philosophy of american education: theorists

Hebraic Educational Tradition

Hebraic Educational Tradition

- Emphasize the importance of literacy and education for everyday life and devotion.
- Teaching youth cultural traditions to preserve culture.
- Reading, listening, memorizing, and recitation as teaching methods.

Greek and Roman Civilizations

- Answer questions such as what is true, good, and beautiful, with aim at developing good citizenship.
Sought to maintain culture by preserving values through storytelling.

Sophists

- Believed the way to power came from speech and rhetoric.
- The purpose of education was to develop these communication skills to become successful advocates and legislators

Socrates

- Knowledge is based on universal truth, this defended the academic freedom to think, question, and teach.
- Education should seek to teach moral excellence.
- Believed true knowledge was already present, just hidden away in the mind.

Plato

- Student of Socrates, founded the Academy which taught truth, virtue, justice, politics, and law.
- Followed Socrates in believing in Reminiscence, where individuals recall the ideas already present in their minds.
- Believed the human soul was spiritual.
- Since knowledge is universal and unchanging, we should teach things that are universal and unchanging.

John Amos Comenius

- Desired teachers to be caring individuals who respect the dignity of students.
- Did not feel that teachers should be pressuring students.
- Believed children learn when they are developmentally ready.
- Preparation of Teachers
o Use visual or kinesthetic strategies.
o Lessons should be organized around student experiences.
o General concepts over specifics.
o Lessons in sequence.

Rousseau

- Parisian intellectual who questioned the authority of the established church and monarchy, and even abandoned his own kids.
- Rejected that schools should socialize kids.
- A child's instincts and needs are good and should be satisfied.
- Believed more in sensations than words in teaching.
- Focused on stages of human development.

Horace Mann

- Given his poor status, we worked hard to earn his education.
- Worked to ensure others would not be denied educational opportunities.
- Worked to improve education, fighting to remove corporal punishment and keep the schools safe and sanitary.
- Received criticism for wanting to separate church and school.
- Best remembered for his efforts towards the common schools, or public schools, with education available for all.

piaget

developmental stages:

Sensorimotor Stage (Birth-2)
o Preoperational (2-7)
o Concrete Operational (7-11)
o Formal Operational (11-early adult)
§ Encourages students to explore and experiment.
§ Differentiate instruction.
§ Hands-on materials

Pestalozzi

- Nurture the holistic development in children.
- Beneficial in a fast-paced society
- Humans are naturally good; society is the problem.
- Reorganized schools
o Pre-service education programs
o Safe environments
o Object-centered instruction.
- General Method: Creating a great environment.
- Special method Direct sensory learning
- Differentiated Instruction

Howard Gardener

- Multiple Intelligences
o Body-kinesthetic
o Interpersonal
o Intrapersonal
o Linguistic
o Logical-Mathematical
o Musical
o Naturalist
o Spatial
- Differentiated Instruction

Friedrich Froebel

- Kindergarten = Children's Garden
- Child's spirituality could be actualized.
- Fun, playful, safe, learning environment.
- Emphasize the country's story, song, fables, and ultimately its culture

Maria Montessori

- Italian educator who developed an internationally popular method where everyone (boys and girls) was presented with various methods, materials, and activities to encourage students to learn based on what interests them.
- Believed children possess a need to work at what interests them without the teacher's influence.
- Fought against sexist stereotyping and built her first schools for the students living in the slums of Rome.

John Locke

- The mind is a blank slate or tabula rasa.
- Men are born without innate ideas, as opposed to predetermined good and evil nature.
- Emphasized knowledge taught during the younger years is more important than during maturity.
- Believed punishments are unhealthy and educators should teach by examples rather than rules. (Like Horace Mann)

Immanuel Kant

- Advocate of public education, learning by doing, a process we call training.
- "Above all things, obedience is an essential feature in the character of a child."
- Children should always obey and learn the virtue of duty because children's inclination to earn or do something is unreliable. Transgressions should be dealt with through punishment.
- Believed man has a radical evil in their nature.

Mortimer Adler

- American philosopher and educator, proponent of Educational Perennialism
o Perennialism: One should teach things based on principle, not facts.

Jerome Bruner

- The purpose of education is to facilitate thinking and problem-solving skills which can then be transferred to a range of situations.
- Education should also develop symbolic thinking in children.
- The Process of Education: Students are active learners who construct their own knowledge.

Angela Duckworth

- GRIT: The ability to get back up, passion and perseverance for long-term goals.
- The one point we have found in building GRIT is developing growth mindsets.