Republic of the Philippines

CAPIZ STATE UNIVERSITY

Main Campus, Roxas City, Capiz
COLLEGE OF EDUCATION

Foundation of Education

Pioneers of Modern Teaching

There are eleven (11) leading educational pioneers who constructed their philosophies and theories
of education. They developed formative ideas about schools, curriculum, and methods of instruction that
continue to shape the preservice preparation of teachers and their practice in today’s classrooms. They are
educational mentors from the past whose life, ideas, and behavior serve as
a model, or an exemplar, for another person.
Early pioneers such as Comenius, Rousseau, and Pestallozzi challenged the inherited concepts of
child depravity and passive learning that had long dominated schooling. The child depravity theory
insisted that children are born with a tendency to evil and that this inclination to misbehavior could be
eliminated by authoritarian teachers. In contrast, the early educational pioneers stressed the naturalistic
theory that children are naturally good and that nature provides the cues for their education.
Later educators such as Froebel, Montessori, Spencer, Dewey, Piaget and Freire argued that (1)
education should follow the natural stages of human growth and development and (2) children learned by
interacting with the objects and situations in their everyday environments.
This significant contributions of the pioneer educators, encouraged teachers to reflect and
determine who qualifies as historical mentors in developing their own philosophy or theory of education.

Comenius : The Search for a New Method

Jan Komensky (1592–1670), known as Comenius, was born in the Moravian town of Nivnitz. He lived
during Europe’s post-Reformation religious war between Catholics and Protestants—a time of hatred and
violence. He constructed a new educational philosophy, pansophism, means to cultivate universal
understanding. A pioneering peace educator, he believed that universally shared knowledge would
overcome ethnic and religious hatreds and create a peaceful world order.
Comenius emphasis on using the senses, rather than passive memorization, to learn. He introduces
Latin instruction to the students’ and by using vernacular language. His lessons began with short, simple
phrases and gradually moved to longer, more complex sentences .

Principles of Teaching
Respecting children’s natural needs and interests, Comenius rejected the child depravity doctrine that
children were inherently bad and that teachers needed corporal punishment to discipline them. Instead,
Comenius wanted teachers to be caring persons who created pleasant classrooms. He believed children
learn most efficiently when they are ready to learn a particular skill or subject. Comenius emphasized the
following principles: (1) use objects or pictures to illustrate concepts; (2) apply lessons to students’
practical lives; (3) present lessons directly and simply; (4) emphasize general principles before details;
(5) emphasize that all creatures and objects are part of a whole universe; (6) present lessons in sequence,
stressing one thing at a time; (7) do not leave a specific subject until students understand it completely.
Comenius’s principles that emphasized children’s readiness, using concrete objects, and moving gradually
in instruction became an integral part of teacher-education programs.

Education and Schooling

Comenius, an early multicultural educator respected religious and cultural diversity but also believed all
persons were members of a common human family. He believed that schooling, by cultivating universal
knowledge and values, could promote international understanding and peace.

Influence on Educational Practices Today

Comenius desired to prepare caring teachers who respected universal human rights and dignity and cultural
and religious diversity; to learn how to recognize children’s stages of development and readiness for
specific kinds of learning; to use objects and pictures to encourage children to use their senses in learning;
and not to rush or pressure children but to create a pleasant and comfortable classroom climate.

Rousseau: Educating the Natural Person

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), a Swiss-born French theorist, lived during the eighteenth-century
Age of Reason, which preceded the American and French Revolutions. According to Rousseau, people
were “noble savages,” innocent, free, and uncorrupted by socioeconomic artificialities. He wrote about
“Respecting child’s freedom”. He argued that children’s instincts and needs were naturally good and
should be satisfied rather than repressed by authoritarian schools and coercive teachers.

