The progressive child: Images of new education in the New Era (1920-1939)

In this article we address the question of whether the international new or progressive pedagogical trends that influenced the educational landscape in Europe during the first decades of the twentieth century produced a new image of the child. If so, what did this progressive child look like? The principles of the New Education Fellowship, the guidelines for new schools, and earlier image-based research provided us with some preliminary answers. We have examined the validity of these answers by analysing a much larger set of images than had previously been used in research. This dataset consisted of all images (N=944) published in The New Era in the period 1920-1939. We conclude that there are clear differences between the progressive child and the disciplined/passive child that appeared in the traditional classroom photographs, but there are also some similarities and variations within the progressive imagery.