Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a major philosopher, writer, and composer of the eighteenth century. Enlightenment, whose political philosophy influenced the French Revolution and the development of modern political and educational though. His novel, Emile:or On Education, which he considered his most important  work, is a seminal treatise on the education of the whole person for citizenship. His sentimental novel, Julie,ou la nouvelle Heloise, was of great importance to development of pre Romanticism and romanticism in fiction. Rousseau’s autobiographical writings: his Confessions, which initiated the modern autobiography, and his Reveries of a Solitary Walker( along with the works of Lessing and Goethe in Germany, and Richardson and Sterne in England), were among the pre- eminent examples of the late eighteenth-century movement known as the “Age of Sensibility”, featuring an increasing focus on subjectivity and instrospection that has characterized the modern age. Rousseau also wrote a play and two operas, and made important contributions to music as a theorist. During the period of the French Revolution, Rousseau was the most popular of the philosophes among members of the Jacobin Club. He was interred as a national hero in Pantheon in Paris, in 1794. sixteen years after his death.

Education and Child Rearing

“The noblest work in education is to make a reasoning man, and we expect to train a young child by making him reason! This beginning at the end; this making an instrument of a result. If children understood how to reason they would not to be educated.”( Rousseau, Emile)

Rousseau’s philosophy of education is not concerned with particular techniques of imparting information and concepts, but rather  with developing the pupil’s character  and moral sense, so that he may learn to practice self-mastery and remain virtuous even in the unnatural and imperfect society in which will have to live. The hypothetical boy, Emile, is to be raised in the countryside, which, Rousseau believes, is a more natural and healthy environment than the city, under the guardianship of a tutor who will guide him through various learning experiences arranged by the tutor. Today we would call this the disciplinary method of “logical consequences”, since like modern psychologists, Rousseau felt that children learn right and wrong through experiencing the consequences of their acts rather than through physical punishment. The tutor will make sure than no harm results to Emile through his learning experiences.

Rousseau was one of the first to advocate developmentally appropriate education; and his description of the stages of child development mirrors his conception of the evolution of culture. He divides childhood into stages : the first is the age of about 12, when children are guided by their emotions and impulses. During the second stages, from 12 to about 16, reason starts to develop: and finally the third stage, from the age of 16 onwards, when the child develop into an adult. Rousseau recommends that the young adult should learn a manual skill such as carpentry, which requires creativity and though, will keep him out of trouble, and will supply a fallback means of making a living in the event of a change of fortune. The sixteen – year old is also ready to have a companion of the opposite sex.

Education reform is a plan or movement which attempts to bring about a systematic change in educational theory or practice across a community or society.

In western society, this preoccupied many famous intellectual such  as Plato and Rousseau. In fact, Western civilization developed classical education to economically teach skills and a framework for all human knowledge. Historically, many reform, such as religious education and universities, originated to correct real or perceived defect in classical education.

Classical education is most concerned with answering the who, what, where, when and how? questions that concern a majority of student. Unless carefully taught, group instruction naturally neglects the theoretical “why” and “which” questions that strongly concern a minority of students.

Classical education in this period also depreciated local languages and cultures in favor of ancient language (Greek and Latin) and their cultures. This produced odd social effects in which an intellectual class might be more loyal to ancient cultures and institutions to their native vernacular language and their actual governing authorities.

Since the 1850s, most reforms have attempted to either make individuals more perfectly develop, or to reduce the costs or increase the effectiveness of mass education. For example, the Transcendental movement, Joseph Lancaster’s London poor school, or Deweyism.

Lancaster’s School

Before the advent of government-funded public schools, the primary  mode of education for those of the lower classes was the charity school, pioneered during the 1800s by Protestant organizations and adapted for use by the Roman Catholic church and governmental bodies. Because these schools operated on very small budgets and attempted to serve as many needy children as possible, economic factors were prominent in their design.

The basic program was to develop “grammar’ schools. These taught only grammar and bookkeeping. This program permits people to start businesses to make money, gives them the skill to continue their education inexpensively from book. “Grammar” was the first third of the then-prevalent system of classical education.

