Philosophy of education
[8][9] A central task for the philosophy of education is to make explicit the various fundamental assumptions and disagreements at work in its field and to evaluate the arguments raised for and against the different positions.
Some theorists emphasize the cultivation of liberal ideals, such as freedom, autonomy, and open-mindedness, while others stress the importance of docility, obedience to authority, and ideological purity, sometimes also with a focus on piety and religious faith.
[8] Others have argued that this constitutes a false dichotomy: that the transmission of knowledge and the development of a rational and critical mind are intertwined aims of education that depend on and support each other.
[6][17][18] In its widest sense, the epistemic approach includes various related goals, such as imparting true beliefs or knowledge to the students as well as teaching dispositions and abilities, such as rationality, critical thinking, understanding, and other intellectual virtues.
On this view, it involves various implicit biases, like egocentrism or distanced objectivity, and culture-specific values arising from its roots in the philosophical movement of the European Enlightenment.
[5] In this regard, it has been argued that, especially for young children, weaker forms of indoctrination may be necessary while they still lack the intellectual capacities to evaluate the reasons for and against certain claims and thus to critically assess them.
[8][43] For example, various liberationist movements belonging to the fields of deschooling and unschooling reject this power and argue that the children's welfare is best served in the absence of compulsory schooling in general.
While overtly this process happens based on individual effort and desert, they argue that this just masks and reinforces the underlying influence of the preexisting social class structure.
Some argue, for example, that this manifests itself in the prominence given to cognitive development in education, which is said to be associated primarily with masculinity in contrast to a more feminine approach based on emotion and intuition.
[5][8][55][56][57] The quantitative approach usually focuses on wide experimental studies and employs statistical methods to uncover the general causal factors responsible for educational phenomena.
This view contrasts with a more pragmatist perspective, which in its emphasis on practice sees students not as passive absorbers but as active learners that should be encouraged to discover and learn things by themselves.
By the end of the 18th century, in addition to the trivium and quadrivium of the Middle Ages, the definition of a classical education embraced study of literature, poetry, drama, philosophy, history, art, and languages.
[62][63][64] They prefer a teacher-centered approach, meaning that the teacher acts as the authority figure guiding the learning activity while students are expected to follow their lead.
[65][64] Critical pedagogy is an "educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help students develop consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive action."
Contemplative education focuses on bringing introspective practices such as mindfulness and yoga into curricular and pedagogical processes for diverse aims grounded in secular, spiritual, religious and post-secular perspectives.
[69] 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.
Elementary education consisted of music and gymnastics, designed to train and blend gentle and fierce qualities in the individual and create a harmonious person.
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 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.
[74] 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.
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".
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.
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.
[88] 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.
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.
[93] 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.
[94] 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.
[102] 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.
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.
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.
