Ancient Plato of
Plato (
Berlin,
Altes Museum)
Plato's educational philosophy was grounded in a vision of an ideal
Republic wherein the
individual was best served by being subordinated to a just society due to a shift in emphasis that departed from his predecessors. The mind and body were to be considered separate entities. In the dialogues of
Phaedo, written in his "middle period" (360 BCE), Plato expressed his distinctive views about the nature of knowledge, reality, and the soul:When the soul and body are united, then nature orders the soul to rule and govern, and the body to obey and serve. Now which of these two functions is akin to the divine? and which to the mortal? Does not the divine appear ... to be that which naturally orders and rules, and the mortal to be that which is subject and servant?On this premise, Plato advocated removing children from their mothers' care and raising them as
wards of the state, with great care being taken to differentiate children suitable to the various castes, the highest receiving the most education, so that they could act as guardians of the city and care for the less able. Education would be
holistic, including facts, skills, physical discipline, and music and art, which he considered the highest form of endeavor. Plato believed that talent was distributed non-genetically and thus must be found in children born in any
social class. He built on this by insisting that those suitably
gifted were to be trained by the state so that they might be qualified to assume the role of a
ruling class. What this established was essentially a system of selective
public education premised on the assumption that an educated minority of the population were, by virtue of their education (and inborn educability), sufficient for healthy governance. Plato's writings contain some of the following ideas: Elementary education would be confined to the guardian class till the age of 18, followed by two years of
compulsory military training and then by
higher education for those who qualified. While elementary education made the soul responsive to the environment, higher education helped the soul to search for truth which illuminated it. Both boys and girls receive the same kind of education. Elementary education consisted of music and gymnastics, designed to train and blend gentle and fierce qualities in the individual and create a harmonious person. At the age of 20, a selection was made. The best students would take an advanced course in
mathematics,
geometry,
astronomy and harmonics. The first course in the scheme of higher education would last for ten years. It would be for those who had a flair for science. At the age of 30 there would be another selection; those who qualified would study dialectics and
metaphysics,
logic and
philosophy for the next five years. After accepting junior positions in the army for 15 years, a man would have completed his theoretical and practical education by the age of 50.
Aristotle from 330 BC. Only fragments of
Aristotle's treatise
On Education are still in existence. We thus know of his philosophy of education primarily through brief passages in other works. Aristotle considered human nature,
habit and
reason to be equally important forces to be cultivated in education.Thus, for example, he considered repetition to be a key tool to develop good habits. The teacher was to lead the student systematically; this differs, for example, from Socrates' emphasis on questioning his listeners to bring out their own ideas (though the comparison is perhaps incongruous since
Socrates was dealing with adults). Aristotle placed great emphasis on balancing the theoretical and practical aspects of subjects taught. Subjects he explicitly mentions as being important included reading, writing and mathematics; music; physical education; literature and history; and a wide range of sciences. He also mentioned the importance of play. One of education's primary missions for Aristotle, perhaps its most important, was to produce good and
virtuous citizens for the
polis.
All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth. Medieval Ibn Sina In the
medieval Islamic world, an elementary
school was known as a
maktab, which dates back to at least the 10th century. Like
madrasahs (which referred to higher education), a maktab was often attached to a
mosque. In the 11th century,
Ibn Sina (known as
Avicenna in the West), wrote a chapter dealing with the
maktab entitled "The Role of the Teacher in the Training and Upbringing of Children", as a guide to teachers working at
maktab schools. He wrote that children can learn better if taught in
classes instead of individual tuition from private
tutors, and he gave a number of reasons for why this is the case, citing the value of
competition and
emulation among pupils as well as the usefulness of group
discussions and
debates. Ibn Sina described the
curriculum of a
maktab school in some detail, describing the curricula for two stages of education in a
maktab school. Ibn Sina wrote that children should be sent to a
maktab school from the age of 6 and be taught
primary education until they reach the age of 14. During which time, he wrote that they should be taught the
Qur'an,
Islamic metaphysics,
language,
literature,
Islamic ethics, and manual skills (which could refer to a variety of practical skills). The
empiricist theory of
tabula rasa was also developed by Ibn Sina. He argued that the "human
intellect at birth is rather like a
tabula rasa, a pure potentiality that is actualized through education and comes to know" and that knowledge is attained through "
empirical familiarity with objects in this world from which one abstracts universal concepts" which is developed through a "
syllogistic method of
reasoning; observations lead to prepositional statements, which when compounded lead to further abstract concepts." He further argued that the intellect itself "possesses levels of development from the material intellect (''al-'aql al-hayulani
), that potentiality that can acquire knowledge to the active intellect (al-'aql al-fa'il''), the state of the human intellect in conjunction with the perfect source of knowledge".