The ultimate development of grammar school was by Joseph Lancaster and Adam Bell who developed the monitorial system. Lancaster who started as a poor Quaker in early 19^th century London. Bell started the Madras School of India. The monitorial system uses slightly more –advanced student to teach less-advanced students, achieving student-teacher ratios as small as 2, while educating more than a thousand students per adult. Lancaster promoted his system in a piece called Improvements in Education that spread widely throughout the English-speaking world.

Discipline and labor in a Lancaster school were provided by an economic system. Scrip, a form of money meaningless outside the school, was created at a fixed exchange rate from a student’s tuition. Every job of the school  was bid – for by student in scrip. The highest bid won. The jobs permitted students to collect scrip from other student for services rendered. However, any student tutor could auction positions in his or her classes. Beside tutoring, students could use scrip to buy food, school supplies, books and childish luxuries in a school store. The adult supervisors were paid from the bids on jobs.

With fully-developed internal economies, Lancaster school provided a grammar-school education for a cost per student near $40 per year in 1999 U.S. dollars. The student were very clever at reducing their costs, and once invented, improvement were widely adopted in a school. For example, Lancaster student, motivated to save scrip, ultimately rented individual pages of textbooks from the school library, read them in groups around music stands to reduce textbook costs. Exchanges of tutoring, and using receipts from “down tutoring” to pay for “up tutoring” were commonplace.

Established educational elites found Lancaster school so threatening that most English-speaking countries develop mandatory publicly-paid education explicitly To keep public education in “responsible” hands. These elite said that Lancaster school might become dishonest, provide poor education and were not accountable to established authorities. Lancaster’s supporters responded that any schoolchild could avoid cheats, given the opportunity, and that the government was not paying for the education, and thus deserved no say in their composition.

Lancaster though motivated by charity, claimed in his pamphlets to be surprised to find that he lived well on the income of his school, even while the low costs made it available to the poorest street-children.

Progressive Reform in Europe and the United State.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau has been called the father of the child-study movement. It has been said that Rousseau “discovered” the child (as an object of study).

Rousseau’s principal work on education is Emile:or. On Education, in which he lays out an educational program  for a hypothetical newborn’s education to adulthood. Rousseau provided a dual critique of both the vision of education set forth in Plato’s Republic and also of the society of his contemporary Europe and the educational methods he regard as contributing to it : he held that a person can either be a man or citizen, and that while Plato’s plan could have brought the latter at the expense of the former, contemporary education failed at both tasks. He advocated a radical withdrawal of the child from society and an educational process that utilized the natural potential of the child and its curiosity, teaching it by confronting it with simulated real-life obstacles and conditioning it by experience rather than teaching it intellectually. His idea were rarely implemented directly, but were influential on later thinkers, particularly Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Friedrich Wilhelm August Frobel, the inventor of the kindergarten.

John Dewey

John Dewey, a philosopher and educator, was heavily influential in American and international education, especially during the first four decades of the twentieth century. An important member of the American Pragmatist movement, he carried the subordination of knowledge to action into the educational world by arguing for experiential education that would enable children to learn theory and practice simultaneously; a well-known example is the practice of teaching elementary physics and biology to students while preparing a meal. He was a harsh critic of “dead” knowledge disconnected from practical human life, foreshadowing Paulo Freire’s attack on the “banking concept of education.”

Dewey criticized the rigidity and volume of humanistic education, and the emotional idealizations of education based on the child-study movement that had been inspired by Bill Joel and those who followed him. He presented his educational theories as a synthesis of the two views. His slogan was that schools should encourage children to “Learn by doing”. He wanted people realize that children are naturally active and curious. Dewey’s understanding of logic is best presented in his ‘Logic, the Theory of Inquiry”(1938). His educational theories were presented in “My Pedagogic Creed”, The School and Society, The Child and Curriculum, and Democracy and Education(1916).

Critiques of Progressive and Classical reforms

Many progressive reforms failed to transfer learned skills. Evidence suggests that higher-order thinking skills are unused by many people.

Some critics  are Jean Peaget, Isabel Myers and Katharine Cook Briggs

Jean Peaget was a Swiss psychologist who studied people’s developmental stages. He showed by widely reproduced experiments that most young children do not analyze or synthesize as Dewey expected. Some authorities therefore say that Dewey’s reforms do not apply to the primary education of young children.

