Philosophy of Education

Plato

Plato is the earliest important educational thinker. Education is, of course, a 
relatively minor part of his overall philosophical vision, but it is an 
important one. He saw education as the key to creating and sustaining his 
Republic. He advocated extreme methods: removing children from their mothers' 
care and raising them as wards of the state, with great care being taken to 
differentiate children suitable to the various castes, the highest receiving 
the most education, so that they could act as guardians of the city and care for 
the less able. Education would be holistic, including facts, skills, physical 
discipline, and rigidly censored music and art. For Plato, the individual was 
best served by being subordinated to a just society. Thomas Jefferson, perhaps 
the first thinker to conceive of systematic public education in the modern sense, 
followed Plato in many respects, adapting him to the particular situation of 
American democracy in his own time.

Plato should be considered foundational for democratic philosophies of education 
both because later key thinkers treat him as such, and because, while Plato's 
methods are autocratic and his motives meritocratic, he nonetheless prefigures 
much later democratic philosophy of education. Plato's belief that talent was 
distributed non-genetically and thus must be found in children born to all 
classes moves us away from aristocracy, and Plato builds on this by insisting 
that those suitably gifted are to be trained by the state so that they may be 
qualified to assume the role of a ruling class. What this establishes is 
essentially a system of selective public education premised on the assumption 
that an educated minority of the population are, by virtue of their education 
(and inborn educability), sufficient for healthy governance. This is different 
in degree rather than kind from most versions of, say, the American experiment 
with democratic education, which has usually assumed that only some students 
should be educated to the fullest, while others may, acceptably, fall by the 
wayside.

Rousseau

Rousseau, though he paid his respects to Plato's philosophy, rejected it as 
impractical due to the decayed state of society. Rousseau also had a different 
theory of human development--where Plato held that people are born with skills 
appropriate to different castes (though he did not regard these skills as 
being inherited), Rousseau held that there was one developmental process 
common to all humans. This was an intrinsic, natural process, of which the 
primary behavioral manifestation was curiosity. This differed from Locke's 
tabula rasa in that it was an active process deriving from the child's nature, 
which drove the child to learn and adapt to its surroundings.

As Rousseau wrote in his Emile (book), all children are perfectly designed 
organisms, ready to learn from their surroundings so as to grow into 
virtuous adults. But, due to the malign influence of corrupt society, they 
often failed to do so. Rousseau advocated an educational method which 
consisted of removing the child from society (i.e., to a country home) and 
alternately conditioning him through changes to environment and setting 
traps and puzzles for him to solve or overcome.

Rousseau was unusual in that he recognized and addressed the potential of 
a problem of legitimation for teaching. He advocated that adults always 
be truthful with children, and in particular that they never hide the 
fact that the basis for their authority in teaching was purely one of 
physical coercion--"I'm bigger than you." Once children reached the age 
of reason (about 12), they would be engaged as free individuals in the 
ongoing process of their education.

B.F. Skinner

B.F. Skinner's perhaps largest contribution to education philosophy in his 
text Walden Two wherein he details the failings of society and education, 
as one is intricately and intrinsically linked to the other. Skinner 
shares Rousseau's lack of faith in society. His behaviorist theories play 
largely in his proposed ideas of social engineering.

Dewey

As can be seen in his Democracy and Education 
(http://wikisource.org/wiki/Democracy_and_Education) 
Dewey attempts to at once synthesize, criticize, and expand upon the
 democratic or proto-democratic educational philosophies of Rousseau 
 and Plato. He saw Rousseau's as overemphasizing the individual and 
 Plato's as overemphasizing the society in which the individual 
 lived. For Dewey, this distinction was by and large a false one; 
 like Vygotsky, he viewed the mind and its formation as communal 
 process. Thus the individual is only a meaningful concept when 
 regarded as an inextricable part of his society, and the society 
 had no meaning apart from its realization in the lives of its 
 individual members. However, as evidenced in his later Experience 
 and Nature Dewey recognizes the importance of the subjective 
 experience of individual people in introducing revolutionary new 
 ideas.

For Dewey, it was vitally important that education not be the teaching 
of mere dead fact, but that the skills and knowledge which students 
learned be integrated fully into their lives as citizens and human 
beings. At the Laboratory School which Dewey and his wife Alice ran 
at the University of Chicago, children learned much of their early 
chemistry, physics, and biology by investigating the natural processes 
which went into cooking breakfast--an activity they did in their classes. 
This practical element--learning by doing--sprang from his subscription 
to the philosophical school of Pragmatism.

Dewey was essentially the seminal thinker of educational progressivism 
and an important progressive in general. His ideas, while quite popular, 
were never broadly and deeply integrated into the practices of American 
public schools, though some of his values and terms were widespread. 
Progressive education (both as espoused by Dewey, and in the more 
popular and inept forms of which Dewey was critical) was essentially 
scrapped during the Cold War, when the dominant concern in education 
was creating and sustaining a scientific and technological elite for 
military purposes. In the post-Cold War period, however, progressive 
education has reemerged in many school reform and education theory 
circles as a thriving field of inquiry.

Freire

A Brazilian who became committed to the cause of educating the 
impoverished peasants of his nation and collaborating with them in the 
pursuit of their liberation from oppression, Paulo Freire contributes 
a philosophy of education that comes not only from the more classical 
approaches stemming from Plato, but also from modern Marxist and 
anti-colonialist thinkers. In fact, in many ways his Pedagogy of the 
Oppressed may best be read as an extension of or reply to Frantz 
Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, which laid strong emphasis on the 
need to provide native populations with an education which was 
simultaneously new and modern (rather than traditional) and 
anti-colonial (that is, that was not simply an extension of the 
culture of the colonizer).

Freire is best-known for his attack on what he called the banking 
concept of education, in which the student was viewed as an empty 
account to be filled by the teacher. Of course, this is not really 
a new move--Rousseau's conception of the child as an active learner 
was already a step away from the tabula rasa (which is basically the 
same as the "banking concept"), and thinkers like John Dewey and 
Alfred North Whitehead were strongly critical of the transmission 
of mere facts as the goal of education.

More challenging, however, is Freire's strong aversion to the 
teacher-student dichotomy. This dichotomy is admitted in Rousseau 
and constrained in Dewey, but Freire comes close to insisting 
that it should be completely abolished. Of course, this is strictly 
inconceivable in absolute terms (there must be some enactment of the
teacher-student relationship in the parent-child relationship), but 
what Freire suggests is that a deep reciprocality be inserted into 
our notions of teacher and student. Freire wants us to think in 
terms of teacher-student and student-teacher, that is, a teacher 
who learns and a learner who teaches, as the basic roles of classroom 
participation.

This is one of the few attempts anywhere to implement something like 
democracy as an educational method and not merely a goal of 
democratic education. Even Dewey, for whom democracy was a touchstone, 
did not integrate democratic practices fully into his methods. (Though 
this is in part a function of his peculiar attitudes toward 
individuality.) However, in its early, strong form this kind of 
classroom has sometimes been criticized on the grounds that it can 
mask rather than overcome the teacher's authority.