economic foundation of education assignment

The Reporter

Program Report: Economics of Education, 2019

The enterprise of education has a supply side, where institutions produce education, and an investment side, where people acquire education. I say an "investment side" and not a "demand side" because education is largely an investment and not a form of consumption. Because it is an investment, the economics of education is guided by a great deal of theory that would not apply if education were a consumption good like, say, bread. Education economists study both the supply of and investment in education.

On the supply side, we think about institutions' objectives and constraints. We consider competition among institutions and how institutions interact with governments and taxpayers. We use models from public economics, political economy, industrial organization, regulation, and finance.

On the investment side, we consider whether people are under- or over-investing in their own or others' education — a determination primarily based on whether they are earning a higher or lower rate of return than what they could earn in an alternative investment, such as physical capital. We consider market failures because the financing of human capital investments is failure-prone, owing to issues like moral hazard that occur when human beings themselves are the vehicles for investment. We often investigate the potential for market failures due to people being poorly informed or irrational about investing in themselves — mispredicting their returns, say, or discounting the future in a hyperbolic manner.

Applying economic analysis to education is the defining feature of the NBER's Economics of Education Program. As an NBER program, there are also some distinctive features. First, the research carried out by education economists now relies, to an unusual extent, on extremely high-quality administrative data recorded by schools, governments, and authoritative third parties. The data are so accurate and comprehensive that we often can use ambitious econometric tools that are impractical with data that are sample-based, sparse, or prone to error. Second, the program features young scholars to an unusual extent, because in most years the share of education economists in the cohort of new PhDs is greater than the share in the previous year. These emerging scholars are highly productive, and they keep the program in a constant state of rejuvenation and intellectual excitement. Third, the program is unusually diverse and inclusive because education is so interesting to so many scholars. The participants in program meetings represent a wide array of institutions, demographic backgrounds, national origins, and policy views.

This energy and diversity make writing a report like this one a challenge: I cannot possibly do justice to all of the research. So, in this report, I emphasize a few key topics that have received considerable attention in the past few years. In my conclusion, I discuss some up-and-coming topics as well.

Productivity in Higher Education

Our most important project, since my last report, is our initiative to analyze productivity in higher education. Institutions of higher education — from large elite research universities to small private colleges and for-profit institutions — have never been under greater scrutiny. Policymakers, families, philanthropists, and the media question whether the benefits of higher education justify the costs. These questions are fundamentally about the productivity of the sector.

To answer these questions, the NBER, with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Spencer Foundation, commissioned nine papers to be the focus of a conference that brought together researchers, university leaders, policymakers, and journalists. The papers are available as NBER working papers and as chapters in a forthcoming volume, Productivity in Higher Education . The studies use rich and novel administrative data, employ cogent economic reasoning, deploy the latest econometric methods, and evince deep institutional understanding. In combination, the papers are fairly comprehensive: They include studies of the returns to undergraduate education, how costs differ by major, the productivity of for-profit schools, the productivity of various types of instructors, and how online education has affected the market.

Analyses of productivity in higher education must confront significant challenges. Higher education affects many out-comes: students' skills, employment, innovativeness, and public service, to name a few. Higher education institutions conduct a bewildering array of activities across many domains, from undergraduate teaching to medical research. Even if we focus on a single outcome — the earnings-based returns to undergraduate education, for instance — assessing the contribution of an individual institution must overcome the fact that students select into schools based on their aptitude and often attend more than one school. Finally, some benefits of higher education are inherently public in nature and difficult to measure or attribute to any one institution. This project's studies demonstrate that these five challenges — multiple outcomes, the multi-product nature of institutions, selection, attribution, and public benefits — are surmountable.

For example, I attempt to compute the productivity of the vast majority of undergraduate programs (more than 6,000) in the United States. 1 While the study emphasizes productivity results based on lifetime earnings because these matter disproportionately for the financial stability of the postsecondary sector, it also shows results based on public service and innovation. The study's most important advance, however, is addressing the aforementioned selection problem by employing all of the possible quasi-experiments in which a student "flips a coin" between schools that have nearly identical selectivity or in which admission staff "flip a coin" between students with nearly identical achievement. Thus, the study exemplifies how having comprehensive data allows one to pursue ambitious econometric strategies.

The study's most important finding, illustrated in Figure 1, is that when earnings are used to measure benefits, the productivity of a dollar is fairly similar across a wide array of selective postsecondary institutions. This result suggests that market forces compel some amount of efficiency among selective institutions. However, I also find that market forces appear to exert little productivity discipline on non-selective schools, possibly because their students are poorly informed investors or rely so greatly on third parties to pay their tuition.