Katherine Brigg and her daughter Isabel Myers developed a psychological test that reproducibly identifies sixteen distinct human temperaments, building on work by Jung. A wide class of temperaments (“sensor”, half by category, 60% of the general population) prefer not use non –concrete information such as theories or logical inference.

In terms of education, some authorities interpret this to mean that 60% of the general population only use, and therefore would prefer to learn answers to concrete “Who, what, when, where”, and “How” questions, rather than answer to the theoretical “which” and “why” questions advocated by progressives.

This information was confirmed (on another research track) by Jean Peaget, who discovered that nearly 60% of adults never habitually use what he called “formal operational reasoning, a term for the development and use of theories and explicit logic.

If  this criticism is true, then schools that teach only principles would fail to educate 60% of general population

The data from Pieget, Myers and Briggs can also be use to criticize classical teaching style that never teach theory or principle. In particular, a wide class of temperament ( “ Intuitives ”, half by category, 40% of the general population) prefer to reason from trusted first principle, and then apply that theory to predict concrete facts.

In term of education, some authorities interpret this to mean that 40% of general population prefer to use, and therefore want to learn, answers to theoretical ”which and “Why’ questions rather than answers to the concrete “Who, what, when, where” and “how” questions.

The synthesis resulting from this two-part critique is a “ neoclassical ”learning theory similar to that practiced by Marva Collins, in which both learning styles are accommodated. The classroom is filled with facts that are organized with theories, providing a rich environment to feed children’s natural preference. To reduce the limitations of depending  only on natural preferences, all children are required to learn both important facts, and important forms of reasoning.

Education reform has been pursued for a variety of specific reasons, but generally most reforms aim at redressing some societal ills, such as poverty; gender; or class – based inequities, or perceived ineffectiveness. Reforms are usually by thinkers who aim to redress societal ills or institute societal changes, most often through a change in the education of the members of a class of people- the preparation of a ruling class to rule or a working class to work, the social hygiene of a lower or immigrant class, the preparation of citizens in a democracy or republic, etc. The idea that all children should be provided with a high level of education is a relatively recent idea, and has arisen largely in the context of Western democracy in the 20^th century.

John Brain, 1 July 2009

John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and education reformer whose though and ideas have been highly influential in the United States and around the world. Dewey, along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, is recognized as one of the founders of the philosophical school of pragmatism.

He is also one of the founders of functional psychology and was a leading representative of the progressive movement in U.S. schooling during the first half of the 20^th century.

Although Dewey is best known for his works on education, he also wrote on a wide range of subjects, including experience and nature, art and experience, logic and inquiry, democracy and ethics.

In his advocacy of democracy, Dewey considered two fundamental element-schools and civil society- as being keys areas needing attention and reconstruction to encourage experimental intelligence and plurality.

In the necessary reconstruction of civil society, Dewey asserted that full democracy was to be obtain not just by extending voting right but also by ensuring that there exists a fully form public opinion, accomplished by effective communication among citizens, experts, and politicians, with the latter being held accountable for the policies they  adopt.

Pragmatism and Instrumentalism

Although Dewey did not identify himself as a pragmatist per se, but instead referred to his philosophy as “instrumentalism”, he is considered one of three central figures in America pragmatism, along with Charles Sanders Peirce, who coined the term, and William James, who popularized it. Dewey worked from strongly Hegelian influences, unlike James, whose lineage was primarily British, drawing particularly on empiricist and utilitarian thought. Neither was Dewey so pluralist or relativist as James.

He held that value was a function not of whim nor purely of social construction, but a quality situated in event( “ nature itself is wistful and pathetic, turbulent and passionate”(Experience and Nature)).

He also held that experimentation( social, cultural, technological, philosophical) could be used as a relatively hard and fast arbiter of truth. For example, James felt that for many people who lacked” over – believe” in religious concepts, human life was  shallow and rather uninteresting, and that while no one religious belief could  be demonstrated as the correct one, we are all responsible for taking the leap of faith and making a gamble on  one or another theism, atheism, monism, etc. Dewey, in contrast, while honoring the important role that religious institution and practices played in human life. Rejected belief in any static ideal, such as a theistic God. Dewey felt that only scientific method could reliably further human good.