Ibn Tufail In the 12th century, the
Andalusian-
Arabian philosopher and novelist
Ibn Tufail (known as "Abubacer" or "Ebn Tophail" in the West) demonstrated the
empiricist theory of '
tabula rasa' as a
thought experiment through his
Arabic philosophical novel,
Hayy ibn Yaqzan, in which he depicted the development of the mind of a
feral child "from a tabula rasa to that of an adult, in complete isolation from society" on a
desert island, through
experience alone. Some scholars have argued that the
Latin translation of his
philosophical novel,
Philosophus Autodidactus, published by
Edward Pococke the Younger in 1671, had an influence on
John Locke's formulation of tabula rasa in "
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding".
Modern Michel de Montaigne Child education was among the psychological topics that
Michel de Montaigne wrote about. His essays
On the Education of Children,
On Pedantry, and
On Experience explain the views he had on child education. Some of his views on child education are still relevant today. Montaigne's views on the education of children were opposed to the common educational practices of his day. Montaigne also thought that tutors should encourage the natural curiosity of students and allow them to question things. "If men are for a long time accustomed only to one sort or method of thoughts, their minds grow stiff in it, and do not readily turn to another. It is therefore to give them this freedom, that I think they should be made to look into all sorts of knowledge, and exercise their understandings in so wide a variety and stock of knowledge. But I do not propose it as a variety and stock of knowledge, but a variety and freedom of thinking, as an increase of the powers and activity of the mind, not as an enlargement of its possessions." Locke expressed the belief that education maketh the man, or, more fundamentally, that the mind is an "empty cabinet", with the statement, "I think I may say that of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education." Locke also wrote that "the little and almost insensible impressions on our tender infancies have very important and lasting consequences." He argued that the "
associations of ideas" that one makes when young are more important than those made later because they are the foundation of the self: they are, put differently, what first mark the
tabula rasa. In his
Essay, in which is introduced both of these concepts, Locke warns against, for example, letting "a foolish maid" convince a child that "goblins and sprites" are associated with the night for "darkness shall ever afterwards bring with it those frightful ideas, and they shall be so joined, that he can no more bear the one than the other." "Associationism", as this theory would come to be called, exerted a powerful influence over eighteenth-century thought, particularly
educational theory, as nearly every educational writer warned parents not to allow their children to develop negative associations. It also led to the development of
psychology and other new disciplines with
David Hartley's attempt to discover a biological mechanism for associationism in his
Observations on Man (
1749).