Evan Riehl, Juan Saavedra, and Miguel Urquiola draw upon data from Colombia, a country with a vigorous market for higher education that is not dissimilar to that of the United States. 2 Importantly, Colombian students' learning is assessed by examinations not only before they enter universities but also when they exit. The researchers demonstrate that college productivity based on learning is quite different from productivity based on earnings, especially initial earnings. In particular, learning-based measures are much more correlated with long-term earnings than they are with initial earnings. This suggests that learning reflects long-term value-added, while initial earnings more heavily reflect skills that depreciate quickly or students' pre-college characteristics.

Joseph Altonji and Seth Zimmerman analyze whether productivity differs by college major. 3 There are at least three reasons why such analyses are hard. First, there is substantial selection into majors: Students with higher aptitude tend to major in certain fields. Second, the relationship between initial earnings and lifetime earnings varies by major. Engineering majors, for instance, have high initial earnings but subsequently experience unusually slow earnings growth. Third, different majors cost different amounts to produce.

Using administrative data for all Florida public institutions, Altonji and Zimmerman show that majors that are intensive in equipment, space, or highly paid faculty are dramatically more costly on a per-student basis. If we consider costs, the productivity findings are very different than what we might conclude from a naive look at initial earnings. Strikingly, as Figure 2 demonstrates, the ratio of earnings to costs is similar in majors with high earnings and high costs, like engineering, and modest earnings and modest costs, like public administration.

Pieter De Vlieger, Brian Jacob, and Kevin Stange estimate instructor productivity in standardized courses at the University of Phoenix. 4 Employing data on more than 300,000 students and 2,000 instructors, they make use of the fact that the assignment of students to teachers is virtually random. They show that instructors' productivity varies greatly and, interestingly, varies much more in person than in online courses. Indeed, if students want to obtain instruction that has maximum value-added, they must get it in person, because the online experience suppresses variation in instructional value-added.

The study's most surprising result, though, is that the University of Phoenix, despite being a for-profit school, pays its highly variant instructors exactly the same amount. This finding suggests that the sort of students who consider non-selective for-profit institutions do not make their enrollment choices based on the schools' record of skill production. If that is the case, the University of Phoenix is probably not forgoing profit by paying all instructors the same amount.

This brings us to a key takeaway from Productivity in Higher Education: Higher education institutions do respond to market forces, but institutions' investors (the students), constraints, production functions, and revenue sources vary. Thus, the extent to which market pressure disciplines productivity differs greatly, with selective institutions probably being subject to much more discipline than non-selective ones.

The Quality of Teachers Is Not Fixed

One of the main results of recent studies using large administrative datasets on educational inputs and outputs in K-12 education is a persuasive body of evidence that, as long assumed, teachers matter. A student who is fortunate enough to have a series of effective teachers can end up with substantially better outcomes, not just in terms of academic achievement but also in terms of college attainment, later earnings, and a variety of social outcomes. But the knowledge that teachers matter could be frustrating if there were no policies by which we could improve the set of people who teach. This is where economics comes in: Do economic logic and evidence suggest that we could have better teachers? This question is one on which research in the last few years has made substantial progress.

Barbara Biasi investigates how teachers responded when a change in Wisconsin law allowed school districts to pay teachers in a flexible way rather than in the rigid, "lockstep" manner based almost entirely on seniority that characterizes nearly all U.S. schools. 5 She finds that districts that adopted flexible pay ended up with teachers whose value-added was higher. Part of the improvement arose because young, high value-added teachers, who were systemically underpaid given their productivity, left the rigid-pay districts and joined flexible-pay ones where they could be paid more in proportion to their contributions. The evidence suggests that part of the improvement came through teachers improving their effectiveness in flexible-pay districts, presumably because effective teaching could be rewarded there.

Hugh Macartney, Robert McMillan, and Uros Petronijevic use data from North Carolina to demonstrate that teachers improve their value-added when accountability incentives are strengthened. 6 They use rich longitudinal data to separate the improvements into two parts: the part that arises because existing teachers raise their effort, and the part that arises because higher-ability people join teaching or decide not to leave it. The researchers use their estimates to compare the cost-effectiveness of alternative education policies and show that incentive-oriented reforms can outperform policies that only target the recruitment of higher-ability teachers. This is essentially because incentive-oriented policies improve all teachers, including the "stayers," and effectively recruit better teachers.

