Category: Philosophical Foundations of Education

This refers to an educational philosophy that emphasizes the education of students based on an individualized curriculum. Student-centered philosophies give students the opportunity to use their experiences and abilities to solve problems and identify new ways of learning. One example of this will be if a math teacher allows the students to work in groups to solve various problems or lets students develop their own tests. With these philosophies, teachers and students are committed to working together and identifying the best achievable learning method.

Three types of student-centered philosophies include:

Progressivism: Progressivism builds the curriculum around students’ interests, abilities, and experiences and encourages them to work together cooperatively. The teacher will use games like Monopoly to illustrate important points. Unlike perennialists, progressivist teachers don’t believe in teaching great books but use field trips, interactive websites, and computer simulations to provide students with realistic learning challenges and build on their multiple intelligences. Teachers use many props to expand students’ abilities and help them think a little differently. Rather than just lecturing to students, teachers try to discover more engaging ways to communicate crucial learning techniques, and this provides students with opportunities to explore ideas and develop knowledge based on their own experiences and observations.

Social reconstructivism: Social reconstructivism promotes students, teachers, and schools to focus their energies and studies on alleviating pervasive inequities. Social reform is central to this kind of philosophy, and social problems and challenges help guide educators with their message. A social reconstructionist educator wants to inform the students and stimulate emotions and identify the inequities surrounding the world and them. The teacher encourages students to discuss and address problems like violence, homelessness, poverty, and many other issues that create disparity. The educator’s role is to discover social problems, suggest alternate perspectives, and help students’ examinations of those problems. The principal focus of this philosophy is to help students identify ways to improve society.

Existentialism: Existentialism places maximum importance on students’ actions, decisions, and perceptions, and individuals are responsible for deciding for themselves what’s right or wrong, true or false, beautiful or ugly. Students make choices and take the time to assess those choices. This philosophy means that pupils think for themselves and are aware of their responsibilities. It says no to tradition and concentrates on students’ unique talents. The teacher considers each student an individual, and the students learn how to achieve their complete potential by trying new concepts.

This refers to a philosophical school of thought that believes that the material world exists outside of ideas and ideologies. Realism opines that things can be known as they actually are. It aims at building an ability in learners to deal with the problems and get happiness out of life. Realism has both merits and demerits.

The merits of realism include:

·         Realism gives emphasis to functional knowledge and practical knowledge. It’s only such type of knowledge that makes an individual successful in life.

·       The objectives of education provided by realism may not be highly exalting, but at least they’re very important and useful. It’s a very important aim to develop an adaptable and dynamic mind to cope with life situations.

·         Realism provides due importance to science and technology in its scheme of curriculum. Only science and technology can raise the standard of living of millions throughout the world. No country can make progress without utilizing science and technology.

·         Heuristic method, Dalton plan, correlation, etc., are all gifts of realism in the arena of teaching methods. All students are expected to investigate for themselves instead of accepting things dogmatically.

·        Realism favors emancipationistic and impressionistic types of discipline. According to this, school discipline should be based on sympathy, understanding, and love instead of authority.

·        Realism promotes the development of proper attitudes like rational judgment and objective thinking among the students. It also emphasizes sympathy, love, and fellow feeling.

The demerits of realism include:

·         Critics opine that realism overlooks the ultimate reality of the spiritual world on account of its passion for the immediate reality of the material world. But the immediate reality as recognized via the senses and interpreted by intellect gets its significance only from the ultimate reality, and the former cannot be isolated from the latter.

·         Realism overlooks the importance of imaginations, emotions, etc., which are also highly important in human life.

·         According to realism, all the knowledge is gained from experimentation and observation. It doesn’t accept the claims of intuition and meditation as superior sources of getting knowledge.

·         Realism excessively emphasizes science and technology and altogether overlooks the importance of the non-material subjects such as art, culture, religion, etc. According to critics, science and technology don’t by themselves have any value unless they act as instruments for developing people’s moral and aesthetic life.

·         Realism has no faith in the highest ideals of life and eternal values. It has faith only in the harsh practical aspects of daily life.

This refers to a written description of what is considered to be the best educational approach. It’s a reflective and purposeful essay about a prospective teacher’s teaching beliefs and practices. This individual narrative also includes solid examples of the ways in which the author enacts these beliefs and practices in the classroom.

A philosophy of education statement should comprise an introduction, body, and conclusion. However, there’re specific components that the author needs to include in the statement. These include:

Introduction: This should be the thesis statement where the authors discuss their general beliefs about education and ideals in relation to teaching. One should consider what the pupils will have learned once they depart the class, after having been guided by the person’s teaching philosophy and strategies.

