Cluster 1 – Philosophical Foundations

Jacques Maritain was born in Paris on Nov. 18, 1882. Under the auspices of his mother,

Mauritain's religious training was Protestant and his education rationalistic and humanitarian;

his Catholic father played little part in these aspects of his upbringing. Maritain attended the

Lycée Henri IV and the Sorbonne, where he devoted himself to studying modern thought in

philosophy, literature, biology, and social questions. At the Sorbonne he met Raïssa Oumansoff,

a Jewish Russian émigré, whom he married in 1904. A highly creative person who later

established a career and a reputation in her own right, working closely with her husband on

several of his books and publishing a number of her own, she attended with Maritain the

lectures of the famous philosopher Henri Bergson while both were university students, and for a

time they were influenced by his thought.

Shortly after their marriage the Maritains came under the influence of Léon Bloy, a

tempestuous intellectual and ardent Roman Catholic. Disillusioned in their intense quest for

knowledge by the alternatives offered by modern thought, they were converted to Catholicism

and baptized in 1906. Their conversion became the vanguard of a return to Catholicism among

some leading French intellectuals.

After completing his work at the Sorbonne, Maritain studied biology for 2 years at the University

of Heidelberg (1907-1908) under the distinguished biologist Hans Driesch. Upon his return to

France he studied the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, fulfilling an interest which had begun

while he was in Heidelberg. Maritain found the fullest satisfaction of both the intellect and the

soul in the thought of St. Thomas, with its harmonizing of revelation and reason and its holistic

and realistic description of reality. At this time Maritain decided to dedicate his career to the

communication of Thomistic ideas and their application to modern problems. While he was

studying, he supported himself by editing a lexicon for a French publisher.

From 1912 to 1914 Maritain taught philosophy at the Collège Stanislas. In 1914 he was

appointed to the chair of the history of modern philosophy at the Institut Catholique,

continuing also his teaching at the Collège. For his Introduction to Philosophy (1921) he was

awarded the title doctor ad honorem by the Congregation of Studies in Rome.

Mortimer Jerome Adler, (born December 28, 1902, New York, New York, U.S.—died June 28,

2001, San Mateo, California), American philosopher, educator, editor, and advocate of adult and

general education by study of the great writings of the Western world.

While still in public school, Adler was taken on as a copyboy by the New York Sun, where he

stayed for two years doing a variety of editorial work full-time. He then attended Columbia

University, completed his coursework for a bachelor’s degree, but did not receive a diploma

because he had refused physical education (swimming). He stayed at Columbia to teach and

earn a Ph.D. (1928) and then became professor of the philosophy of law at the University of

Chicago. There, with Robert M. Hutchins, he became a proponent of the pursuit of liberal

education through regular discussions based on reading great books. He had studied under John

Erskine in a special honours course at Columbia in which the “best sellers of ancient times”

were read as a “cultural basis for human understanding and communication.”

Adler was associated with Hutchins in editing the 54-volume Great Books of the Western World

(1952) and conceived and directed the preparation of its two-volume index of great ideas, the

Syntopicon.

In 1952 Adler became director of the Institute for Philosophical Research (initially in San

Francisco and from 1963 in Chicago), which prepared The Idea of Freedom, 2 vol. (1958–61). His

books include How to Read a Book (1940; rev. ed. 1972), A Dialectic of Morals (1941), The

Capitalist Manifesto (with Louis O. Kelso, 1958), The Revolution in Education (with Milton

Mayer, 1958), Aristotle for Everyone (1978), How to Think About God (1980), and Six Great

Ideas (1981).
 Cluster 2 – Historical Foundations

William Heard Kilpatrick, son of James Hines Kilpatrick, a Baptist pastor, and Edna Perrin

(Heard) Kilpatrick, was born in White Plains, Georgia, on November 20, 1871. Having completed

his early education in the local school system he enrolled at the age of 17 as a sophomore at

Mercer University in Georgia, a Baptist institution that listed Kilpatrick's grandfather among its

founders and original trustees. Kilpatrick graduated second in his class in 1891. Kilpatrick then

completed a year of graduate study in mathematics and physics at Johns Hopkins University. At

the end of that year he returned to Mercer, where he was awarded an M.A. degree in 1892 for

his work at Hopkins.

