Unfortunately, the progressive education, which was very popular during the 60's-70's in the US, has failed. Several of the comments here referred to "progressive" ideas (for more details look into the works of Dewey, Freire, Bertrand Russel), but what good are we unless we learn from our history? The new phase of progressive education in the US today has been researched over and over, and the findings are inconclusive: "progressive" students did not show consistent improvement in any educational measurament. As much as I, personally, highly support these ideas, the discussion is useless unless we face the evidential ineffectiveness of this method.