The theory and practice of emancipatory education in the United States owes much progressive educators such as John Dewey. Even though progressive education emerged in the late nineteenth century at the precise moment when the United States became a global imperial power, however, most historical accounts of American progressivism rely on a national narrative that obscures the United States’ place within global systems of power and domination.  Although a growing body of scholarship has examined the uptake of Dewey’s ideas around the world, even this scholarship has neglected the analysis of progressive education as a global imperial project. Instead, historians have focused on the ways that Dewey’s thought articulated with national traditions and contributed to nationally organized democratic educational projects.  Moreover, uptake offers a limited framework for understanding the impact of the traveling of ideas on their point of origin.

In order to illuminate the role of broader political, social and economic relations in the history of American progressivism, this study focuses on the US Southwest.  There, white settlers, long-time Hispano residents, recent Mexican immigrants, and Native Americans were all the focus of progressive educational projects. Moreover, progressive educators simultaneously drew on ideas and models from the United States and from such Mexican protégés of Dewey as Moisés Sáenz.

The paper focuses on Loyd Tireman’s work at Nambe in New Mexico and John Collier’s work on the Navaho reservation in Arizona as cases of Southwestern progressivism.  Nambe was school serving a Hispano community whose organization and pedagogy drew on existing US progressive community-centered schools and like them integrated agricultural work and other local activities and experiences into the curriculum.  Far more than its models however, Nambe integrated the production of traditional crafts into its curriculum. Although both whites and Native Americans lived in the vicinity of Nambe, no students were drawn from those groups.  A pivotal figure in white United States-Native American relations, John Collier had organized a progressive school in New York before administering the Navaho reservation and bringing progressive education to it.  The paper details the ideas and practices of Tireman and Collier, situating them in the range of Southwestern progressive educational activities.

The paper demonstrates that progressive enactments of self-direction and activity promoted both democratic engagement and an ideological rationale for settler colonialism.  Educators’ lessons consciously sought to fit students into different social positions. At the same time, far more than contemporary manifestations of progressivism elsewhere in the United States, progressivism in the Southwest simultaneously represented the lack of development of subject races and celebrated traditional cultural products.  In so doing, it both relied on cultural activities and differences to justify paternalistic mechanisms of authority and social control, and integrated subject peoples into subordinated positions within the existing capitalist order by promoting the production of traditional cultural objects for market.

The paper relies on a range of government reports, memoirs, and published accounts, as well as the personal papers of educator/reformers.