Philosophical Foundation Of Education

[Jovanna Ponder]

Philosophyis at the heart of curriculum development. It helps educators in formulating beliefs, arguments, and assumptions and in making value judgments. Philosophy develops a broad outlook, and it also helps in answering what schools are for, what subjects are important, how students should learn, and what materials and methods should be used. Philosophy provides the starting point . . . in decision making about education in its totality (Ogwara, et. al, 2013).

Idealism is considered one of the oldest philosophical systems, whose main proponent was the Greek philosopher, Plato. Idealism advocates that ideas constitute what is real and permanent, i.e. ideas are the only true reality. Idealism also emphasizes the spiritual component of man, i.e., man is a spiritual being.

According to this philosophy, education is the process of development of a person, his/her conscious and spiritual self. The ultimate responsibility for learning rests with learners. The school exists to develop character, increase knowledge, and cultivate aesthetic taste. The teacher is expected to be a model, friend, and guide to the learners.

Selection of study material in line with the expressed interests and concerns of the learner. Non-formal curriculum activities and physical training in areas like games, related hobbies, and other co-curricular areas.

In general, it is possible to identify elements of past education in the present-day curricula in many education systems within the United States and the rest of the world, depending on the past history.

Take some time to answer the questions in this survey to see where your philosophical beliefs align with progressivism, perennialism, essentialism, or existentialism. What did you learn about your own philosophical views? How will these impact your future classroom?

Where did these philosophies originate? To examine this question, we now turn to the historical foundations of education in the United States. Education as we know it today has a long history intertwined with the development of the United States. In this section, we will follow historical events through key periods of U.S history to see the forces that left lasting influences on education in the United States.

Another form of education occurred in dame schools. Where available, some parents sent their children to a neighboring housewife who taught them basic literacy skills, including reading, numbers, and writing. Because families paid for their children to attend dame schools, this form of education was mainly available to middle-class families. Teaching aids and texts included Scripture, hornbooks, catechisms, and primers (Urban & Wagoner, 2009).

More expensive than dame schools, Latin grammar schools were also available. The first Latin grammar school was established in Boston in 1635 to teach boys subjects like classical literature, reading, writing, and math at what we would consider the high school level today in preparation to attend Harvard University (Powell, 2019).

In Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, town or village schooling was not as common. Their populations were sparser, and they focused more on economic opportunities for survival than religion. Education was considered a private matter and a responsibility of individual parents, not the government. Schooling was seen as a service that should be paid by the users of that service, creating a stratified system of education where wealthy families had access to schooling and others did not. Wealthier parents often sent their children to English boarding schools or paid for private schooling in the colonies. Wealthy families also sent their children to parson schools, operated by a highly educated minister who opened his home to young scholars and often taught secular subjects. Education for the poor was usually limited to the rudiments of basic literacy learned in the home or occasionally at church.

In Colonial America, education in the mid-Atlantic and southern colonies was heavily stratified and remained out of reach for most inhabitants. New England Puritans worked hard to establish schools. Fear, anxiety, and the struggle for survival lent urgency to their quest for cultural transmission, which helps us understand their desire for formal schooling. Table 3.2 summarizes the main forms of schooling in Colonial America.

After the American Revolution, our new country was establishing its systems and identity. Many key Founders believed public education was a prerequisite in a republic. Three groups had distinct post-revolutionary plans for education and schooling, all of which were intended to serve as part of the founding process: Federalists, Anti-Federalists, and the lesser known Democratic-Republican Societies.

Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and John Adams, among other Federalists, focused on building a new nation and a new national identity by following the new Constitution, which consolidated power in a new federal government. The Federalists supported mass schooling for nationalistic purposes, such as preserving order, morality, and a nationalistic character, but opposed tax-supported schooling, viewing it as unnecessary in a society where elites rule.

Anti-Federalists, on the other hand, were opposed to a strong central government, preferring instead state and local forms of government. The Anti-Federalists believed that the success of a republican government depended on small geographical areas, spaces small enough for individuals to know one another and to deliberate collectively on matters of public concern. Anti-Federalists feared concentrated power.

Thomas Jefferson was an Anti-Federalist. An aristocrat whose genteel lifestyle was bolstered by his violent oppression of enslaved people, Jefferson put forth proposals to educate all white citizens in the state of Virginia. Jefferson proposed a system of tiered schooling. The three tiers were primary schools, grammar schools, and the College of William and Mary. The foundation of his tiered schooling plan included three years of tax-supported schooling for all white children with limited options for a few poor children to advance at public expense to higher levels of education. While he suggested very limited educational opportunities for women, no other key Founder advocated giving high-achieving scholars from poor families a free education. Religion was not a core curricular area in the primary and grammar schools. However, his plans were viewed as too radical by his aristocratic peers, and they correspondingly rejected his state education proposals.

The third group of post-revolution political activists formed several clubs broadly described as the Democratic-Republican Societies during the 1790s. Members of these political clubs included artisans, teachers, ship builders, innkeepers, and working class individuals. They generally supported universal, government-funded schooling, not simply to secure allegiance and order, but also to develop democratic citizen virtue and venues for deliberative learning and opportunities for dissent. The Democratic-Republican Societies viewed education as a means to prepare active citizens for new civic roles, and they considered the government responsible for providing positive benefits to individuals to realize a more fulfilling citizenship through venues such as education.

During the early- to mid-nineteenth century, the United States was expanding westward, and urbanization and immigration intensified. This period of history was defined by the emergence of the common school movement and normal schools, though conflicts over the organization and control of education continued. This period also saw the advent of higher education.

With the rise of common schools, Horace Mann then turned to how female teachers would be educated. For Mann, the answer was to create teacher training institutions originally referred to as normal schools. A French institution dating back to the sixteenth century, cole normale was the term used to identify a model or ideal teaching institute. Once adopted in the United States, the institution was simply called a normal school.

Because the teaching profession was being feminized, administrators and policymakers viewed this as an opportunity. Men were exiting the profession, and women were typically paid much less, allowing more women to be hired for less money to educate the growing ranks of students as common schools spread westward. Furthermore, once the profession was feminized, teaching became perceived as a missionary calling rather than an academic pursuit. While male policymakers insisted women were better nurturers and more suited to teaching morality and correct behavior in children, framing the discourse of teaching around a calling helped rationalize lower pay for women and fewer advancement possibilities.

The common school movement was not without its conflicts. Whigs (formerly Federalists), including Horace Mann, sought to establish state systems of schooling in order to create standardization and uniformity in curricula, classroom equipment, school organization, and professional credentialing of teachers across state schools. Democrats, however, often supported public schooling but feared centralized government, thus opposing the centralization of local schools under the common school movement. The battle between Whigs and Democrats during the nineteenth century represents one of the initial conflicts related to public schooling.

Another important conflict related to the common school movement was the clash between urban Protestants and Catholics. Typically from Protestant backgrounds, common school reformers continued to use the Bible as a common text in classrooms without considering the potential conflict this could generate in diverse communities. Horace Mann advocated using only generalized Scripture in order to prevent offending different sects. However, what appeared to Protestants as a generalization of Christian text was actually very insulting to Catholic immigrants, who were becoming the second largest group of city dwellers at the time. Protestants realized that it was best to reduce the religious content in the common school curriculum, but unhappy Catholic leaders created their own private parochial schools. This conflict generated a greater theoretical acceptance of the separation of church and state doctrine in publicly-funded common schools, though in practice, common schooling continued to infuse Protestant biases for over a century.

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