Teacher Says "Write an Essay on the Glories of Progessivism"

Sometimes when I am making copies, I find lessons and projects from other teacher's on the copy machine. One such essay that I recently found for a US History class was called "Progressive Reforms," and asked students to write a several page essay detailing all the progressive reforms of US Presidents Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson. Students were encouraged to write what the reform was and how it helped society. Suggested reforms for students to learn about and glorify were Roosevelt's trustbusting or founding of the Department of Commerce and Labor or Pure Food and Drug Act, Taft's conservation efforts or the Mann Elkins Act, or Wilson's 'reforms' of the banks and 'reforms' of tariffs.

This lesson is a good example of the kind of prevalent liberal bias that exists in education today. Although these are all proper subjects to learn about and important to US history and there is nothing wrong with learning about these subjects in isolation, this essay does demonstrate liberal bias because of the context that these subjects are studied and the absence of other things being studied.

The context that Progressivism is taught in schools is that society needed to be reformed because things were really bad in America under the conservative administrations of Republican McKinley and Democrat Cleveland, who favored businesses and limited government and traditional values to the determinant of our nation. Progressives on the other hand were the good guys in the story of American history, using the power of government to override the objections of states, localities, and minorities so that they could jam through regulations of business and society to give increased power to groups that they favored. Admittedly some good was done by these changes- national parks are nice- but at the very least some of the reforms that are taught to students as unqualified and unconditional successes are not.

Arguments could made that the glorification of the Progressive era is distorting the reality of the situation- students learn that Roosevelt broke up Standard Oil because it was an evil monopoly run by a bad millionaire, but that is not the real story at all. Students read and memorize The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and are told that this is an example of why we need a federal Food and Drug administration, but they never learn any criticisms of this book or the arguments that it advances or the legacy that it led to. Students learn about 'reforming banks', but what is meant by 'reform' is actually a big government-big business partnership called the Federal Reserve System of Banks, which many (especially the Ron Paul types) think is very bad. And these are just a couple examples.

The point is that students are being asked in this essay to talk about all that was good about the Progressive movement after reading a textbook about how good the Progressive movement was, and later on these students will become voters who might perhaps believe what they read and wrote about. Again, that's not to say that students should not learn about the good aspects of the Progressive movement, but it is to say that it demonstrates liberal bias in education that is deep and thorough when students learn about events and issues from one slant or agenda only and do not spend equal time learning about other issues from other slants or agendas (for example, students spend considerable time on the Progressive Era, but little time on the successful economic time period of the 1920's or the foreign policy successes of Taft or the return to normal economic growth that was achieved under Eisenhower).

The effect of this kind of education in every school in our entire country speaks to the size of the bias and slant that education needs to overcome if it is to no longer be liberally biased.