would join progressivism’s democratic convictions to labor’s democratic practices, and thus, fulfill education’s responsibility to publicly uphold ‘the democratic ideal,’” Hlavacik writes.

Best line.

“Two ideals are struggling for supremacy in American life today: one the industrial ideal, dominating thru the supremacy of commercialism, which subordinates the worker to the product and the machine,” she said. “The other, the ideal of democracy, the ideal of the educators, which places humanity above machines, and demands that all activity shall be the expression of life.”

The struggle goes on.

JSTOR Daily
The 19th-Century Activist Who Tried to Transform Teaching
Livia Gersho