Sally Hudson attempts to answer the question most often asked about Teach for America (TFA). 7 Even if TFA teachers, who come from the nation's most selective colleges, are really much more able than the average incumbent teacher, is it worthwhile to hire them? After all, they are inexperienced, and evidence is strong that instructors improve in their first couple of years. Moreover, TFA teachers need to be replaced every two to three years because the vast majority go on to careers outside the classrooms. Hudson shows that, in fact, hard-to-staff schools appear to benefit from a succession of TFA teachers. This is largely because the TFA teachers' effectiveness is so much greater, even when they are novices, than that of non-TFA teachers. Also, the TFA teachers improve their effectiveness faster than do non-TFA teachers.

Andrew C. Johnston conducts a novel experiment, asking teachers to choose between pay that is more or less merit-based, between systems of merit evaluation, and between compensation that is salary-focused or benefits-focused. 8 Much teacher compensation is currently in the form of unusually generous retirement and health benefits. Johnston asks teachers how they would trade off better pay versus students who were easier to teach, students who were lower-income, longer commutes, and so on. Crucially, he conducts these experiments in a district that is actually reconfiguring its entire system of teacher compensation. Thus, nearly all teachers participated in the experiments, and they had strong incentives to answer honestly in order to get the system they preferred. One important result is that teachers with high value-added prefer merit pay more than those with low value-added. This suggests that, by switching to pay that is more merit-based, a district can disproportionately pull in higher value-added recruits. Another interesting result is that, while teachers do need to be paid more to teach students who are low achievers, all else being equal, they do not need to be paid more to teach students from low-income or racial/ethnic minority backgrounds.

Two other papers that demonstrate that greater relative compensation allows schools to recruit more effective teachers are by Markus Nagler, Marc Piopiunik, Martin R. West, and Owen Thompson. 9 , 10 In short, the quality of teachers in the United States is not fixed, but depends on how they are recruited and the compensation-based incentives they face. For example, as Figure 3 illustrates, when the unemployment rate for recent college graduates rises, the quality of teachers, measured by their value added for students, rises.

Fascinatingly, much that can be said of U.S. education can also be said of other countries that might be thought to be very different. For instance, Natalie Bau and Jishnu Das showed that Pakistani teachers' value-added varies about as much as it does in highly industrialized countries, and is, as in those countries, uncorrelated with teachers' credentials. 11 As in other countries, teachers in Pakistan improve in their first couple of years, but not much after that. There is no relationship between teacher pay and performance in Pakistan's public schools, where compensation is based almost entirely on seniority, but there is a meaningful positive relationship in private schools, where average pay is lower. These findings apply in many countries, rich and poor. The similarities are so striking that they must reveal something about first, the underlying production function for instruction, and second, the political economy of public education.

Bau and Das' most surprising finding is that, in Pakistan, compensation was so out of line with effectiveness that public schools' actually recruited better teachers after a policy change that put teachers on temporary contracts — jobs more susceptible to performance review — even though that same policy cut their average salaries by 35 percent.

This phenomenon — public school teachers' pay being dramatically out of line with alternative jobs and with effectiveness — is fairly common in developing countries. In Colombia, for instance, Saavedra, Dario Maldonado, Lucrecia Santibanez, and Luis Omar Herrera Prada show that people across all ability levels earn a substantial premium if they teach in public schools rather than take alternative jobs. 12 The researchers demonstrate this convincingly by comparing people who barely pass and barely fail the national teacher-screening exam.

Finally, Isaac Mbiti, Karthik Muralidharan, Mauricio Romero, Youdi Schipper, Constantine Manda, and Rakesh Rajani find the intriguing result that teacher pay incentives are more effective when they are combined with additional resources, at least in Tanzania. 13 Their findings are based on an ambitious randomized controlled trial involving 350 schools where unconditional grants, teacher incentives, or a combination of both are implemented.

Student Loans

Student loans have risen greatly in volume in recent years and are now by far the largest source of unsecured debt in the United States. Moreover, some students are unlikely to repay, so these loans generate risks for the entire economy in a manner not unlike the risks generated by mortgages in the recent financial crisis. Fortunately, many economists of education associated with the NBER are helping everyone to gain a better understanding of student loans.

