Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi 1746-1827)
FIRST to recognize special needs of disadvantaged
TWO levels of teaching:
- Teachers alleviate psychological, physical and emotional problems of poor students before focusing on teaching to use their senses (concrete to abstract).
- Learning through progression: Start w/ immediate surroundings
- Family
- Community
- State
- Nation
- World
His ideas lead to today’s focus on special needs of the disadvantaged
Prudence Crandall (1803-1889)
Interest in Bringing education to AFRICAN AMERICAN GIRLS
Started School for girls in Canterbury, CT. Admitted black girl, Sarah Harris. White parents withdrew their daughters. Prudence advertised and got 15 Black girls to attend. Pubic did not like it – Legislature passed the Black Law forbidding schools to educate blacks from other states. Prudence was arrested, tried and convicted . Conviction overturned but her school was vandalized. And she closed it.
Maria Montessori (1870-1952)
FIRST female doctor in Italy.
Identified educational potential of young children through her work with mentally handicapped/retarded children. She discovered they were more capable than many believed.
Started a school for disadvantaged children in slums of Rome.
Her Theory: Children:
- Have an inner need to work on tasks that interest them
- did not need to be rewarded or punished by teacher
- preferred work to play
- were capable of sustained periods of concentration
- Needa carefully prepared environment in order to learn.
Friedrich Froebel (1782 – 1852)
Established Kindergarten in 1837
Deep sense of importance of early childhood and critical role teachers play
Saw teachers as moral & cultural role models –vs- disciplinarians
Saw NATURE as prime source of learning.
Schools need to provide warm and supportive environment.
Johann Friedrich Herbart(1776–1841) German Philosopher
One of the founders of modern scientific pedagogy.
Believed primary goal of education is moral education – development of GOOD PEOPLE.
Development of cognitive powers/knowledge would lead to:
Values based on personal conviction
Concern for the social welfare of others
Positive & negative consequences associated with one’s behavior
Believe in coordinated and logical development of curriculum (history to geography to literature)
STRUCTURE TEACHING –
- prepare students for learning (readiness)
- Helping students form connections by relating new material to previously learned
- Using examples to increase understanding
- teaching students how to apply information
His concern for moral education paved the way for contemporary educators to explore the relationship between values and knowledge.
Jean Jacque Rousseau (1712 – 1778) French/Swiss
Distinguished schooling from education.
Concern with stages of development
Viewed humans as fundamentally good and corrupted by societal influences like schools.
Believe Children could learn better by using senses & nature
Believed children developed through stages & their own interests and needs should be the focus of curriculum
Wrote “Emile”
Senses as the first teachers
- Nature over Society
- Learner Instincts over adult-developed school curriculum.
His work led to Child Study movement – and to Progressive Education.
COMENIUS (Jan Komensky) 1592-1670
Supported Universal Education
Education Ideas revolutionary for his time
Abandoned notion that children were inherently bad and needed punishment to learn.
Identified developmental stages of learned and match instruction to those stages
- Teach general principals before details
- Concrete examples before abstract ideas
- Sequencing ideas in logical progressing
- Include practical applications
Emma Hart Willard 1787 – 1870 Connecticut
16th of 17 children
Self Taught as girls were not allowed in higher education
1814 – Opened Middlebury Female Seminary
Wrote pamphlet, An Address to the Public; Particularly to Members of Legislature of NY, Proposing a Plan for Improving Female Education. (got attention of Tom Jefferson, John Adams & James Monroe) but no money.
Opened Troy Female Seminary – School to prepare professional teachers long before first normal teacher training school founded.
1837 Formed Willard Asso. For Mutual Improvement of Female Teachers, 1st organization to focus public attention on need for well-prepared and trained teachers.
A Pioneer in the struggle for women’s intellectual and legal rights
- Supported property rights for married women and other financial reforms
- Dedicated her life to promoting the intellectual and education freedom of women
- Her ideas promoted recognition of teachers as a profession
Her commitment to providing education opportunities for women has shaped the past 2 centuries of progress, not only for women but for all Americans.
Thomas Jefferson
Wanted to go beyond educating the small group of elite
Education for all WHITE children regardless of economic or social class
Education to be paid for by government
Started University of Virginia
Benjamin Franklin
Wanted to replace LatinGrammar School with the academy
Started FranklinAcademy (secondary school)
- Free of religious influence
- Offered variety of practical subjects (math, astronomy, athletics, navigation, drama, and bookkeeping.
- Students got to choose their subjects
- Boys and Girls who could afford tuition could attend
FranklinAcademy became the University of Pennsylvania
Jerome Bruner (1915- ) (graduate of Harvard)
Established AmericanSchool of cognitive psychology and shaped school curriculum.
Bruner has cogently argued for more problem solving and direct involvement in the process of education for all learners, from young children to adults.
During World War II, he worked in General Eisenhower’s headquarters, studying psychological warfare. His doctoral dissertation concerned Nazi propaganda techniques.
