Review of: The New Leaven

Reviews the book "The New Leaven" by Stanwood Cobb . In this book, Stanwood Cobb has written an important, and what is even more important, an extremely readable interpretation of the whole progressive movement in education. His manner is warm and conversational rather than lectury. He has his facts straight. And if he is biased, it is so decidedly in favor of the human as against the mechanical in teaching and administration, that he needs no apologist. In brief, he pleads Jesus rather than Hegel: Schools made for men, and not men for schools. The book holds an infinity of interests, ranging all the way from challenge to comfort, for parents, teachers, administrators who hold the power of help or hindrance over youngsters going over the road from the nursery to the university. Sensibly enough, Cobb makes no attempt at a definition of "progressive" education. Instead, he formulates ten principles based on descriptions offered by thirty-two progressive teachers from schools all over the country. With these ten principles as text, he writes ten brilliant, indignant, amusing chapters, full of excellent human stuff of what most schools are, what all schools might be and ought to be, and some few, very few schools are decently approximating toward the progressive ideal. In those ten chapters a reviewer is faced with an embarrassment of riches and would do a poor service to the prospective reader if he went into detail.