Progressive Education: Is There a “Real World” After This?

What might lie ahead is the “real world,” an idea of life post-education that erases the effects of student-faced disparities and oppression. Progressive education should seek rightfully to divest from this concept. 

The concept is as cold as the world it implies: the “real world” that is claimed to exist beyond education can be used as a relentlessly accurate descriptor of adult life, but it can also minimize the struggles that students face in real time. If there is a “real world” to prepare for, the beliefs behind progressive education are needed now more than ever. 

The “real world” is one that political theorist Jade Saab describes in a 2018 article as “a concept [that] rationalizes our servitude.” While the concept can be interpreted as an honest illustration of capitalism and its effects in adulthood, the “real world” serves to enforce it, rather than critique; this very distinction is why it’s important to decentralize from the “real world,” and to instill the values of progressive education whenever and wherever possible.

But to decentralize from this “real world” – if its nuances allow it to exist at all – is invariably a privilege. Progressive education is often found in small, private institutions, whose accesses can be limited by financial constraints; admissions can create prohibitive and exclusive environments. As expressed in the book Social Ecology and the Right to the City, “we have to be holistic and multi-dimensional in the way that we approach the issue of education…we have a role to educate ourselves and then educate others, to take these ideas out into the world.”

Regardless of its separation from the notions of the “real world,” progressive education should extend beyond the small environment or microcosm of a private school. This is not to say that these institutions should be deprived of this educational model – New Roads itself has been championed as a model for progressive education – but it is important that the beliefs behind progressive education are implemented with equity and accessibility in mind, staying true to the philosophy of progressivism as a whole. Put best by Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits, “education – whose benefits are concentrated in the extravagantly trained children of rich parents – must become open and inclusive.” There cannot be a more equitable world without it.

Progressive education can be summarized by treating students as individuals, rather than workers who need to be prepared; learning by experience; and attaining knowledge through critical thinking, historical analysis, and connecting the past to contemporary issues. For Mario Johonson – New Roads School director of student life, access, equity, and inclusion – progressive education places a necessary focus on “fulfilling your dreams, figuring out who you are, [and] maximizing the greatest expression of your potential as a human being.” 

At 26 years old, New Roads has positioned itself as a community that is “informed by diversity, equity, inclusion, progressivism, enlightenment, access to opportunities, and democratizing our possibilities,” according to Johonson; such values are also present in the school’s online mission statement. Though the school can only serve as one depiction of progressive education, it is clear that the work is far from over: as long as progressive ideals are almost entirely located in independent schools, the pursuit of equity is ever-growing and necessary. 

Johonson goes on to state that “New Roads does do a really phenomenal job, and does serve as an example, a model, for other institutions [looking] for how it can be done…not just copying us, but maybe picking up some of our design features, that can be incorporated into other institutions – other educational institutions – to create a more equitable, progressive, and humanistic framework for education.” Certainly, the values of an equitable, progressive, and humanistic education are integral to decentralizing from the capitalist ideal of a “real world” – one that is founded largely on erasing student oppression. But it is also important to note that the efforts to instill these values – in all forms of progressive education, New Roads included – cannot be labeled as finished. 

If the “real world” does exist, its effects are faced at disproportionate levels. This would also reflect the levels of oppression faced by students, which can occur at the intersection of race, class, ethnicity, gender, ability, and nationality; the marginalization of certain groups impacting every aspect of life, both within the concept of the “real world” and out. Given that the “real world” adheres to the narrative that life after education can only manifest as difficult – the prospect of it being described by Johonson as “traumatizing and anxiety-evoking”- how would this apply to those who are already affected? 

Progressive education, for one thing, presents itself as an amelioration to this issue: a “safe haven,” of sorts, that would provide an environment free from what is present externally. But when taking into account its rampant inaccessibility, its ties to private schools, and the work that must be done to increase its equity, Johonson proposes that we examine the design features that allow schools “to stipulate goals around DEI, progressivism, access…some of those broader goals that are now really stepping forth as being twenty-first century values.”

“I think we are all finally stepping into [that],” he says, “at least at the dialogue level.”