- After the war he published works showing how human needs affect perceptions. – poor children are more likely to overestimate the value of coins than richer children. Adult values and needs affect the way they see the world as well. Realities do not conform to these needs and beliefs are mentally altered.
- Showed that human behavior can be observed, analyzed and understood in an objective way.
In 1960 he help found HarvardUniversity’s Center for Cognitive Studies.
He helped legitimize the systematic, objective and scientific study of human learning and thinking.
His approach was applied to school curriculum.
His report on the Woods Hole summit of scientists, educators and scholars interested in reforming education was published in The Process of Education in 1960. His work is hailed as a practical and readable analysis of curriculum needs. It has been translated into 22 languages and is studied by teachers around the world.
- He argues that schools should not focus on facts but should attempt to teach the “structure”, the general nature, of a subject.
- He also stressed the need for developing intuition and insights as a legitimate problem-solving technique.
- His best know quotation from this work is, “Any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.”
MANN, HORACE - 1796-1859 –
"Father of Public School"
Although a gifted and able student he was denied formal schooling – this directed his life and altered the history of US education. Learned on his own and was eventually admitted to BrownUniversity
Preparing for a career in Law and Politics
Worked to ensure other would not be denied educational opportunities.
As a member of Massachusetts House of Representatives he worked to improve the quality of education:
- Corporal punishment, floggings and unsafe/unsanitary schools denounced
- Removal of religion instruction from schools
- Lengthen the school term
- Increase teacher salaries
Established the first public normal schoolin 1839 to prepare better teachers.
Organized school libraries
Encouraged writing of textbooks that included practical social problems
His efforts resulted in the establishment of the Massachusetts Board of Education
Most remembered for his leadership in the common school movement to establish fee, publicly supported schools for all Americans.
Viewed ignorance as bondage and education as a passport to a promising future.
Through education:
- The disadvantaged could lift themselves out of poverty
- Black could achieve freedom
- Children with disabilities could learn to be productive members of society
Mann’s credo – Social mobility and the improvement of society could be attained through a free education for all.
His fervor not confined to establishing quality public education
- He denounced slavery, child labor, worker exploitation, workplace hazards, and dangers of slum life.
- Later, (1850’s), as President of Antioch College, he admitted women and minorities
His efforts are found in our public school system; education of minorities, the poor, and women; and efforts to provide well-trained teachers in well-equipped classrooms.
Common School – NOW OUR ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS
Bethune, Mary McLeod - 1875-1955 -
moved a people from intellectual slavery to education (So. Carolina).
African American daughter of slaves (1st child in her family not born into slavery) The last of 17 children born to South Carolina sharecroppers.
Was a field hand, picking cotton to an unofficial presidential advisor. (member of the Hoover Commission on Child Welfare and advisor to FDR)
Committed to meeting the critical need of providing education to the newly freed African Americans.
She was selected for a scholarship to educate one black girl at Scotia Seminary in Concord, NH.
Rented cottage for $1.50 and 5 students started her first school that became Bethune-CookmanCollege in Daytona, FL
Dewey, John - 1859-1952 -
Developed progressive education and democratic practices.
Most influential educator of the 20th century
Professor of University of Chicago and ColumbiaUniversity
His Educational philosophy has been referred to as progressivism, pragmatism and experimentalism.
Believed purpose of education was:
- To assist the growth of individuals
- Help children understand and control their environment.
- Knowledge consists of experiences that should help you solve problems
- School should be organized around the needs and interests of the child - (Child-centered learning)
- Learn by doing.
The learner’s interests serve as a springboard to understanding and mastering contemporary issues. Ex: Use the school store to teach math by working with money.
Education consists of change and of reconstructing experiences.
- Children, like adults, should learn how to structure their lives and develop self-discipline.
- Autocratic governments and authoritarian schools are disservices to democracy. Students should participate in shaping their education.
- The School should be preparation for democracy – Students should continue this process and shape the world as adults.
Dewey’s philosophy helped open schools to innovation and integrated education with the outside world.
Piaget, Jean - 1896-1980 - Swiss.
Created theory of cognitive development.
He observed that children at different age levels see the world in different ways. 4 stages of development
Worked with Alfred Binet, who developed the first intelligence test (version of today’s Stanford-Binet IQ test).
In his work on the study to develop the test, he (Jean) observed that children at different age levels see the world in different ways. From this he conceptualized his theory of cognitive, or mental, development which has influenced the way educators have viewed children ever since.
Four stages of development:
Infancy to 2 years of age – child functions at the sensorimotor stage -Infants explore and learn through their senses
Ages 2 to 7 years of age – children enter the preoperational stage – begin to organize and understand through language and concepts
Ages 7 to 11 – Concrete operations stage – children learn to develop and use more sophisticated concepts and mental operations. They can understand numbers and some processes and relationships
Formal stage – 11 to 15 and into adulthood – represents the highest level of mental development, the level of adult abstract thinking.
His theory further suggests that teachers should recognize the abilities and limits at each stage and provide appropriate learning activities.
His work led to increased attention to early childhood education and the critical learning that occurs during these early years.
