WHAT IS THE IDEA OF PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION ON THIS BLOG?

PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION, what does a term like that mean on this blog? Well, I am hopeful that some reader may eventually help me define such a term. I am clearly trying to put diverse ideological frameworks that I am selecting as "progressive" into the a sack labeled progressive. So a number of ideas are tossed into the same bag. I like them, I like to think they are more-or-less progressive frameworks as well.

Many of these frameworks are interrelated, at least I think various liberty and liberation notions are related. So take feminism or women's liberation. That seems like an obvious dimension of progressive thought and practice. It seems that as long as a feminism or women's liberation can help in liberating women from patriarchal oppression who can say it is anything else? Liberation theology or liberation theologies seems like another set of frameworks that are generally progressive. Abolitionism seems like a progressive framework as well, abolishing slavery that is. So we have mentioned three categories of liberation frameworks already and I guess these things, as different as they are seem intuitively similar and we can imagine them overlapping to some degree as well.

Most feminists oppose slavery, they are in that sense supporters of abolitionism, most of us are in some sense. So there you have the intersection of the set of abolitionisms and the set of feminisms. This is a sort of short hand approach, of course, since the various feminisms and abolitionisms may stray from what most of us regard a progressive values or progressive effects.

Similarly an abolitionist may or may not be a feminist or for womens liberation. Historically we have seen that some who opposed chattel slavery were also very patriarchal. Feminism and abolitionism don't necessarily overlap.

Liberation theologies. They may or may not be feminist in nature. I think of some of the liberation theologies in the Americas and it is difficult to imagine any of them justifying slavery. Liberation theologies often seems to advance the freedom and liberation of women.