Principles of Teaching and Learning

Rousseau emphasized the crucial importance of stages of human development. He identified five
developmental stages: infancy, childhood, boyhood, adolescence, and youth. Each stage set its own
conditions for readiness to learn and led to the next stage.
Rousseau’s first stage, infancy (birth to age five), construct initial impression of reality and learns
directly by using his senses to examine the objects in his environment. Childhood (ages five to twelve),
using his senses to learn about the world. Boyhood (ages twelve to fifteen), learning natural science by
observing the cycles of growth of plants and animals; and by exploring his surroundings. Adolescence
(ages fifteen to eighteen) , learning the broader world of society, government, economics, and business.
The last stage of education, Youth (ages eighteen to twenty), expanding his horizons by visiting countries
and readiness to enter the marital life.

Education and Schooling

Rousseau was suspicious of schools, which he believed taught children to conform to society’s artificial
rules rather than living according to nature. School-induced socialization forced children into the routines
that adults preferred instead of letting them grow according to their own instincts, interests, and needs. By
forcing children to memorize books, traditional teachers upset the child’s own power to learn from direct
experience. Schooling teaches children to play the roles that adults prefer, rather than being their natural
selves. Rousseau used the following key ideas in formulating his philosophy of education: (1) childhood is
the natural foundation for future human development; (2) children’s natural interests and instincts will lead
to a more thorough exploration of the environment; (3) human beings, in their life cycles, go through
necessary stages of development; (4) adult coercion has a negative impact on children’s development.
Rousseau’s ideas contributed to permissive and progressive views of childhood that continue to influence
teaching and learning.

Influence on Educational Practices Today

Rousseau’s argument that the curriculum should arise from children’s interests and needs profoundly
affected child-centered progressive educators. Rousseau’s ideas also anticipated constructivism, in which
children interpret their own reality rather than learn information from indirect sources. Despite his distrust
of schools, Rousseau’s insights that teacher’s should follow children’s interests and that children should
learn from their direct interaction with the environment have shaped preservice preparation and classroom
practice.

Pestalozzi: Educator of the Senses and Emotions

The life of the Swiss educator, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827), coincided with the early industrial
revolution in Europe and America when factory-made products were replacing home handicrafts. Early
industrialization changed family life as women and children entered the work force. Pestalozzi sought to
develop schools that, like loving families, would nurture children’s development. His ideas about the
relationship of families and schools are useful in today’s rapidly changing society. Pestalozzi believed that
schools, if properly organized, could become centers of effective learning. He devised a method of
simultaneous group instruction by which children learned in a loving and unhurried manner.

Principles of Teaching and Learning

Pestalozzi’s approach to teaching can be organized into “general” and “special” methods. The general
method created a permissive and emotionally healthy homelike learning environment that had to be in
place before more specific instruction occurred.
Special method, or the object lesson, stressed on direct sensory learning. Children studied the
common objects in their environment like plants, rocks, artifacts, and other objects encountered in daily
experience. Thus students learn from these object to draw, write, count, add, subtract, multiply, divide, and
read.
Pestalozzi developed the following strategies, teachers should (1) begin with concrete objects
before introducing abstract concepts; (2) begin with the learner’s immediate environment before dealing
with what is distant and remote; (3) begin with easy and simple exercises before introducing complex
ones; and (4) always proceed gradually and cumulatively. Pestalozzi’s method became an important part of
elementary-school classroom practice in Europe and the United States.

Education and Schooling

Pestalozzi based learning on natural principles and stressed the importance of human emotions. He used
group instruction rather than individual tutoring. He stressed empirical learning, through which people
learn about their environment by carefully observing natural phenomena. He was especially dedicated to
children who were poor, hungry, and socially or psychologically handicapped He believed children should
learn slowly and understand thoroughly what they are studying. For him, a teacher was not only skilled in
instructional method but also capable of loving all children.

Influence on Educational Practices Today

Pestalozzi’s object lessons were incorporated into the American elementary-school curriculum in the
nineteenth century. His emphasis on having students manipulate the objects in their environment was
forerunner of process-based learning. His belief that education should be directed to both the mind and the
emotions stimulated educators to develop instruction to encourage both cognitive and affective learning.

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Herbart: Systematizing Teaching
Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841), a German professor of philosophy and psychology, devised an
educational method that systematized instruction and encouraged the moral development of students.