Skinner, Burrhus Frederick (BF) - 1904-1990
Robert Frost encouraged Skinner to write - Skinner said, “I discovered the unhappy fact that I had nothing to say, and went to graduate study in psychology, hoping to remedy that short-coming.”
Doctorate from Harvard – went on to teach –
Attracted by works of John B. Watson – Skinner’s ideas became quite controversial.
He believed organisms, including humans, are entirely the products of their environment --- engineer the environment and you can engineer human behavior. His view of human behavior was called “behaviorism”.
During World War II he trained pigeons to pilot missiles and torpedoes.
He believed children could be conditioned to acquire desirable skills and behaviors.
Break down learning into small, simple steps
Reward children after completion of each step
By combining many steps, complex behaviors can be learned efficiently.
Developed a “teaching machine” to use these principles. – later led to development of behavior modification and computer-assisted instruction.
He wrote three books that spread his ideas on the importance of environment and behaviorism to educators, psychologists and the public.
Clark, Kenneth - 1914- 2005
Panama Canal Zone and (NYC)
Identified crippling effects of racism and formulated community action to overcome it. His work strongly key to desegregation decisions by courts.
Mother relocated family to NYC when he was 5 in order to provide better education for her children.
Mother, working as a seamstress in a NY sweatshop, helped to organize the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union.
He learned from his mother the importance of “people doing things together to help themselves.”
Went to school in Harlem – he witnessed an integrated community become all black and felt the growing impact of racism.
Graduated from HowardUniversity and got a doctorate from Columbia – yet his concern was with the educational plight of African Americans and the Harlem community.
He investigated the impact of segregated schools in NYC, concluding that black students receive an education inferior to that of whites.
He established several community self-help projects to assist children with psychological and educational problems.
- HARYOU (Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited) to prevent school dropouts, delinquency and unemployment.
- His efforts served as a catalyst for government action in NYC and Federally providing funds to enhance educational opportunities for minority students.
First African American appointed to faculty position at CityCollege in NY.
Supreme Court (in 1954) cited Clark’s work as psychological evidence for the need to desegregate US schools.
He said, “A racist system inevitably destroys and damages human beings; it brutalizes and dehumanized blacks and whites alike.”
Warner, Sylvia Ashton - 1908-1984 - New Zealand
Her emphasis on key vocabulary, individualized reading and meaningful learning is evident in classrooms today in America and abroad.
Place children at the center of curriculum.
Mother was a teacher – Sylvia learned through rote memorization
She was a flamboyant and eccentric personality- considered herself an artist more than a teacher. (painter, musician and writer) Considered a below-average teacher, often absent and unpredictable.
Fascinated w/creativity and encouraging self-expression among the native Maori children in New Zealand.
During peak years of her teaching career (1950 and 1952) she developed innovative teaching techniques that influenced teachers in US and world
- Developed “key vocabulary” as she realized certain words were especially significant to individual pupils because of life experiences. Made word cards of the words.
- Her philosophy centered on bringing meaning to children. She provided a foundation of several reading approaches and teaching strategies.
Wrote "Key Vocabulary" and "Teacher"
Freire, Paulo Reglus Neves - 1921-1997 - Brazil
Wrote "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" - mobilized education in the cause of social justice education of the poor.
Abandoned his career in Law to commit himself to education of the poor and politically oppressed.
Denounced teacher-centered classrooms.
Believed instructor domination denied the legitimacy of student experiences and treated students as secondary objects in the learning process. “Banking” education – as students became little more than passive targets of teacher comments.
Critical pedagogy – placing the student at the center of the learning process.
- Student dialogue, knowledge and skills shared cooperatively, legitimizing the experiences of the poor.
- Students taught how to generate their own questions, focus on their own social problems and develop strategies to live more fruitful and satisfying lives.
- Teachers are not passive as bystanders or the only source of wisdom.
- Teachers should facilitate and inspire rather than unhappy witnesses to social injustice.
- Teachers should be advocates for the poor and agents for social change.
His best know work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, illustrated how education could transform society.
When Brazil’s government was overthrown in 1964, Freire was jailed for “subversive” activities and later exiled. In the late 1960’s, in America, Freire witnessed racial unrest and antiwar protests. These events convinced him that political oppression is present in “developed nations” as well as third world countries and that economic privilege does not guarantee political advantage and that the pedagogy of the oppressed has worldwide significance.
, and use of ideas and concepts rather than facts alone."
Ernest Boyer – Conducted a major study of secondary education – for over 150 years high schools have been taking on more and more purposes with the delusion that they can do it all. Boyer Quotes:
"It is no longer enough to simply read and write. Students must also become literate in the understanding of visual messages as well. Our children must learn how to isolate a social cliché and distinguish facts from propaganda, analysis from banter and important news from coverage".
"A poor surgeon hurts 1 person at a time. A poor teacher hurts 130".
April 1995 quote from Ernest Boyer
"And above all, let them remember that the meaning of life is to build a life as if it were a work of art. In the end, the BasicSchool is committed to building lives as if they were works of art."