Ed Philosophy Essay

Philosophy of education can refer to either the academic field of applied philosophy or to one of any educational philosophies that promote a specific type or vision of education, and/or which examine the definition, goals and meaning of education. As an academic field, philosophy of education is â€Å"the philosophical study of education and its problems†¦ its central subject matter is education, and its methods are those of philosophy†. [1] â€Å"The philosophy of education may be either the philosophy of the process of education or the philosophy of the discipline of education. That is, it may be part of the discipline in the sense of being concerned with the aims, forms, methods, or results of the process of educating or being educated; or it may be metadisciplinary in the sense of being concerned with the concepts, aims, and methods of the discipline. â€Å"[2] As such, it is both part of the field of education and a field of applied philosophy, drawing from fields of metaphysics, epistemology, axiology and the philosophical approaches (speculative, prescriptive, and/or analytic) to address questions in and about pedagogy, education policy, and curriculum, as well as the process of learning, to name a few. [3] For example, it might study what constitutes upbringing and education, the values and norms revealed through upbringing and educational practices, the limits and legitimization of education as an academic discipline, and the relation between educational theory and practice. Instead of being taught in philosophy departments, philosophy of education is usually housed in departments or colleges of education, similar to how philosophy of law is generally taught in law schools. [1] The multiple ways of conceiving education coupled with the multiple fields and approaches of philosophy make philosophy of education not only a very diverse field but also one that is not easily defined. Although there is overlap, philosophy of education should not be conflated with educational theory, which is not defined specifically by the application of philosophy to questions in education. Philosophy of education also should not be confused with philosophy education, the practice of teaching and learning the subject of philosophy. Philosophy of education can also be understood not as an academic discipline but as a normative educational theory that unifies pedagogy, curriculum, learning theory, and the purpose of education and is grounded in specific metaphysical, epistemological, and axiological assumptions. These theories are also called educational philosophies. For example, a teacher might be said to follow a perennialist educational philosophy or to follow a perennialist philosophy of education. Contents * 1 Philosophy of Education * 1. 1 Idealism * 1. 1. 1 Plato * 1. 1. 2 Immanuel Kant * 1. 1. 3 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel * 1. 2 Realism * 1. 2. 1 Aristotle * 1. 2. 2 Avicenna * 1. 2. 3 Ibn Tufail * 1. 2. 4 John Locke * 1. 2. 5 Jean-Jacques Rousseau * 1. 2. 6 Mortimer Jerome Adler * 1. 2. 7 Harry S. Broudy * 1. 3 Scholasticism * 1. 3. 1 Thomas Aquinas * 1. 3. 2 John Milton * 1. 4 Pragmatism * 1. 4. 1 John Dewey * 1. 4. 2 William James * 1. 4. 3 William Heard Kilpatrick * 1. 4. 4 Nel Noddings * 1. 4. 5 Richard Rorty * 1. 5 Analytic Philosophy * 1. 5. 1 Richard Stanley Peters * 1. 5. 2 Paul H. Hirst * 1. 6 Existentialism * 1. 6. 1 Karl Jaspers * 1. 6. 2 Martin Buber * 1. 6. 3 Maxine Greene * 1. 7 Critical Theory * 1. 7. 1 Paulo Freire * 1. 8 Postmodernism * 1. 8. 1 Martin Heidegger * 1. 8. 2 Hans-Georg Gadamer * 1. 8. 3 Jean-Francois Lyotard * 1. 8. 4 Michel Foucault * 2 Normative Educational Philosophies * 2. 1 Perennialism * 2. 1. 1 Allan Bloom * 2. 2 Progressivism * 2. 2. 1 Jean Piaget * 2. 2. 2 Jerome Bruner * 2. 3 Essentialism * 2. 3. 1 William Chandler Bagley * 2. 4 Social Reconstructionism and Critical Pedagogy * 2. 4. 1 George Counts * 2. 4. 2 Maria Montessori * 2. 5 Waldorf * 2. 5. 1 Rudolf Steiner * 2. 6 Democratic Education * 2. 6. 1 A. S. Neill * 2. 7 Classical Education * 2. 7. 1 Charlotte Mason * 2. 8 Unschooling * 2. 8. 1 John Holt * 2. 8. 2 Contemplative education * 3 Professional organizations and associations * 4 References * 5 Further reading * 6 External links| Philosophy of Education Idealism Plato Inscribed herma of Plato. (Berlin, Altes Museum). Main article: Plato Date: 424/423 BC – 348/347 BC Plato’s educational philosophy was grounded in his vision of the ideal Republic, wherein the individual was best served by being subordinated to a just society. He 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 builds on this by insisting that those suitably gifted are to be trained by the state so that they may be qualified to assume the role of a ruling class. What this establishes is essentially a system of selective public education premised on the assumption that an educated minority of the population are, 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 one 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. They would study the idea of good and first principles of being. 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. Immanuel Kant Main article: Immanuel Kant Date: 1724–1804 Immanuel Kant believed that education differs from training in that the latter involves thinking whereas the former 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. [4] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Main article: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Date: 1770–1831 Realism Aristotle Bust of Aristotle. Roman copy after a Greek bronze original by Lysippos from 330 B. C. Main article: Aristotle Date: 384 BC – 322 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. [1] 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. [2] Avicenna Main article: Avicenna Date: 980 AD – 1037 AD 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 â€Å"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. [5] 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). [5] Ibn Sina refers to the secondary education stage of maktab schooling as the period of specialization, when pupils should begin to acquire manual skills, regardless of their social status. He writes that children after the age of 14 should be given a choice to choose and specialize in subjects they have an interest in, whether it was reading, manual skills, literature, preaching, medicine, geometry, trade and commerce, craftsmanship, or any other subject or profession they would be interested in pursuing for a future career. He wrote that this was a transitional stage and that there needs to be flexibility regarding the age in which pupils graduate, as the student’s emotional development and chosen subjects need to be taken into account. [6] The empiricist theory of ‘tabula rasa’ was also developed by Ibn Sina. He argued that the â€Å"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 â€Å"empirical familiarity with objects in this world from which one abstracts universal concepts† which is developed through a â€Å"syllogistic method of reasoning; observations lead to prepositional statements, which when compounded lead to further abstract concepts. † He further argued that the intellect itself â€Å"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. â€Å"[7]