MY VIEWS ON EDUCATION.
DICTIONARY.
BRITANNICA ONLINE..
Pestalozzi, Johann
Heinrich
(b. Jan. 12, 1746, Zürich--d. Feb. 17, 1827,
Brugg, Switz.), Swiss educational reformer,
who advocated education of the poor and
emphasized teaching methods designed to
strengthen the student's own abilities.
Pestalozzi's method became widely accepted,
and most of his principles have been absorbed
into modern elementary education.
In the history of pedagogy there is no period of such fruitfulness as the 19th century in Germany. In addition to
Herbart, Froebel, Pestalozzi (in German Switzerland), and their followers, there were scores of the most important writers,
philosophers, and theologians contributing their ideas on education--including Friedrich Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, G.W.F. Hegel, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, Ernst Moritz Arndt, and Friedrich Nietzsche. To list the many ideas and contributions of these figures and others is impossible here, but it is worthwhile to suggest briefly the work of three men--Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Wilhelm von Humboldt--representing three divergent views.
When the great heterodox University of Berlin was founded in 1809, Fichte became one of its foremost professors and a year later its second rector, having already achieved fame throughout Germany as an idealist philosopher and fervent nationalist. At a time when Napoleon had humbled Prussia, Fichte in Berlin delivered the powerful Addresses to the German Nation (1807-08), full of practical views on national recovery and glory, including suggestions on the complete reorganization of the German schools along Pestalozzian lines. All children would be educated--and would be educated by the state. Boys and girls would be taught together, receiving virtually the same education. There would be manual training in agriculture and the industrial arts, physical training, and mental training, the aim of which would be not simply the transmission of measures of knowledge but rather the instillation of intellectual curiosity and love and charity toward all men. Unlike Pestalozzi, however, Fichte was wary of the influence of parents and preferred educating children in a "separate and independent community," at least until a new generation of parents had arisen, educated in the new ideas and ideals. Here was an apparent revival of Plato's idea of a strictly ordered, authoritarian state.
Another of the founders of the University of Berlin (teaching there from 1810 to 1834) was the Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, who sounded a very modern note by offering a social interpretation of education. Education, in his view, was an effort on the part of the older generation to "deliver" the younger generation into the four spheres of life--church, state, social life, and science. Education, however, not only assumes its organization in terms of these four areas of life but also serves to develop and influence these areas.
Perhaps more than any other individual, the philologist and diplomat Wilhelm von Humboldt was responsible for the founding of the University of Berlin. Supported by the king of Prussia, Frederick William III, he adopted for it principles that raised it to a foremost place among the universities of the world--the most important principle being that no teacher or student need adhere to any particular creed or school of thought. This academic freedom survived in Germany despite its temporary suspension and Humboldt's dismissal by a reactionary Prussian government in 1819. Philosophically and pedagogically, Humboldt was himself a humanist--a part of a wave of what were called new humanists--who reasserted the importance of studying the classical achievements of humanity in language, literature, philosophy, and history. The aim of education in these terms was not the service of society or the state but rather the cultivation of the individual.
José Vasconcelos
(1881-1959)
Filósofo, escritor y político, José Vasconcelos nació en la ciudad de Oaxaca en 1881. También fue colaborador de Venustiano Carranza, quien lo designó como agente
confidencial ante los gobiernos de Inglaterra y Francia. Eran los tiempos de impedir que aquellas naciones
otorgaran apoyo económico a Victoriano Huerta. Adolfo de la
Huerta le dio posesión como jefe del Departamento Universitario y de Bellas Artes. Fue en este cargo que José
Vasconcelos impuso.
What Does Level 1 Mean?
The NALS found a total of 21-23 percent - or 40-44 million - of the 191 million American adults (defined as age 16 or
older) at Level 1, the lowest literacy level. Although many Level 1 adults could perform many tasks involving simple texts
and documents, all adults scoring at Level 1 displayed difficulty using certain reading, writing, and computational skills
considered necessary for functioning in everyday life.
The following chart details activities most adults at Level 1 usually can and cannot perform successfully:
Low literacy skills are closely connected to the social problems related to poverty. Nearly half (43 percent) of all adults in Level 1 live in poverty. This contrasts with only four to eight percent of those at the two highest literacy levels.
"A word as to the education of the heart. We don't believe that this can be imparted through books; it can only be imparted
through the loving touch of the teacher.""Real education should consist of drawing the goodness and the best out of our own students. What better books can there be than the book of humanity?"
"The end of all education should surely be service to others."
"The end of all knowledge should surely be service to others."
"The end of all knowledge must be the building up of character."
"Years of misguided teaching have resulted in the destruction of the best in our society, in our cultures and in the environment." Cesar Chavez.