Principles of Teaching and Learning

Herbart defined interest as a person’s ability to bring and retain an idea in consciousness. He reasoned that
a large mass or network of ideas generated a great number of interests. Ideas related to each other formed a
network, an “apperceptive mass,” in the mind. He emphasized the humanistic studies of history and
literature as rich sources of moral values. By studying the lives of great men and women, students could
discover how people made their moral decisions.

Education and Schooling

Herbart wanted to systematize education and schooling by organizing instruction into a well-defined
sequence of steps that teachers could follow. The five Herbartian steps were:
1. Preparation.Teachers prepare students to receive the new concept or material they are going to present.
2. Presentation. Teachers clearly identify and present the new concept.
3. Association. The new concept is compared and contrasted with ideas the student already knows.
4. Generalization. A general principle is formed that combines the new and previous learning.
5. Application. The student’s knowledge of the new principle is tested by appropriate examinations and
exercises.

Influence on Educational Practices Today

Herbart’s view of moral education helped make history and literature into a cultural curricular
core. Herbart’s method was introduced in preservice programs as an indispensable way to bring order and
system to instruction.

Froebel: The Kindergarten Movement

The German educator Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852) is renowned for his pioneering work in developing a
school for early childhood education—the kindergarten, or children’s garden. Froebel, an idealist, believed
that spirituality was at the core of human nature. Every child, he believed, possessed an interior spiritual
power, a soul, striving to be externalized. Froebel constructed the kindergarten as an educational
environment in which children’s inherent but latent spirituality could be brought to the surface. A German
nationalist, he believed that the people of each country, including his native land, shared a common folk
spirit that manifested itself in the nation’s stories, songs, and fables. Thus, storytelling and singing had an
important place in the kindergarten program.

Principles of Teaching and Learning

As a philosophical idealist, Froebel believed that every child’s inner self contained a spiritual essence that
stimulated self-active learning. He therefore designed the kindergarten as a “prepared environment” in
which children could externalize their interior spirituality through self-activity. Froebel’s kindergarten,
first founded in 1837 in Blankenburg, was a permissive environment featuring games, play, songs, stories,
and crafts. The kindergarten’s songs, stories, and games, now a standard part of early childhood education,
stimulated children’s imaginations and introduced them to the culture’s folk heroes and heroines and
values. The games socialized children and developed their physical and motor skills.
Education and Schooling
Froebel believed the kindergarten teacher’s personality to be of paramount importance. Preservice
experiences should help teachers become sensitive to children’s needs and give them the knowledge and
skills required to create caring and wholesome learning environments. Froebel would encourage
kindergarten teachers to resist the contemporary pressures to introduce academic subjects into
kindergartens as a premature pressure that comes from adults, often parents, rather than from the children’s
needs and readiness.

Influence on Educational Practices Today

Kindergarten education grew into an international movement. German immigrants brought the
kindergarten to the United States, where it became part of the American school system.

Spencer: Social Darwinist and Utilitarian Educator

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) was an English social theorist whose ideas enjoyed great popularity and
influence in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Spencer was highly influenced by
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Spencer, a key proponent of Social Darwinism, the application of Darwin’s biological theory to society,
believed that the “fittest” individuals of each generation would survive because of their skill, intelligence,
and adaptability. Competition, a natural ethical force, induced the best in the human species to climb to the
top of the socioeconomic ladder. According to Social Darwinism, competition would improve the human
race and bring about gradual but inevitable progress.
Spencer opposed public schools, which he argued would create a monopoly for mediocrity by
catering to the average rather than the brightest in the school-age population. Private schools, in contrast,
as they competed for the most able students would become centers of educational innovation. Like
contemporary proponents of a voucher system, Spencer believed the best schools would attract the
brightest students and the most capable teachers.

Principles of Teaching and Learning

According to Spencer nature meant the law of the jungle and the survival of the fittest. He believed that
people in an industrialized society needed a utilitarian education to learn useful scientific skills and
subjects. Spencer wanted education based on the activities that people needed to survive, especially the
modern survival skills found in science and technology that prepared individuals to be intelligent
producers and consumers in an industrial society.