Body: In this section of the statement, the authors should discuss what they see as the ideal classroom environment and how it makes them better teachers, facilitates parent/child interactions, and addresses student needs. This section should also discuss how they’ll facilitate age-appropriate learning and how they’ll involve students in the assessment process. The authors should explain how they’ll put their educational ideals into practice. They should clearly state their goals and objectives for students. This helps the reader understand how their teaching philosophy will play out in the classroom.

Conclusion: In this part, authors should talk about their goals as teachers, how they’ve been able to meet them in the past, and how they can build on those to meet future challenges. They should focus on their personal approach to classroom management and pedagogy and how they wish to advance their careers to support education further. While the authors don’t need to use an official citation style, they should cite their sources.

There’s no right or wrong method to write a philosophy of education statement. However, authors should follow some general rules when writing such a statement.

Keeping it brief: The statement shouldn’t be more than one to two pages.

Using present tense: Authors should write the statement in present tense and in the first person.

Avoiding jargon: Authors should use everyday, common language and not technical terms.

Creating a vivid portrait: Authors should try to write the statement in a way that helps the readers take a mental peek into their classrooms.

Additionally, it’s important to talk about the authors’ personal experiences and beliefs. Authors should also ensure the statement is original and truly describes the philosophy and methods they’ll employ in teaching.

This is a branch of philosophy that is concerned with how people learn and retain knowledge. It suggests that knowledge can be divided into four main bases:

●               logic

●               reason

●               experience

●               divine revelation

The term is drawn from two Greek words, namely episteme and logos. Episteme stands for ‘knowledge’ or the ‘study, or science of’ while logos refer to ‘argument,’ ‘account,’ or ‘reason.’ Just as each of these different meanings captures some aspect of the Greek terms, so too does each definition of epistemology itself. Though the word “epistemology” isn’t more than a couple of centuries old, the domain of epistemology isn’t any less old than other fields of philosophy.

Throughout its extensive history, different aspects of epistemology have attracted interest. For instance, Plato’s epistemology drew attention for its attempt to realize what was there to know, and how knowledge (in contrast to mere true opinion) is good for the person seeking it. The focus of Locke’s epistemology was on knowing the processes of human understanding. The goal of Kant’s epistemology was to become aware of the conditions of the possibility of human understanding. The emphasis of Russell’s epistemology was on comprehending how modern science could be validated by appeal to sensory experiences.

When it comes to the field of formal epistemology, some of the recent works’ focus is on understanding how the level of human confidence is rationally constrained by its evidence. Considerable work done recently in the domain of feminist epistemology is an attempt to understand how interests affect human evidence and even their rational constraints, in general. It’s interesting to notice that in all these cases, epistemology tries to understand one or another category of cognitive success (or cognitive failure, as the case may be).

Though epistemologists concern themselves with different tasks, all of them can be classified into two categories. The first category relates to understanding what knowledge is and differentiating it between cases where someone knows something and others where someone doesn’t know something. To put it differently, it’s about determining the nature of knowledge, or finding what it means when someone knows, or fails to know, something.

The second category relates to finding the level of human knowledge. In other words, it’s about how much do humans know or can know. The way people use their senses, reasoning ability, the testimony of others, and even additional resources to gain knowledge – all are covered in this category. Additionally, this category tries to find if there are any limits to what humans can know.

Modern realism was developed and popularized by a group of philosophers, the most popular of which were Francis Bacon and John Locke. This is based on the belief that all knowledge comes from ruminating over past experiences. This idea is founded on the understanding that we do not bring any ideas into this life when we are born. Our ideas and philosophies are picked up as we grow older and have more experiences.

As a consequence, it can be hard to distinguish our ideas from reality. Bacon decided that rather than using deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning would be a much more helpful approach. Inductive reasoning completely ignores preconceived notions and focuses on the observable reality.

This ideology was created by St. Thomas Aquinas, who suggested that God is the ultimate truth, and as such, operates based on pure reasoning. This belief that all truth can be found in God is known as religious realism.

Aquinas developed a distinct view by drawing upon Aristotle’s ideas and perspectives, in addition to using the Neoplatonic doctrines of the Church Fathers and St. Augustine. Aquinas treated human existence as the supreme act or divine attribute. He set aside the creative act to God alone and refuted the presence of matter in angels. This way, he differentiated between God and created beings by hypothesizing that it’s just in created beings where existence is different from essence. Another significant facet of Aquinas’s teaching was that the human soul is an inimitable subsistent form, substantially connected with matter to form human nature. He upheld his belief that the human soul’s immortality can be firmly displayed. He also maintained that there’s a genuine difference of principles between the soul and its powers of willing and knowing, and that the basis of human knowledge is the sensory experience, which triggers the reflective activity of the human mind. According to Aquinas, human beings and lower creatures possess an inherent tendency or love toward God. He viewed God as the supernatural grace that perfects and lifts up the natural abilities of humans, and involves that blessedness, which one gets by formally knowing God himself through knowledge accompanied by the love of God.

