In addition to Dewey, such prominent curriculum theorists as George Counts, Theodore Bramald, and Harold Rugg also made significant contributions to Progressivism in the early half of the 20th century in the United States. The Progressive Movement promoted the idea that students be encouraged as independent thinkers, creative beings, and expressive about their feelings. This was a sharp contrast from prevalent educational approaches rooted in social efficiency in the early 1900s in the United States. Such approaches did not foster the importance of individualism and creativity, and instead emphasized classroom control, management, and a structured curriculum that focused on basic skills. Two basic principles fostered in the Progressive Movement were continuity and interaction.
Continuity is the principle that each learning experience be nurtured by the previous experience.
Therefore, from a Progressive standpoint, the learning process is gradual. The second principle, interaction, denotes the concept that what was learned may possibly need revisions, adaptations, or be discarded all together because further research has claimed it to be false. Essentially, from this standpoint, assumptions need to be challenged in the continual search for absolute truth. Thus the interaction principle encouraged experimentalism, verification, and reconstruction. The Progressive Movement was at its peak in the 1930's during the Great Depression in the United States.