Education and Schooling

Spencer strongly opposed the traditional schools’ highly verbal literary and classical curriculum. The most
valuable subjects, in his opinion, were the physical, biological, and social sciences as well as applied
technology in fields such as engineering. Spencer classified human activities according to the degree that
they advanced human survival, prosperity, and progress. Science was given a high priority since it applied
to the effective performance of life activities. He included five types of activities in the curriculum: (1)
self-preservation activities; (2) occupational or professional activities; (3) child-rearing activities; (4)
social and political participation activities; and (5) leisure and recreation activities.

Influence on Educational Practices Today

Spencer would make the entry into preservice teacher-education programs more competitive so that only
the best and the brightest applicants were admitted. The program would stress science and technology.
Dewey: Learning Through Experience
John Dewey (1859–1952) developed his pioneering Experimentalist philosophy of education against the
backdrop of the social, political, scientific, and technological changes taking place in the United States in
the first half of the twentieth century. Dewey’s philosophy incorporated elements of progressive social
reform, Darwin’s theory of evolution, and Einstein’s theory of relativity. He believed that social
intelligence is enhanced by cooperative group activity and rejected Spencer’s emphasis on individual
competition. Envisioning education as an instrument of social progress, he saw schools as intimately
connected to society.

Principles of Teaching and Learning

According to Dewy, children were socially active human beings eager to explore and gain control over
their environment. By interacting with their world, learners confront both personal and social problems.
Such problematic encounters stimulate children to use their intelligence to resolve the difficulty and
expand their knowledge in an active, and instrumental manner.
For Dewey, the scientific method is the most effective process to solve problems. By using the
scientific method to solve problems, children learn how to think reflectively and to direct their experiences
in ways that lead to personal and social growth. Steps in applying scientific method in teaching and
learning: (1.) The learner, involved in a “genuine experience,” encounters a problem that truly interests
him or her. (2.) Within this experience, the learner locates and defines the problem. (3.) The learner
acquires the information needed to solve the problem by reading, research, discussion, and other means.
(4.) The learner constructs possible, tentative solutions that may solve the problem. (5. ) The learner
chooses a possible solution and tests it to see if it solves the problem.

Education and Schooling

Dewey considered education a social process by which the group’s immature members, especially
children, learn to participate in group life. Through education, children gain entry to their cultural heritage
and learn to use it in problem solving. Dewey said “(1) the educational process has no end beyond itself;
and that (2) the educational process is one of continual reorganizing, reconstructing, and transforming.
Dewey’s curriculum consists of three levels of learning activities and processes.The first level,
“making and doing,” engages children in projects in which they explore their environment and put their
ideas into concrete form. The second level broadens students’ concepts of space and time through projects
in history and geography. The third level, “science,” brings students into contact with various subjects such
as biology, chemistry, and social studies that they can use as resources in problem solving.
Dewey saw democratic education and schooling as open-ended processes that were free from
preconceived, or antecedent, principles and values in which students and teachers could test all ideas,
beliefs, and values. Opposing the separation of people from each other because of ethnicity, race, gender,
or economic class, Dewey believed that communities were enriched when people shared their experiences
to solve their common problems.

Influence on Educational Practices Today

John Dewey exercised an enormous influence on American education by applying pragmatism to
education, he helped to open schooling to change and innovation. Dewey’s ideas about socially expanding
children’s experience stimulated progressive education, which emphasized children’s interests and needs..
Dewey’s influence can also be seen in teaching that takes a “hands-on” or process oriented approach. He
costructed the preservice education of teachers on the principles of (1) seeing education in broad social
terms, and (2) in developing competencies to solve problems according to the scientific method. Practicing
teachers would use group activities, collaborative learning, and process-centered strategies in their
classrooms.
Addams: Socialized Education
Jane Addams (1860–1935)—the founder of Hull-House and a pioneering leader in social work, the peace
movement, and women’s rights—developed an educational philosophy called socialized education. She
based her educational theory on her efforts to improve the living and working conditions of immigrants in
Chicago and to mobilize women to work for social and educational reforms. She was a pioneer of modern
multicultural, international, and women’s education. Rebelling against the gender restrictions that
Victorian society imposed on women. Addams rejected the traditional curriculum that limited women’s
educational choices and opportunities. She wanted women to define their own lives, to choose their own
careers, and to participate fully in politics, society, and education.