Through religious realism, Aquinas articulated a highly developed and sophisticated adaptation of classical theism. His views brought together the perceptions of the Abrahamic religious traditions and classical Greek metaphysics. Additionally, his realist, pluralist ontology defended an account of existence that blended the elements of Neoplatonic and Aristotelian thoughts. His work on religious realism was extremely systematic, as he deployed a basic set of distinctions that he used creatively across an extensive array of topics. It was his metaphysical system that paved the way to the postulation of the First Cause that considered God as the beginning of this world. It differed considerably from the rest of reality. Though his position came under tremendous criticism and pressure, Aquinas held onto his views related to the relationship of faith to reason and of philosophy to theology. He presented several arguments for God’s existence and put forward lengthy studies of the divine nature, all of which are relevant to the modern philosophy of religion.

Realism is based on the belief that reality exists outside of ideas and ideologies conjured up by humans. It attempts to teach students ways to unearth absolute reality via logical processes. Realism was popularized by Aristotle, who was Plato’s student. Aristotle adapted his philosophies from that of Plato. He believed that there was an absolute reality out there, irrespective of whether humans recognized it or not. Similar to idealism, realism has three branches: classical, religious, and modern.

In the field of education, realism refers to the belief that teachers should study critical thinking, logic, and scientific methods to teach students ways to identify and understand reality. Thus, educational realism lays heavy emphasis on science and mathematics, though the humanities too can be influenced by it.

Realist educators persuade students to draw their observations and derive conclusions from their surrounding environment, rather than confining themselves to examine their own ideas. But what does educational realism in a classroom involve? Say, a teacher, Dave, is trying to formulate his curriculum for the forthcoming school year. Since Dave is a realist, he’ll tend to include many opportunities to encourage his students to study the natural world. Realists consider that the job of schools is to teach students about their surrounding world. This means Dave is likely to teach his students ways to use logical processes to find truth in the natural world. For instance, instead of using a textbook to teach his students about gravity, Dave might take them out in the open and climb a tree to drop objects of varying masses to reconstruct Newton’s moment of clarity. This will let students understand how gravity and mass work together. To help his students learn math, Dave can again use nature. He can share a hill’s photo and have his students find out its slope. Thus, irrespective of what Dave is teaching, educational realism will focus on using logical processes in the natural world to help students perceive and understand reality to find the truth.

The role of today’s teachers, which is a blend of a systematizer, organizer, and promoter of critical thinking, is mainly based on realist principles. Realist educators believe in a methodical approach to gaining classified knowledge while building on the information learned earlier. They are less inclined to encourage their students to seek the truth in ideas and literature. Instead, they encourage them to seek it by analyzing learned principles in their surroundings.  

These educational philosophies believe that students should be educated according to the need, requirements, and ideals of society so that once they are fully educated, they can contribute meaningfully to the growth and preservation of society. Thus, society-centered philosophies go beyond focusing on the student. Their emphasis is on a group or a population instead. Such educational philosophies focus on educating a group of people, which could be a minority group or the entire world, rather than a solitary student. Critical theory and globalization are two types of society-centered philosophies.

Critical theory is an educational philosophy that examines organizations, institutions, and instructions with respect to power relationships. Proponents of critical theory say that schools are controlled by the wealthy and powerful upper-class, which marginalizes the lower classes by using their power to uphold or reproduce their favored position on a subject. In contrast, the supporters of critical theory focus on empowering the subordinate classes by evaluating educational and social circumstances in schools and society. They highlight exploitative power relationships, like marginalization or determination to promote change.

Advocates of critical theory maintain that the existing curriculum in schools has two components – an official curriculum and a hidden curriculum. The latter is the unspoken, yet apparently widespread inclusion of views, which is likely to support the continued dominance of the upper class. To prevent the spread of the hidden curriculum to the disadvantage of the lower-class, critical theory proponents believe that schools should use officially sanctioned textbooks that are based on unbiased views and won’t promote or help maintain the dominance of the upper-class. Additionally, teachers are expected to persuade students to voice their ideas about their own values instead of those that are popular. 

The scope of globalization is much broader than the educational landscape, as it involves processes that encourage global participation and relationships between people of different cultures, countries, and languages. Four key processes that encourage globalization are economic, communication, educational, and political processes.

In the domain of education, an example of globalization can be the familiarity of teachers with technology. Though teachers in developed countries with reasonably priced access to technology are expected to integrate technology into every aspect of their teaching, the same won’t essentially be expected of a teacher in an underdeveloped country’s rural school. But irrespective of expectations or where they live, all students will come into contact with technology at some point and start dialogues on an international level. This makes it important for teachers from all countries to make their students aware of technological advancements, at the least, if not familiar with them.