Of the idea of God, Dewey said, “ it denotes the unity of all ideal ends arousing us to desire and actions.”

As with the reemergence of progressive philosophy of education , Dewey’s contributions to philosophy as such( he was, after all, much more a professional philosopher than thinker on education) he also reemerged with the reassessment of pragmatism, beginning in  the late 1970s, by thinkers like Richard Rorty, Richard J. Bernstein and Hans Joas.

Because og his process-oriented and sociologically conscious view of the world and knowledge, he is sometimes seen as a useful alternative to both modern and postmodern ways of thinking. Dewey’s non-foundation approach pre – date postmodernism by more than half a century. Recent exponents Dewey’s own usage of  other thinkers and with his own philosophy – for Dewey, past doctrines always require reconstruction in order to remain useful for the present time.

Dewey’s philosophy has gone by many names other than “pragmatism”. He has been called  an instrumentalist, an experimentalist, an empiricist, a functionalist, and a naturalist. The term “transactional” may better describe his views, a term emphasized by Dewey in his later years to describe his theories of knowledge and experience.

John Brain, 16 July 2009

Classical education movement advocates a form of education based in the traditions of Western culture, with a particular focus on education as understood and taught in the Middle Ages, with a further glance back to the Ancient Greek concept of Paideia. Classical Education was first developed by Martianus Capella, and systematized by Petrus Ramus. It is an essential part of Ramism. Capella’s original goal was to provide a systematic, memorable framework to teach all human knowledge.

Classical education developed many of terms now to describe modern education. Western classical education has three phases. The phases are primary education, secondary education and tertiary education, each with a different purpose.

Primary Education

Primary education was often called the trivium, which covered grammar, logic and rhetoric.

Logic and rhetoric were often taught in part  by the Socratic method, in which the teacher raises questions and the class discusses. By controlling the pace , the teacher can keep the class very lively, yet disciplined.

Grammar

Grammar consists of language skills such as reading and the mechanics of writing. An important goal of grammar is to acquire as many words and manage as many concepts as possible so as to be able to express and understand clearly concepts of varying degrees of complexity. Very young students can learn these by rote especially through the use of chant and song. Their minds are often referred to as “sponges”, that easily absorb a large number of facts. Classical education traditionally included study of Latin and Greek which greatly reinforced understanding of grammar, and the workings of a language, and so that students could read Classics of Western Civilization in the words of the authors. In the modern renaissance of classical education, this period refers to the upper elementary school years.

[edit] Logic

Logic is the art of correct reasoning The traditional text for teaching logic was Aristotel’s Logic. In the modern renaissance of classical education, this logic stage (or dialectic stage) refers to the junior high or middle school aged student, who developmentally is beginning to question ideas and authority, and truly enjoys a debate or an argument. Training in logic, both formal and informal, enables students to critically examine arguments and to analyze their own.

[edit] Rhetoric

Rhetoric debate and composition (which is the written form of rhetoric) are taught to somewhat older (often high school aged) students, who by this point in their education have the concepts and logic to criticize their own work and persuade others. According to Aristotle “Rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic.” It is concerned with finding “all the available means of persuasion.” The student has learned to reason correctly in the Logic stage so that they can now apply those skills to Rhetoric. Students would read and emulate classical poets such as Ovid and others in learning how to present their arguments well.

[edit] Secondary education

Secondary education, classically the quadrivium or “four ways,” classically taught astronomy, arithmetic, music and geometry, usually from Aristotle and Euclid. Sometimes architecture was taught, often from the works of Vitruvius.

History was always taught to provide a context, and show political and military development. The classic texts were from ancient authors such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, Cicero and Tacitus.

Biographies were often assigned as well; the classic example being Plutarch‘s “Lives.” Biographies help show how persons behave in their context, and the wide ranges of professions and options that exist. As more modern texts became available, these were often added to the curriculum.

In the Middle Ages, these were the best available texts. In modern terms, these fields might be called history, natural science, accounting and business, fine arts (at least two, one to amuse companions, and another to decorate one’s domicile), military strategy and tactics, engineering, agronomy, and architecture.