Principles of Teaching and Learning

Adams argued that education had to take on new and broadened social purposes. Teachers needed to
understand the trends that were reshaping American society from a rural to an urban society and prepare
their students to deal with them in socially responsible and democratic ways. Believing that cultural
diversity could coexist with and contribute to America’s broad common culture, Addams sought to build
connections between immigrants and the larger American society. Addams propose to include the history,
customs, songs, crafts, and stories of various ethnic and racial groups in the curriculum in public schools.

Education and Schooling

Addams’s “socialized education,” influenced by progressivism and pragmatism, defined education in
broad social terms. She saw schools as agencies, much like settlement houses, that had the mission of
restoring the sense of community in a country undergoing a profound transition from a rural to an urban
industrialized and technological society. She envisioned schools as multifunctional agencies that socialized
as well as educated children. Teachers, like social workers, had many faceted responsibilities for their
students’ social well-being. The curriculum should be reconstituted to provide broadened experiences that
explored children’s immediate environment and highlighted connections with a technological society.
Addams’s enlarged concept of teaching as having a social mission has important implications for
preservice teacher education. It means that prospective teachers need to examine issues of social change
and social justice. For practicing teachers, it means that the classroom needs to be connected to the people
in the community that it serves.

Influence on Educational Practices Today

Addams’s belief that education must be free from gender biases corresponds with the goals of
contemporary women’s education, especially equal rights for women and their freedom to define their
lives and choose their careers. Her belief that industrialism should be infused with broad social purposes
applies to the argument that technology should advance greater communication and sharing rather than
generate consumer oriented materialism. Her crusade for a world without war provides a needed message
for a world wracked by violence and terrorism.
Montessori: The Prepared Environment
The Italian educator Maria Montessori (1870–1952) devised an internationally popular method of early
childhood education. Like Pestalozzi and Froebel, Montessori recognized that children’s early experiences
have an important formative and continuing influence on their later lives. As a pioneering women’s
educator, she vigorously challenged those who, because of sexist stereotyping, argued that women should
not be admitted to higher and professional programs of study. Defying the barriers to women’s education,
Montessori was admitted to the University of Rome and became the first woman in Italy to be awarded the
degree of doctor of medicine.

Principles of Teaching and Learning

In 1908 Maria Montessori established a children’s school for impoverished children in the slums of Rome.
The school created a “specially prepared environment” that featured methods, materials, and activities
based on her observations of children. Montessori argued that children possess an inner need to work at
what interests them without the prodding of teachers and without being motivated by external rewards and
punishments. She found that children are capable of sustained concentration and work. Enjoying structure
and preferring work to play, they like to repeat actions until they master a given skill. In fact, children’s
capacity for spontaneous learning leads them to begin reading and writing on their own initiative.

Influence on Educational Practices Today

Montessori’s pioneering contribution to education was her emphasis on the formative power that early
childhood learning has for later lifelong development. Among her significant educational contributions
were her (1) concept of sensitive periods, phases of development, during which children are ready to work
with materials that are especially useful in sensory, motor, and cognitive learning; (2) belief that children
are capable of sustained self-directed work in learning a particular skill; and (3) emphasis on the school as
part of the community and the need for parent participation and support.

Piaget: Developmental Growth

The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980) developed significant pioneering insights into children’s
cognitive, moral, and language development. Instead of philosophical speculation, Piaget used clinical
observation to discover how children construct and act on their ideas.

