Ancients vs. Moderns

Back during the Renaissance, scholars faced off in the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. At stake was the question whether the insights of an emerging modern science were superior, or still inferior, to the pronouncements of the ancients. One dimension of this debate involved the 16th century anatomist Andreas Vesalius contending rather forcefully that his methods and discoveries superseded the wisdom of the Roman physician Galen. Since that time, certainly, learned opinion in the West has tended to favor modern science over its Classical Greco-Roman counterpart, but…

It is interesting to note of Vesalius, and of many in the emerging modern West, that they more-or-less always referred to the Classics, and seem to have valued having a kind of intellectual continuum with them. Historical criticism today can probably do much to undermine their view--for example noting of modern republics how little resemblance they have to their ancient Roman counterpart--but the point is more that the moderns wanted to make reference to the Classics, and to older material in general. Troublesome as the specifics may have been, they seem to have valued that sense of continuity.

----------

So now to the present, and some help I offered to a friend working on a paper for an education class:

    me:  here's a math book from 1868!
    friend:  I'll check on it tomorrow!!
        Also, (education school) just made new rules: I can only use books from the last 10 years
    me:  really?!?!
    friend:  So, more than that, they said it's not valid. Since it's too old
        Yeaaah, sadly
        I have no idea why they decided it that way
        Totally disagree!!! X(

I feel like I have seen this attitude before, in several places, though perhaps more appropriate in some places than others. On the one hand, clearly there is no need to reinvent the wheel, or the Rosetta space probe for that matter. On the other, notwithstanding some pressures on my historian-colleagues to keep up with the latest literature, I find that my research frequently benefits from century-old sources that some of my contemporaries have missed or simply ignored. So, some questions so far as they apply to the education world:

I am willing to concede that my particular math book was probably irrelevant--mea culpa!--but let me extrapolate to some broader questions on principle:

• I ask this with some confessed ignorance, but what progress as a scholarly field has "progressive, practical arithmetic" enjoyed since 1868?
• What about on the teaching end: has the content significantly changed from what it was back then, relative to the average grade-school student?
• Along those same lines, are the teaching methods demonstrably better today, or even very different from their 19th century forebears, for this particular subject?

Moving outward, let me ask a few more questions:

• It is interesting to note my friend's instinct that older sources might have something of value, and her instructor's apparent disaffirmation of that instinct. So I'm curious, for modernists who really don't want to see older sources, why not--and why go so far as to stifle a student's curiosity?
• Confessing my own training as an historian, I would assert that the older stuff has value on those grounds (i.e. historical scholarship). I imagine that historians of education would broadly agree so far as that goes; but would they disagree on the pedagogical value of the older material?

Finally, well, let me just open the whole historian's can of worms…

• How do you cover Maria Montessori, who lived from 1870 to 1952? Her teaching methods seem to have taken their most distinctive shape ~1895-1915, with a substantial, global legacy up to the present day. For a class in 2015 on the Montessori teaching method, would students be expected to know only the latest literature on the subject, or her original work as well?
• What about the Feminist legacy, which has had a big influence on the contemporary academy, notwithstanding recent enrollment declines in Women's Studies programs? Mary Hawkesworth's Feminist Inquiry (2006) would be just about out of date according to my friend's professor, yet it seems to me that a student's feel for contemporary feminist (or, dare I say, women's) education could only benefit from reading some of Hawkesworth's most important predecessor texts: Friedan's Feminine Mystique (1963), Beauvoir's Second Sex (1949), and Chopin's Awakening (1897). Where do these foundational feminist texts fit in a modernist education curriculum?
• Moving properly to educational classics--at least so far as I can imagine them--what does the modernist education instructor make of Machiavelli's Prince, Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, and Education of a Christian Prince by Desiderius Erasmus? What about Rousseau's Emile or Pierre Chodleros de Laclos' de l'Education des Femmes, or, more recently and in a Christian vein, C.S. Lewis' Abolition of Man and Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Life Together?

In advocating these older sources, I don't mean to disdain the contributions of education scholars in the present day, any more than I would reject the findings of contemporary scientists carrying forward the legacy of Vesalius (in medicine or any other field) over the past ten years. Yet just as Vesalius made reference to Classical forebears like Galen--even if only to criticize them--I am led to wonder in this pedagogical extension of the ancients v. moderns debate how it came to pass that the "ancients" (by which I mean, functionally, anything before the 21st century) seem to have been rejected out of hand.

Or am I simply out of line in making my plea for the value of a few old books?