For his first job in education Kilpatrick accepted a position as a teacher of mathematics at a

combination elementary-secondary school in Blakely, Georgia; he was appointed principal after

his first year at the school. While teaching in Blakely, Kilpatrick took summer school courses in

education at Rock College and began to develop a serious interest in the teaching-learning

process.

After three years in Blakely, Kilpatrick returned to Johns Hopkins for another year of graduate

work and then moved on to Savannah, Georgia, where he taught for a year and also assumed

the duties of school principal at the Anderson Elementary School. Toward the end of that school
year, Kilpatrick accepted an appointment as professor of mathematics and astronomy at Mercer

University. He taught at Mercer from 1897 to 1906, serving during the last two of those years as

acting president. Meanwhile, he married Marie Beman Guyton of Marianna, Florida, on

December 27, 1898. They had three children, two of whom died in infancy.

John Franklin Bobbit was born near English, Indiana on February 16, 1876. He was a son of

James and Martha Bobbitt. He was born of true American stock, who believed that hard work,

study, self-discipline, religious faith, and devotion to duty were the absolute ingredients for

survival in this life and entry into the life beyond. He was a university professor and author. He

also taught school from 1903 to 1907 at the Philippine Normal School in Manilla. John Franklin

Bobbitt was a social efficiency advocate who saw the curriculum as a means for preparing

students for their adult roles in the new industrial society. His work greatlyinfluenced the

development of curriculum by emphasizing specifications and responses to current social needs

rather than on teaching classical subjects. In 1918, Bobbitt authored

The Curriculum. This was the first book to focus specifically on curriculum. This book has

beenrecognized by many scholars as the beginning of structured curriculum. Bobbitt realized

that it was not enough to just develop new curricula, but saw there was a need to learn more

about how new curricula could best be developed. This insight came through his vast

experience in the field of curriculum.

In his book, Bobbitt tells of a personal experience that caused him to look at curriculum from

the point of view of social needs rather than mere academic study. He had gone to the

Philippines early in the American occupation as a member of a committee sent to draw up an

elementary school curriculum for the islands. With the freedom to recommend almost anything

to meet the needs of the population, the committee had the opportunity to create an original,

constructive curriculum. Originally they assembled American textbooks for reading, arithmetic,

geography, United States history, and other subjects with which they had been familiar in

United States schools. Without being conscious of it, they had organized a course of study for

the traditional eight elementary grades, on the basis of their American prejudices and

preconceptions about what an elementary course ought to be.

Cluster 3 – Psychological Foundations

Abraham Harold Maslow, also called Abraham H. Maslow, (born April 1, 1908, New York, New York, U.S.

—died June 8, 1970, Menlo Park, California), American psychologist and philosopher best known for his

self-actualization theory of psychology, which argued that the primary goal of psychotherapy should be

the integration of the self.

Maslow studied psychology at the University of Wisconsin and Gestalt psychology at the New School for

Social Research in New York City before joining the faculty of Brooklyn College in 1937. In 1951 he
became head of the psychology department at Brandeis University (Waltham, Massachusetts), where he

remained until 1969.

Influenced by existentialist philosophers and literary figures, Maslow was an important contributor in the

United States to humanistic psychology, which is sometimes called the “third force.”

In his major works, Motivation and Personality (1954) and Toward a Psychology of Being (1962), Maslow

argued that each person has a hierarchy of needs that must be satisfied, ranging from basic physiological

requirements to love, esteem, and, finally, self-actualization. As each need is satisfied, the next higher

level in the emotional hierarchy dominates conscious functioning. Maslow believed that truly healthy

people were self-actualizers because they satisfied the highest psychological needs, fully integrating the

components of their personality, or self. His papers, published posthumously, were issued in 1971 as The

Farther Reaches of Human Nature.

Carl Rogers is best-known for his nondirective approach to treatment called client-centered therapy
Carl Ransom Rogers was born in 1902 in Oak Park, Illinois. Rogers was the fourth of six children born to

his parents, a civil engineer, and housewife. Rogers was a high achiever in school from an early age. He

could already read before age 5, so he was able to skip kindergarten and first grade entirely to enter

school in the second grade.