Jean-Jacques Rousseau ]
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, though he paid his respects to Plato's philosophy, rejected it as impractical due to the decayed state of society. Rousseau also had a different theory of human development; where Plato held that people are born with skills appropriate to different castes (though he did not regard these skills as being inherited), Rousseau held that there was one developmental process common to all humans. This was an intrinsic, natural process, of which the primary behavioral manifestation was curiosity. This differed from Locke's '
tabula rasa' in that it was an active process deriving from the child's nature, which drove the child to learn and adapt to its surroundings. Rousseau wrote in his book
Emile that all children are perfectly designed organisms, ready to learn from their surroundings so as to grow into virtuous adults, but due to the malign influence of corrupt society, they often fail to do so. Rousseau advocated an educational method which consisted of removing the child from society—for example, to a country home—and alternately conditioning him through changes to his environment and setting traps and puzzles for him to solve or overcome. Rousseau was unusual in that he recognized and addressed the potential of a problem of legitimation for teaching. He advocated that adults always be truthful with children, and in particular that they never hide the fact that the basis for their authority in teaching was purely one of physical coercion: "I'm bigger than you." Once children reached the age of reason, at about 12, they would be engaged as free individuals in the ongoing process of their own. He once said that a child should grow up without adult interference and that the child must be guided to suffer from the experience of the natural consequences of his own acts or behaviour. When he experiences the consequences of his own acts, he advises himself. "Rousseau divides development into five stages (a book is devoted to each). Education in the first two stages seeks to the senses: only when Émile is about 12 does the tutor begin to work to develop his mind. Later, in Book 5, Rousseau examines the education of Sophie (whom Émile is to marry). Here he sets out what he sees as the essential differences that flow from sex. 'The man should be strong and active; the woman should be weak and passive' (Everyman edn: 322). From this difference comes a contrasting education. They are not to be brought up in ignorance and kept to housework: Nature means them to think, to will, to love to cultivate their minds as well as their persons; she puts these weapons in their hands to make up for their lack of strength and to enable them to direct the strength of men. They should learn many things, but only such things as suitable' (Everyman edn.: 327)." Émile
Immanuel Kant Immanuel Kant believed that education differs from training in that the former involves thinking whereas the latter does not. In addition to educating reason, of central importance to him was the development of character and teaching of moral
maxims. Kant was a proponent of public education and of learning by doing.
Charlotte Mason Charlotte Mason was a British educator who invested her life in improving the quality of children's education. Her ideas led to a method used by some homeschoolers. Mason's philosophy of education is probably best summarized by the principles given at the beginning of each of her books. Two key mottos taken from those principles are "Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life" and "Education is the science of relations." She believed that children were born persons and should be respected as such; they should also be taught the Way of the Will and the Way of Reason. Her motto for students was "I am, I can, I ought, I will." Charlotte Mason believed that children should be introduced to subjects through living books, not through the use of "compendiums, abstracts, or selections." She used abridged books only when the content was deemed inappropriate for children. She preferred that parents or teachers read aloud those texts (such as Plutarch and the Old Testament), making omissions only where necessary.
20th and 21st century Rudolf Steiner (Waldorf education) Waldorf education (also known as Steiner or Steiner-Waldorf education) is a humanistic approach to pedagogy based upon the educational philosophy of the Austrian philosopher
Rudolf Steiner, the founder of
anthroposophy. Now known as
Waldorf or Steiner education, his pedagogy emphasizes a balanced development of
cognitive,
affective/
artistic, and practical skills (head, heart, and hands). Schools are normally self-administered by faculty; emphasis is placed upon giving individual teachers the freedom to develop creative methods. Steiner's theory of child development divides education into three discrete developmental stages predating but with close similarities to the stages of development described by
Piaget. Early childhood education occurs through imitation; teachers provide practical activities and a healthy environment. Steiner believed that young children should meet only goodness. Elementary education is strongly arts-based, centered on the teacher's creative authority; the elementary school-age child should meet beauty. Secondary education seeks to develop the judgment, intellect, and practical idealism; the adolescent should meet truth. Learning is interdisciplinary, integrating practical, artistic, and conceptual elements. The approach emphasizes the role of the imagination in learning, developing thinking that includes a creative as well as an analytic component. The educational philosophy's overarching goals are to provide young people the basis on which to develop into free, morally responsible and integrated individuals, and to help every child fulfill his or her unique destiny, the existence of which anthroposophy posits. Schools and teachers are given considerable freedom to define curricula within collegial structures.
John Dewey in 1902 In
Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education,
John Dewey stated that education, in its broadest sense, is the means of the "social continuity of life" given the "primary ineluctable facts of the birth and death of each one of the constituent members in a social group". Education is therefore a necessity, for "the life of the group goes on." Dewey was a proponent of
Educational Progressivism and was a relentless campaigner for reform of education, pointing out that the
authoritarian, strict, pre-ordained knowledge approach of modern traditional education was too concerned with delivering knowledge, and not enough with understanding students' actual experiences. In 1896, Dewey opened the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago in an institutional effort to pursue together rather than apart "utility and culture, absorption and expression, theory and practice, [which] are [indispensable] elements in any educational scheme. As the unified head of the departments of Philosophy, Psychology and Pedagogy, John Dewey articulated a desire to organize an educational experience where children could be more creative than the best of progressive models of his day.