These are taught in a matrix of history, reviewing the natural development of each field for each phase of the trivium. That is, in a perfect classical education, the historical study is reviewed three times: first to learn the grammar (the concepts, terms and skills in the order developed), next time the logic (how these elements could be assembled), and finally the rhetoric, how to produce good, humanly useful and beautiful objects that satisfy the grammar and logic of the field.

History is the unifying conceptual framework, because history is the study of everything that has occurred before the present. A skillful teacher also uses the historical context to show how each stage of development naturally poses questions and then how advances answer them, helping to understand human motives and activity in each field. The question-answer approach is called the “dialectic method,” and permits history to be taught Socratically as well.

Classical educators consider the Socratic method to be the best technique for teaching critical thinking. In-class discussion and critiques are essential in order for students to recognize and internalize critical thinking techniques. This method is widely used to teach both philosophy and law. It is currently rare in other contexts. Basically, the teacher referees the students’ discussions, asks leading questions, and may refer to facts, but never gives a conclusion until at least one student reaches that conclusion. The learning is most effective when the students compete strongly, even viciously in the argument, but always according to well-accepted rules of correct reasoning. That is, fallacies should not be allowed by the teacher.

By completing a project in each major field of human effort, the student can develop a personal preference for further education and professional training.

[edit] Tertiary education

Tertiary education was usually an apprenticeship to a person with the desired profession. Most often, the understudy was called a “secretary” and had the duty of carrying on all the normal business of the “master.” Philosophy and Theology were both widely taught as tertiary subjects in Universities however.

The early biographies of nobles show probably the ultimate form of classical education: a tutor. One early, much-emulated classic example was that Alexander the Great was tutored by Aristotle.

Education theory is the theory of purpose, application and interpretation of education and learning. Its history begins with classical Greek educationalist and shophists and includes, since the 18^th century, pedagogy and andragogy. In the 20^th century, “theory” has become an umbrella term for variety of scholarly  approaches to teaching, assessment and education law, most of which are informed by various strands of philosophy, social theory, cultural studies, and psychology.

AIMS OF EDUCATIONAL

Aims that have been proposed for education include:

►Preparation for political participation

►Preparation for economic participation

►A product for use as social capital

►Fulfillment of self – development

►Development of character.

The aims are not mutually exclusive and are often combined. For example, the enterprise of civil society depends on educating people to become responsible, thoughtful and enterprising citizen. This is an intricate, challenging task requiring deep understanding of ethical principles, moral values, political theory, aesthetics and economic, not to mention an understanding of who children are, in themselves and in society.

EDUCACIONAL THEORIST

Further information Educational theorist :

►Michael Apple

►Charles Beard

►Theodore Brameld

►John Dewey

►George Counts

►Allan Bloom

►Paula Freire

►Howard Gardner

►Henry Giroux

►Maria Montessori

►Bell Hooks

►Ivan Illich

►Peter McLaren

►Richard Mitchell

►Harold Rugg

►Jonathan Kozol

►John Caldwell Holt

Education progressivism is the belief that education must be based on the principle that humans are social animals who learn best in real – life activities with other people. Progressivists claimed to rely on the best available scientific theories of learning. Most progressive educators believe that children learn as if they were scientists, following a process similar to John Dewey’s model of learning.

1. Become aware of the problem
2. Define the problem
3. Propose hypotheses to solve it
4. Evaluate the consequences of the hypotheses from one’s past experience.
5. Test the likeliest solution.

Give this view of human nature, a progressivist teacher desire to provide not just reading and drill, but also real – world experiences and activities that center on the real life of the student. A typical progresivist slogan is “Learn by Doing”.

Philosophy

Progressive education is pedagogical movement that began in late nineteenth century and has persisted in various forms to the present. More recently, it has been viewed as an alternative to the test- oriented instruction legislated by the No Child Left Behind educational funding act.

The term “progressive” was engaged to distinguish this education from the traditional curriculum of the 19^th century, which was rooted in classical preparation for the university and strongly differentiated by socioeconomic level. By contrast, progressive education finds its roots in present experience. Most progressive education program have these qualities in common:

● Emphasis on learning by doing – hands –on projects, experiential learning

● Integrated curriculum focused on thematic units

● Strong emphasis on  problem solving and critical thinking

● Group work and development of social skill

● Understanding and action as the goals of learning as opposed to rote knowledge

● Collaborative and cooperative learning project

● Education for social responsibility and democracy

● Integration of community service and service learning projects into the daily

curriculum

● Selection of subject content by looking forward to ask what skills will be

needed in future society

● De-emphasis on text-books in favor of varied learning resources

● Emphasis on  life-long learning and social  skills

● Assessment by evaluation of child’s projects and productions

Education reform is a plan or movement which attempts to bring about a systematic change in educational theory or practice across a community or society.