For instance, Luis Armona, Rajashri Chakrabarti, and Michael Lovenheim focus on the extremely important role that for-profit institutions play in the non-repayment of student loans. 14 These schools' students are very disproportionately responsible for non-repayment because they take on unusually great student debt and experience unusually little improvement in earnings. The researchers ask whether these patterns are causal. In other words, if the same students were to attend, say, public community colleges, would they end up with equal payment problems? By comparing enrollment and postsecondary outcome changes across areas that experience similar labor demand shocks but have different supplies of for-profit institutions, they are able to show that much of the effect is indeed causal. As Figure 4 shows, enrollment in for-profits leads to greater loans, increased non-repayment, and worse labor market outcomes.

Why might enrolling at a for-profit cause greater debt and non-repayment? Charlie Eaton, Sabrina Howell, and Constantine Yannelis answer this question. 15 Studying what happens when a for-profit college is subject to stronger incentives to maximize profits as the result of a private equity buyout, they find that institutions subject to high-powered profit-maximizing incentives intensify their focus on capturing federal government aid at the expense of student outcomes. It is worth noting that federal loans, federal aid, and veterans' GI Bill-based aid often make up close to 100 percent of the revenue at for-profit schools. In other words, a student paying tuition from his or her own pocket is a rare exception, not the rule, at such schools. The researchers find that, when their incentives to maximize profits are intensified, for-profit schools enroll more students, enroll students who are less likely to benefit from higher education, increase tuition, and increase student loans. The results are worse student outcomes in terms of graduation rates, employment, and earnings, and significantly lower repayment rates.

Other evidence of for-profit institutions' eagerness to capture government aid comes from Matthew Baird, Mike Kofoed, Trey Miller, and Jennie Wenger. 16 They show that for-profit schools quickly raised tuition to absorb the increases in maximum tuition allowed under the new Forever GI Bill. Given the high tendency of veterans to attend for-profits, the bill thus improved profits but did little for veterans. Arguably, this bill made matters worse for non-veterans who attend for-profit schools, since they too were faced with somewhat higher tuition and, consequently, greater loans.

What would happen if for-profit colleges were to lose some of their access to federal loans and other federal financial aid? Stephanie Cellini, Rajeev Darolia, and Lesley Turner examine what happened when, in the 1990s, students at more than 1,200 for-profit institutions faced restricted access to loans because loan default rates were so high at the schools. 17 Using variation in the timing and restrictiveness of sanctions, the researchers find that low-income students were less likely to attend for-profit schools but were so much more likely to attend public community colleges that the effects on their enrollment were about a wash. The effects on loan repayment were positive, however, because the students who went to community colleges acquired less debt and were more likely to repay the smaller loans they took on.

Other Exciting Developments

The program is proud to report that a long-time member, Parag Pathak, won the American Economic Association's John Bates Clark Medal in 2018. The award citation recognized his work using market design theory to analyze systems in which students are matched to schools. Such systems are used in numerous cities. In a study of Taiwan's matching system, for example, Umut M. Dur, Fei Song, Pathak, and Tayfun Sönmez found that school assignment mechanisms which include deduction systems are manipulable, meaning that children from families which are strategic are more likely to receive desirable placements. 18

As mentioned at the outset, there is much more exciting research associated with the Economics of Education Program than I can possibly describe here. To induce you to explore further, let me mention just a few topics that are "up and coming." A number of recent NBER working papers and conference papers evaluate online education, both at the K-12 and college level. The use of technology in education has also been the subject of recent studies which explore both developed and developing countries. Some evidence from India looks promising.

There is new evidence on the returns to college majors, calling into question the common impression that the greatest returns are to becoming an engineer. Supported by rich data and the econometric ambitiousness of program members, many program meetings now include presentations on applied econometric methods. Indeed, we now host methods symposia. Increasingly, advances from behavioral economics, brain science, and psychology are finding their way into papers in the economics of education.

Researchers

Foundations of Education

Lisa AbuAssaly-George

Kanoe Bunney

Ceci De Valdenebro

Jennifer Margolis

ISBN 13: 9781312028470

Publisher: Open Oregon Educational Resources

Language: English

Formats Available

Conditions of use.

Learn more about reviews.

Reviewed by Erin Weldon, Director of Instructional Design and Development, Trine University on 4/15/24

Comprehensiveness rating: 5 see less

Foundations of Education provides a comprehensive exploration of education, delving into historical aspects of education in the United States, philosophical foundations, ethics, and legal points. The text focuses in on the key components of a teacher’s responsibility. The textbook could benefit from an index or glossary for specific terms to ensure a more accessible experience for those who are less acquainted with educational terminology.