Transactionalism as a pragmatic philosophy grew out of the work he did in the Laboratory School. The two most influential works that stemmed from his research and study were
The Child and the Curriculum (1902) and
Democracy and Education (1916). Dewey wrote of the dualisms that plagued educational philosophy in the latter book: "Instead of seeing the educative process steadily and as a whole, we see conflicting terms. We get the case of the child vs. the curriculum; of the individual nature vs. social culture." Dewey found that the preoccupation with facts as knowledge in the educative process led students to memorize "ill-understood rules and principles" and while second-hand knowledge learned in mere words is a beginning in study, mere words can never replace the ability to organize knowledge into both useful and valuable experience.
Maria Montessori and
Samuel Sidney McClure The Montessori method arose from Dr.
Maria Montessori's discovery of what she referred to as "the child's true normal nature" in 1907, which happened in the process of her experimental observation of young children given freedom in an environment prepared with materials designed for their self-directed learning activity. The method itself aims to duplicate this experimental observation of children to bring about, sustain and support their true natural way of being.
William Heard Kilpatrick William Heard Kilpatrick was a
US American philosopher of education and a colleague and a successor of
John Dewey. He was a major figure in the
progressive education movement of the early 20th century. Kilpatrick developed the
Project Method for early childhood education, which was a form of
Progressive Education organized curriculum and classroom activities around a subject's central theme. He believed that the role of a teacher should be that of a "guide" as opposed to an authoritarian figure. Kilpatrick believed that children should direct their own learning according to their interests and should be allowed to explore their environment, experiencing their learning through the natural senses. Proponents of Progressive Education and the Project Method reject traditional schooling that focuses on memorization, rote learning, strictly organized classrooms (desks in rows; students always seated), and typical forms of assessment.
William Chandler Bagley William Chandler Bagley taught in elementary schools before becoming a professor of education at the University of Illinois, where he served as the Director of the School of Education from 1908 until 1917. He was a professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia, from 1917 to 1940. An opponent of pragmatism and progressive education, Bagley insisted on the value of knowledge for its own sake, not merely as an instrument, and he criticized his colleagues for their failure to emphasize systematic study of academic subjects. Bagley was a proponent of
educational essentialism.
A. S. Neill A. S. Neill founded
Summerhill School, the oldest existing
democratic school in Suffolk, England, in 1921. He wrote a number of books that now define much of contemporary democratic education philosophy. Neill believed that the happiness of the child should be the paramount consideration in decisions about the child's upbringing, and that this happiness grew from a sense of personal freedom. He felt that deprivation of this sense of freedom during childhood, and the consequent unhappiness experienced by the repressed child, was responsible for many of the psychological disorders of adulthood.
Martin Heidegger Martin Heidegger's philosophizing about education was primarily related to higher education. He believed that teaching and research in the university should be unified and that students should be taught "to focus on and explicitly investigate the ontological presuppositions which implicitly guide research in each domain of knowledge," an approach he believed would "encourage revolutionary transformation in the sciences and humanities."
Jean Piaget Jean Piaget was a
Swiss developmental psychologist known for his
epistemological studies with children. His
theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "
genetic epistemology". Piaget placed great importance on the education of children. As the Director of the International Bureau of Education, he declared in 1934 that "only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual." Piaget created the International Centre for Genetic
Epistemology in
Geneva in 1955 and directed it until 1980. According to
Ernst von Glasersfeld, Jean Piaget is "the great pioneer of the
constructivist theory of knowing." Jean Piaget described himself as an
epistemologist, interested in the process of the qualitative development of knowledge. As he says in the introduction of his book
Genetic Epistemology (): "What the genetic epistemology proposes is discovering the roots of the different varieties of knowledge, since its elementary forms, following to the next levels, including also the scientific knowledge."