In western society, this preoccupied many famous intellectual such  as Plato and Rousseau. In fact, Western civilization developed classical education to economically teach skills and a framework for all human knowledge. Historically, many reform, such as religious education and universities, originated to correct real or perceived defect in classical education.

Classical education is most concerned with answering the who, what, where, when and how? questions that concern a majority of student. Unless carefully taught, group instruction naturally neglects the theoretical “why” and “which” questions that strongly concern a minority of students.

Classical education in this period also depreciated local languages and cultures in favor of ancient language (Greek and Latin) and their cultures. This produced odd social effects in which an intellectual class might be more loyal to ancient cultures and institutions to their native vernacular language and their actual governing authorities.

Since the 1850s, most reforms have attempted to either make individuals more perfectly develop, or to reduce the costs or increase the effectiveness of mass education. For example, the Transcendental movement, Joseph Lancaster’s London poor school, or Deweyism.

Lancaster’s School

Before the advent of government-funded public schools, the primary  mode of education for those of the lower classes was the charity school, pioneered during the 1800s by Protestant organizations and adapted for use by the Roman Catholic church and governmental bodies. Because these schools operated on very small budgets and attempted to serve as many needy children as possible, economic factors were prominent in their design.

The basic program was to develop “grammar’ schools. These taught only grammar and bookkeeping. This program permits people to start businesses to make money, gives them the skill to continue their education inexpensively from book. “Grammar” was the first third of the then-prevalent system of classical education.

The ultimate development of grammar school was by Joseph Lancaster and Adam Bell who developed the monitorial system. Lancaster who started as a poor Quaker in early 19^th century London. Bell started the Madras School of India. The monitorial system uses slightly more –advanced student to teach less-advanced students, achieving student-teacher ratios as small as 2, while educating more than a thousand students per adult. Lancaster promoted his system in a piece called Improvements in Education that spread widely throughout the English-speaking world.

Discipline and labor in a Lancaster school were provided by an economic system. Scrip, a form of money meaningless outside the school, was created at a fixed exchange rate from a student’s tuition. Every job of the school  was bid – for by student in scrip. The highest bid won. The jobs permitted students to collect scrip from other student for services rendered. However, any student tutor could auction positions in his or her classes. Beside tutoring, students could use scrip to buy food, school supplies, books and childish luxuries in a school store. The adult supervisors were paid from the bids on jobs.

With fully-developed internal economies, Lancaster school provided a grammar-school education for a cost per student near $40 per year in 1999 U.S. dollars. The student were very clever at reducing their costs, and once invented, improvement were widely adopted in a school. For example, Lancaster student, motivated to save scrip, ultimately rented individual pages of textbooks from the school library, read them in groups around music stands to reduce textbook costs. Exchanges of tutoring, and using receipts from “down tutoring” to pay for “up tutoring” were commonplace.

Established educational elites found Lancaster school so threatening that most English-speaking countries develop mandatory publicly-paid education explicitly To keep public education in “responsible” hands. These elite said that Lancaster school might become dishonest, provide poor education and were not accountable to established authorities. Lancaster’s supporters responded that any schoolchild could avoid cheats, given the opportunity, and that the government was not paying for the education, and thus deserved no say in their composition.

Lancaster though motivated by charity, claimed in his pamphlets to be surprised to find that he lived well on the income of his school, even while the low costs made it available to the poorest street-children.

Progressive Reform in Europe and the United State.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau has been called the father of the child-study movement. It has been said that Rousseau “discovered” the child (as an object of study).

