What united progressive education movements?

Progressive education, movement that took form in Europe and the United States during the late 19th century as a reaction to the alleged narrowness and formalism of traditional education. One of its main objectives was to educate the "whole child"-that is, to attend to physical and emotional, as well as intellectual, growth. The school was conceived of as a laboratory in which the child was to take an active part-learning through doing. The theory was that a child learns best by actually performing tasks associated with learning. Creative and manual arts gained importance in the curriculum, and children were encouraged toward experimentation and independent thinking. The classroom, in the view of Progressivism's most influential theorist, the American philosopher John Dewey, was to be a democracy in microcosm.