Mortimer Jerome Adler Mortimer Jerome Adler was an
American philosopher, educator, and popular author. As a philosopher he worked within the
Aristotelian and
Thomistic traditions. He lived for the longest stretches in
New York City,
Chicago,
San Francisco, and
San Mateo, California. He worked for
Columbia University, the
University of Chicago,
Encyclopædia Britannica, and Adler's own Institute for Philosophical Research. Adler was married twice and had four children. Adler was a proponent of
educational perennialism.
Harry S. Broudy Harry S. Broudy's philosophical views were based on the tradition of classical realism, dealing with truth, goodness, and beauty. However he was also influenced by the modern philosophy existentialism and instrumentalism. In his textbook Building a Philosophy of Education he has two major ideas that are the main points to his philosophical outlook: The first is truth and the second is universal structures to be found in humanity's struggle for education and the good life. Broudy also studied issues on society's demands on school. He thought education would be a link to unify the diverse society and urged the society to put more trust and a commitment to the schools and a good education.
Jerome Bruner Another important contributor to the inquiry method in education is
Jerome Bruner. His books
The Process of Education and
Toward a Theory of Instruction are landmarks in conceptualizing learning and curriculum development. He argued that any subject can be taught in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development. This notion was an underpinning for his concept of the "
spiral" (
helical) curriculum which posited the idea that a curriculum should revisit basic ideas, building on them until the student had grasped the full formal concept. He emphasized intuition as a neglected but essential feature of productive thinking. He felt that interest in the material being learned was the best stimulus for learning rather than external motivation such as grades. Bruner developed the concept of
discovery learning which promoted learning as a process of constructing new ideas based on current or past knowledge. Students are encouraged to discover facts and relationships and continually build on what they already know.
Paulo Freire A Brazilian philosopher and educator committed to the cause of educating the impoverished peasants of his nation and
collaborating with them in the pursuit of their liberation from what he regarded as "oppression",
Paulo Freire is best known for his attack on what he called the "banking concept of education", in which the student was viewed as an empty account to be filled by the teacher. Freire also suggests that a deep reciprocity be inserted into our notions of teacher and student; he comes close to suggesting that the teacher-student dichotomy be completely abolished, instead promoting the roles of the participants in the classroom as the teacher-student (a teacher who learns) and the student-teacher (a learner who teaches). In its early, strong form this kind of classroom has sometimes been criticized on the grounds that it can mask rather than overcome the teacher's authority. Aspects of the Freirian philosophy have been highly influential in academic debates over "participatory development" and development more generally. Freire's emphasis on what he describes as "emancipation" through interactive participation has been used as a rationale for the participatory focus of development, as it is held that 'participation' in any form can lead to empowerment of poor or marginalised groups. Freire was a proponent of
critical pedagogy. "He participated in the import of European doctrines and ideas into Brazil, assimilated them to the needs of a specific socio-economic situation, and thus expanded and refocused them in a thought-provoking way"
John Holt In 1964
John Holt published his first book,
How Children Fail, asserting that the academic failure of schoolchildren was not
despite the efforts of the schools, but actually
because of the schools.
How Children Fail ignited a firestorm of controversy. Holt was catapulted into the American national consciousness to the extent that he made appearances on major TV talk shows, wrote book reviews for
Life magazine, and was a guest on the
To Tell The Truth TV game show. In his follow-up work,
How Children Learn, published in 1967, Holt tried to elucidate the learning process of children and why he believed school short circuits that process.
Nel Noddings Nel Noddings' first sole-authored book
Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984) followed close on the 1982 publication of
Carol Gilligan's ground-breaking work in the ethics of care
In a Different Voice. While her work on ethics continued, with the publication of
Women and Evil (1989) and later works on moral education, most of her later publications have been on the philosophy of education and
educational theory. Her most significant works in these areas have been
Educating for Intelligent Belief or Unbelief (1993) and
Philosophy of Education (1995). Noddings' contribution to education philosophy centers around the
ethic of care. Her belief was that a caring teacher-student relationship will result in the teacher designing a differentiated curriculum for each student, and that this curriculum would be based around the students' particular interests and needs. The teacher's claim to care must not be based on a one time virtuous decision but an ongoing interest in the students' welfare. ==See also==