Rousseau’s principal work on education is Emile:or. On Education, in which he lays out an educational program  for a hypothetical newborn’s education to adulthood. Rousseau provided a dual critique of both the vision of education set forth in Plato’s Republic and also of the society of his contemporary Europe and the educational methods he regard as contributing to it : he held that a person can either be a man or citizen, and that while Plato’s plan could have brought the latter at the expense of the former, contemporary education failed at both tasks. He advocated a radical withdrawal of the child from society and an educational process that utilized the natural potential of the child and its curiosity, teaching it by confronting it with simulated real-life obstacles and conditioning it by experience rather than teaching it intellectually. His idea were rarely implemented directly, but were influential on later thinkers, particularly Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Friedrich Wilhelm August Frobel, the inventor of the kindergarten.

John Dewey

John Dewey, a philosopher and educator, was heavily influential in American and international education, especially during the first four decades of the twentieth century. An important member of the American Pragmatist movement, he carried the subordination of knowledge to action into the educational world by arguing for experiential education that would enable children to learn theory and practice simultaneously; a well-known example is the practice of teaching elementary physics and biology to students while preparing a meal. He was a harsh critic of “dead” knowledge disconnected from practical human life, foreshadowing Paulo Freire’s attack on the “banking concept of education.”

Dewey criticized the rigidity and volume of humanistic education, and the emotional idealizations of education based on the child-study movement that had been inspired by Bill Joel and those who followed him. He presented his educational theories as a synthesis of the two views. His slogan was that schools should encourage children to “Learn by doing”. He wanted people realize that children are naturally active and curious. Dewey’s understanding of logic is best presented in his ‘Logic, the Theory of Inquiry”(1938). His educational theories were presented in “My Pedagogic Creed”, The School and Society, The Child and Curriculum, and Democracy and Education(1916).

Critiques of Progressive and Classical reforms

Many progressive reforms failed to transfer learned skills. Evidence suggests that higher-order thinking skills are unused by many people.

Some critics  are Jean Peaget, Isabel Myers and Katharine Cook Briggs

Jean Peaget was a Swiss psychologist who studied people’s developmental stages. He showed by widely reproduced experiments that most young children do not analyze or synthesize as Dewey expected. Some authorities therefore say that Dewey’s reforms do not apply to the primary education of young children.

Katherine Brigg and her daughter Isabel Myers developed a psychological test that reproducibly identifies sixteen distinct human temperaments, building on work by Jung. A wide class of temperaments (“sensor”, half by category, 60% of the general population) prefer not use non –concrete information such as theories or logical inference.

In terms of education, some authorities interpret this to mean that 60% of the general population only use, and therefore would prefer to learn answers to concrete “Who, what, when, where”, and “How” questions, rather than answer to the theoretical “which” and “why” questions advocated by progressives.

This information was confirmed (on another research track) by Jean Peaget, who discovered that nearly 60% of adults never habitually use what he called “formal operational reasoning, a term for the development and use of theories and explicit logic.

If  this criticism is true, then schools that teach only principles would fail to educate 60% of general population

The data from Pieget, Myers and Briggs can also be use to criticize classical teaching style that never teach theory or principle. In particular, a wide class of temperament ( “ Intuitives ”, half by category, 40% of the general population) prefer to reason from trusted first principle, and then apply that theory to predict concrete facts.

In term of education, some authorities interpret this to mean that 40% of general population prefer to use, and therefore want to learn, answers to theoretical ”which and “Why’ questions rather than answers to the concrete “Who, what, when, where” and “how” questions.

The synthesis resulting from this two-part critique is a “ neoclassical ”learning theory similar to that practiced by Marva Collins, in which both learning styles are accommodated. The classroom is filled with facts that are organized with theories, providing a rich environment to feed children’s natural preference. To reduce the limitations of depending  only on natural preferences, all children are required to learn both important facts, and important forms of reasoning.

Education reform has been pursued for a variety of specific reasons, but generally most reforms aim at redressing some societal ills, such as poverty; gender; or class – based inequities, or perceived ineffectiveness. Reforms are usually by thinkers who aim to redress societal ills or institute societal changes, most often through a change in the education of the members of a class of people- the preparation of a ruling class to rule or a working class to work, the social hygiene of a lower or immigrant class, the preparation of citizens in a democracy or republic, etc. The idea that all children should be provided with a high level of education is a relatively recent idea, and has arisen largely in the context of Western democracy in the 20^th century.

John Brain, 1 July 2009