Content Accuracy rating: 5

This textbook presents precise and impartial information. Information is supported with numerous facts and statistics that contextualize the content. Some facts do include personal thoughts on education; however, the text maintains a balanced perspective without taking a particular stance. I appreciate the number of quotes, thoughts and scenarios shared from educators. These statements support the accuracy of how education is evolving while also maintaining its foundational roots.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 5

Content is up to date and relevant for a foundations intro into education. It might be helpful to have more recent statistics regarding the bullying in the classroom. The focus was on 2017 statistics. This is an area in education that is an ongoing topic of discussion and is continuously improving as schools are working to provide new strategies or resources to prevent bullying in the classroom. As online learning continues to rise, I found the cyberbullying curricula resources to be very helpful! I appreciate the resources provided in this book on this topic for educators to create a positive classroom environment. From a higher education standpoint, it would be helpful to touch on Higher Education in addition to K-12 when it comes to Governance and Finance. There are references for colleges and universities; however, it seems as if the focus is on elementary and secondary. Many of the topics in this text also relate to higher education, especially for those who are entering the profession to teach adult learners. This could even be open a door to an OER text called, “Foundations of Teaching in Higher Education.”

Clarity rating: 5

The textbook is well-written and provides accessible text for all readers. The text avoids overly complex sentence structures and jargon. It uses active voice and familiar vocabulary whenever possible. I appreciate the number of examples and scenarios throughout the entire text. Terminology was explained with many examples for easy understanding of concepts. The textbook includes features like bolded key terms, definitions within the text, and conclusion summaries at the end of each chapter.

Consistency rating: 5

The text is solely focused on education. The content is presented in a way that follows a clear learning path. It starts with the fundamental principles and foundational knowledge required for educators, then progressively builds upon that base to cover more advanced topics and culminate in the process of becoming a teacher. I appreciate the historical aspects of education and how the foundations are still used in today’s teaching practices.

Modularity rating: 5

The text is easy to read and provides an excellent separation of topics. However, each chapter comes with a lot of information to digest. With the amount of reading involved, it might be helpful to include some of the information as a podcast or recording to lesson the reading load. There are quite a few references which is great! H5P provides great opportunities to condense information in a format that reduces the scrolling and amount of information on one page. As an instructional designer, I utilize the H5P accordion often to reduce the amount of reading and page overload for learners.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 5

The organization to this textbook exceeds expectations. It is presented well from the basics of why you teach to becoming a teacher with critical topics to think about before becoming a teacher. The chapters are organized in a way that tie back to the main idea, focusing on the multifaceted components of education. The book flows from one item to the next and teaches educators about the ever-changing needs of individuals and education today. Chapters are interconnected with real-world situations and scenarios.

Interface rating: 4

The overall interface of the textbook is well-created. Navigation from one chapter to the next is easy for readers. There were a few images that were difficult to read such as the Bloom’s Taxonomy Chart in Chapter 8. It might be helpful to navigate readers to the site with the pyramid.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

The text was clear and understandable with no notable grammatical errors.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

I found the concept of students arriving at school with an invisible backpack particularly insightful. This example suggests that each student carries varying burdens, some light and others heavy, based on their current life circumstances. It is important for teachers to foster an inclusive environment where all students feel valued and secure. When teachers acknowledge these invisible backpacks, they create a space where all students feel valued and secure. As a teacher it is important to remember that a student’s academic performance is not the whole picture and that we should show empathy and understanding to ensure learners feel safe and supported.

Overall, this is an excellent foundations course for future educators! This book is ideal for first-year education majors and serves as a valuable resource for developers and instructors of introductory education course. The text serves as a well-structured resource with a multifaceted approach to ensure key topics are covered effectively, preparing educators for the complexities of the classroom.

Introduction
History of US Education
Educational Philosophies
Students, Educators and Community
Building a Classroom Community
Teaching and Learning
Curriculum and Academic Standards
Governance and Finance
Ethical and Legal Issues in Education
Becoming a Teacher

Ancillary Material

About the book.

This dynamic and equity-focused Open Educational Resource serves as a multifaceted textbook for Foundations of Education courses in post secondary institutions.

About the Contributors

Dr. Kanoe Bunney

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Chapter 3: Philosophical and Historical Foundations of Education in the United States

In this chapter, we will explore how philosophical and historical foundations have shaped the trajectory of education in the United States.

Chapter Outline

Philosophical foundations, puritan massachusetts, the middle and southern colonies, federalists, anti-federalists, democratic-republican societies, the common school movement, the development of normal schools, conflicts in the common school movement, higher education in the colonies and antebellum america, increasing influence of the federal government, the beginning of education in the south, the morrill acts of 1862 and 1890.