When he was 12, the family moved from the suburbs to a rural farm area. He enrolled at the University

of Wisconsin in 1919 as an agriculture major but later changed to religion with plans to become a

minister.
It was a visit with a school group to Beijing and a bout of illness that cause him to start reconsidering

these plans. After attending a 1922 Christian conference in China, Rogers began to question his career

choice. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1924 with a bachelor's degree in History and

enrolled at the Union Theological Seminary before transferring to Teachers College of Columbia

University in 1926 to complete his master's degree.

Part of the reason he chose to abandon his pursuit of theology and switch to the study of psychology

was a course he took at Columbia University taught by the psychologist Leta Stetter Hollingworth. Rogers

decided to enroll in the clinical psychology program at Columbia. He completed his doctorate at

Columbia in 1931.

Cluster 4 - Sociological Foundations

John Dewey, (born Oct. 20, 1859, Burlington, Vt., U.S.—died June 1, 1952, New York, N.Y.), American

philosopher and educator who was a founder of the philosophical movement known as pragmatism, a

pioneer in functional psychology, and a leader of the progressive movement in education in the United

States.

Dewey graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the University of Vermont in 1879. After receiving a

doctorate in philosophy from Johns Hopkins University in 1884, he began teaching philosophy and

psychology at the University of Michigan. There his interests gradually shifted from the philosophy of

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to the new experimental psychology being advanced in the United States

by G. Stanley Hall and the pragmatist philosopher and psychologist William James. Further study of child
psychology prompted Dewey to develop a philosophy of education that would meet the needs of a

changing democratic society. In 1894 he joined the faculty of philosophy at the University of Chicago,

where he further developed his progressive pedagogy in the university’s Laboratory Schools. In 1904

Dewey left Chicago for Columbia University in New York City, where he spent the majority of his career

and wrote his most famous philosophical work, Experience and Nature (1925). His subsequent writing,

which included articles in popular periodicals, treated topics in aesthetics, politics, and religion. The

common theme underlying Dewey’s philosophy was his belief that a democratic society of informed and

engaged inquirers was the best means of promoting human interests.

Alvin Toffler was born on 4 October 1928, in New York City and went to the New York University where

he studied English literature and met his future wife Heidi. They both were radical thinkers and belonged

to the Left Wing ideology.

They left the university together and relocated to the Midwest of the United States, working the blue-

collar jobs on the assembly line. After five years, Heidi became a union shop steward and he became a

millwright and welder.

After working as a manual laborer for some time, Toffler got a job in the Washington office of a Union

sponsored paper. He used to write on the political affairs of American Congress and the White House for

a Pennsylvanian daily.
He worked three years for the Pennsylvanian daily and then moved to New York City to work as a labor

columnist for the ‘Fortune’ magazine. He was later asked to write on the topics of business and

management. Thereafter, Toffler left ‘Fortune’ and joined IBM and was asked to write an essay on how

computers have changed society and organizations. While working on this essay, he came in contact with

many original theorists on artificial intelligence.

Xerox also asked Toffler to write analysis on its research laboratory and AT & T. His study revealed that

that company should have broken up more than a decade before the government forced it to break

down. In 1970, Toffler wrote his first book called ‘Future Shock’. In this book he explained the

psychological changes that come from ‘too much change in too short period of time’. The book was an

international bestseller.

After ‘Future Shock’ his second big book ‘The Third Wave’ came out. It was a sequel to the ‘Future Shock’

and talked about the transition in the developed countries from Industrial Age to Information Age. In

1983, Toffler got one of his essays ‘Previews and Premises: A Penetrating Conversation About Jobs,

Identity, Sex Roles, the New Politics of the Information Age and the Hidden Forces Driving the Economy’

published .
References

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Abraham-H-Maslow

https://www.verywellmind.com/carl-rogers-biography-1902-1987-2795542

https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Dewey

https://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/alvin-toffler-682.php

https://biography.yourdictionary.com/william-h-kilpatrick

http://www2.southeastern.edu/Academics/Faculty/nadams/educ692/Bobbitt.html

https://biography.yourdictionary.com/jacques-maritain

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mortimer-J-Adler