Principles of Teaching and Learning

Piaget discovered that children construct their concepts about reality by actively exploring their
environment. According to him, intelligence develops through a series of stages, characterized by the
child’s set of mental structures and operations at a particular age. With each new stage, children develop
new mental abilities that enable them to reconstruct the concepts they constructed at an earlier stage into a
more complex cognitive map of the world.
Based on his stage-learning theory of development, Piaget identified four qualitatively distinct but
interrelated periods of cognitive growth:
1. The sensorimotor stage, from birth to two years, children learn by actively exploring their immediate
environment.
2. The preoperational stage, from two to seven years, children intuition combines with speech to lead to
operational thinking involving concepts of space, time, and cause-and-effect relationships that extend
beyond the immediate situation.
3. The concrete-operational period, from seven to eleven years, children begin thinking in a
mathematical and logical way.
4. At the formal-operational period, from age eleven through early adulthood, individuals deal with
logical propositions and construct abstract hypotheses. They now understand and interpret space, historical
time, and multiple cause and- effect relationships.
Early childhood and elementary education should be based on how children develop and act on
their own thinking and learning processes. As they move through the stages of development, children have
their own readiness for new learning based on the cognitive level they have reached. This, in turn,
determines their readiness for new and higher-order learning experiences.
Education and Schooling
Piaget put emphasis on their environment as children’s setting for learning. Thus, children learn directly and
informally from their environment.
As they interact with their environment, children build their knowledge of their world through a
process of creative invention known as constructivism. As they discover inadequacies between their
existing concepts and the new situations they encounter as they explore their environment, children
reconstruct or reconceptualize their existing knowledge with their new information to construct more
complete higher-order concepts. To stimulate children’s explorations, teachers can design their classrooms
as learning centers that are stocked with materials that engage children’s curiosity.
The following principles from Piaget can guide teachers’ preservice preparation and classroom practice:
1. Encourage children to explore and experiment.
2. Individualize instruction so that children can learn at their own level of readiness.
3. Design the classroom as a learning center stocked with concrete materials that children can touch,
manipulate, and use.

Influence on Educational Practices Today

Piaget’s cognitive psychology connected how children learn to think and reason with teaching and learning
in schools. His theory generated revolutionary changes in early childhood and elementary education, not
only in the United States, but throughout the world. His ideas stimulated a movement to make classroom
settings more informal and more related to how children learn. Contemporary constructivist education
originated with Piaget’s pioneering assertion that children do not copy but rather construct reality.

Freire: Liberation Pedagogy

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) developed his philosophy of liberation pedagogy while working in a literacy
campaign among the impoverished illiterate peasants and urban poor of Brazil, his native country. For
Freire, literacy meant more than learning to read and write; it raised people’s consciousness about
conditions of their lives, especially those that exploited and marginalized them.

Principles of Teaching and Learning

An important goal of Freire’s philosophy is conscientizaçao, a Portuguese word meaning to be conscious
and critically aware of the social, political, and economic conditions and contradictions that affect a
person’s life. To raise their consciousness students, in dialogue with their teachers, must study their own
life stories and the collective histories of their racial, ethnic, language, economic, and social groups.

Education and Schooling

Freire asserted that the school’s curriculum and instruction can either indoctrinate students to conform to
an official version of knowledge or it can challenge them to develop a critical consciousness that
empowers them to engage in self-liberation. Education that defines a person’s worth in terms of wealth and
power and sees schooling as a ticket to a success in an exploitative economic system cannot be truly
humanizing.
Freire’s teachers should be neither impartial nor uncommitted on social, political, and economic
issues. Rather, teachers should develop a critical consciousness of the real power relationships in the
schools and of the conditions that affect their students. For Freire, real learning takes place as teachers and
students engage in an open and ongoing dialogue. He attacks instruction that leads to false, rather than
critical, consciousness in students’ perceptions of reality. An example is “teacher talk.” Teacher talk
implies that teachers can transmit knowledge to students by telling them what is true: students memorize
what the teacher says and passively deposit it in their minds for later recall. Freire calls the teacher-
talking–student-listening method educational “banking” in which each bit of information is deposited to be
cashed in the future, usually for an examination.

Influence on Educational Practices Today

Freire is esteemed as a genuine educational reformer and pioneer by contemporary critical theorists. His
worked to transform teaching and learning from the limited concept of transmitting information to
engaging the project of completing one’s identity and meaning in a world that needs to be made more
equitable, humane, and just. According to Freire, preservice preparation should involve future teachers in
dialogues in which they critically assess the social, economic, and political conditions that have an impact
on schools. In their classroom practice, teachers should help students to work for social justice by creating
a true consciousness that exposes the conditions that marginalize them and their communities.