After the war, I had a teacher in France who was totally crazy. He spoke 30 languages, literally 30 languages. One day he learned that I knew Hungarian, and he didn't. He felt so bad that he learned Hungarian in two weeks. In two weeks he knew more about Hungarian literature than I did.Then, I had, in New York, a very great teacher, a very great Master. His name was Saul Lieberman, a Talmudic Scholar. I've studied Talmud all my life. I still do, even now, every day. For 17 years we were friends, as only a real teacher and a good student can be.
As a boy, what books most influenced you, were most important to you? Religious books, of course. At home we didn't study the prophets that much. We studied the five books of Moses (the Pentateuch) and then, again, Talmud and Hasidic stories.
They, of course, had a lasting influence on me. Secular literature? We had to go to school, so we went to school too, but I received the main impact from my religious schools as a child.
After the war, I began reading, of course. I went to the Sorbonne and I began reading literature. Dostoyevsky and Thomas Mann, the usual. And Kafka. I remember the awakening that occurred in me when I read, for the first time, Franz Kafka. It was in the evening when I began reading. I spent the entire night reading and, in the morning, I heard the garbage collector around five o'clock. Usually, I was annoyed at the garbage collector. It's a very ugly noise that they make, ugly sounds. That morning I was happy. I wanted to run out and embrace them, all these garbage collectors, because they taught me that there was another world than the world of Kafka, which is absurd and desperate, and despairing.
I read a lot. I teach my students, not creative writing, but creative reading and it is still from my childhood. You take a text, you explore it, you enter it with all your heart and all your mind.
And then you find clues that were left for you, really foredestined to be received by you from centuries ago. Generation after generation there were people who left clues, and you are there to collect them and, at one point, you understand something that you hadn't understood before. That is a reward, and as a teacher I do the same thing. When I realize there is a student there, in the corner, who understands, there is a flicker in the eye. That is the greatest reward that a teacher can receive. Elie Wiesel.
Montaigne applies and illustrates his ideas concerning
the independence and freedom of the self and the
importance of social and intellectual intercourse in all his
writings and in particular in his essay on the education of
children. There, as elsewhere, he advocates the value of
concrete experience over abstract learning and of
independent judgment over an accumulation of
undigested notions uncritically accepted from others. To know by rote, is no knowledge,
and signifies no more but only to retain what one has intrusted to our memory. He
also stresses, throughout his work, the role of the body,
as in his candid descriptions of his own bodily functions
and in his extensive musings on the realities of illness, of
aging, and of death. The presence of death pervades the
Essays, as Montaigne wants to familiarize himself with
the inevitability of dying and so to rid himself of the
tyranny of fear, and he is able to accept death as part of
nature's exigencies, inherent in life's expectations and
limitations.
Education, The Churches and. J. McCabe, Rationalists Encyclopaedia The legend that Christianity "gave the world schools,"
which is still repeated even by apologists who consider themselves above the popular class, is, like similar claims in regard to
slavery, philanthropy, purity, etc., the exact opposite of the historical facts as they are recorded in every manual of the history
of education published since the middle of the last century. Indeed, the Roman system of free education had been described
repeatedly since the classical revival of the fifteenth century, and even in Christian circles every biography of Augustine of
Hippo had described how he found free pagan schools, primary and secondary, even in the smaller towns of Africa. In earlier
civilizations a good deal of schooling had been provided for boys (occasionally girls) of the middle class, as we find in Egyptian
and Babylonian remains, but they all, including Greece, regarded the education of the workers as superfluous. Under the
influence of the Stoic-Epicureans, long before bishops had the least influence, the Roman Emperors created a system of
schools, maintained by the municipalities, for all freeborn children. By the fourth century the "ladder of education" (free to
all) stretched, in all parts of the Empire, from the simple primary school, often in the open air, through secondary schools to a
sort of university at Rome (and in a few other cities). See the details in Laurie's Historical Survey of Pre-Christian Education
(1900) or any modern manual. These schools, in which the text-books were, naturally, Pagan literature, were offensive and
dangerous to the Church, and the fact that in so intellectually busy a city as Alexandria the Christians opened a few small
schools rather reminds us of the fable of the fly on the chariot - wheel when we are asked to regard this as the beginning of
education. The Fathers were, in fact, overwhelmingly opposed to education and expressed a contempt for profane
knowledge. "After Jesus Christ," said Tertullian, "all curiosity is superfluous."
Vygotsky searched for one science of life which would explain everything instead of a separate mental science and separate natural science. He looked for a science which considered genetics and the brain mechanism, developmental history, and societal context. He looked for one science which related to multiple disciplines including education, psychology, and medicine. Vygotsky's belief that life was both an object to be studied , tested, and described and a process which was dynamic and everchanging through the course of social evolution prompted his search for one unifying science.