Native American Boarding Schools: Cultural Imperialism and Genocide

Differing Approaches to Progressivism

Emergence of critical theory, extending schooling beyond the primary level, the development of teacher unions, ongoing inequalities and federal funding.

Separate Is Not Equal

Increasing Access to Education for Minoritized Groups

Establishing the department of education.

A Nation at Risk and Standards-Based Reform

Social Emotional Learning

As students ourselves, we may have a particular notion of what schooling is and should be as well as what teachers do and should do. In his book entitled Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study , Dan Lortie (1975) called this the “apprenticeship of observation” (p. 62). Many people who pursue teaching think they already know what it entails because they have generally spent at least 13 years observing teachers as they work. The role of a teacher can seem simplistic because as a student, you only see one piece of what teachers actually do day in and day out. This can contribute to a person’s idea of what the role of teachers in schools is, as well as what the purpose of schooling should be. The idea of the purpose of schooling can also be seen as a person’s philosophy of schooling.

Philosophy can be defined as the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality and existence. In the case of education, one’s philosophy is what one believes to be true about the essentials of education. When thinking about your philosophy of education, consider your beliefs about the roles of schools, teachers, learners, families, and communities. Four overall philosophies of education that align with varying beliefs include perennialism, essentialism, progressivism, and social reconstructionism, which are summarized in Table 3.1.

Table 3.1: Four Key Educational Philosophies

Perennialism is an educational philosophy suggesting that human nature is constant, and that the focus of education should be on teaching concepts that remain true over time. School serves the purpose of preparing students intellectually, and the curriculum is based on “great ideas” that have endured through history. See the following video for additional explanation.

Essentialism is an educational philosophy that suggests that there are skills and knowledge that all people should possess. Essentialists do not share perennialists’ views that there are universal truths that are discovered through the study of classic literature; rather, they emphasize knowledge and skills that are useful in today’s world. There is a focus on practical, useable knowledge and skills, and the curriculum for essentialists is more likely to change over time than is a curriculum based on a perennialist point of view. The following video explains the key ideas of essentialism, including the role of the teacher.

Progressivism emphasizes real-world problem solving and individual development. In this philosophy, teachers are more “guides on the sides” than the holders of knowledge to be transmitted to students. Progressivism is grounded in the work of John Dewey [1] . Progressivists advocate a student-centered curriculum focusing on inquiry and problem solving. The following video gives further explanation of the progressivist philosophy of learning and teaching.

The final major educational philosophy is social reconstructionism . Social reconstructionism theory asserts that schools, teachers, and students should take the lead in addressing social problems and improving society. Social reconstructionists feel that schooling should be used to eliminate social inequities to create a more just society. Paulo Freire [2] , a Brazilian philosopher and educator, was one of the most influential thinkers behind social reconstructionism. He criticized the banking model of education in his best known writing, Pedagogy of the Oppressed . Banking models of education view students as empty vessels to be filled by the teacher’s expertise, like a teacher putting “coins” of information into the students’ “piggy banks.” Instead, Freire supported problem-posing models of education that recognized the prior knowledge everyone has and can share with others. Conservative critics of social reconstructionists suggest that they have abandoned intellectual pursuits in education, whereas social reconstructionists believe that the analyzing of moral decisions leads to being good citizens in a democracy.

PAUSE & PONDER

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?

Historical Foundations

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.

Colonial America

(Note: If you are using a downloaded version of this text and cannot load the interactive timelines throughout this chapter, please turn to Appendix A to see image versions of these timelines.)

Public education as we know it today did not exist in the colonies. In the First Charter of Virginia in 1606, King James I set forth a religious mission for investors and colonizers to disseminate the “Christian Religion” among the Indigenous population, which he described as “Infidels and Savages.” His colonial and educational mission would impact settlement and education in America for centuries. Next, we will explore how education began evolving in Puritan Massachusetts and the Middle and Southern Colonies during the colonial period.

Puritans in Massachusetts believed educating children in religion and rules from a young age would increase their chances of survival or, if they did die, increase their chances of religious salvation. Puritans in Massachusetts established the first compulsory education law in the New World through the Act of 1642 , which required parents and apprenticeship masters to educate their children and apprentices in the principles of Puritan religion and the laws of the commonwealth. The Law of 1647 , also referred to as the Old Deluder Satan Act , required towns of fifty or more families to hire a schoolmaster to teach children basic literacy. Because of similar religious beliefs and the physical proximity of families’ residences, formal schooling developed quickly in the commonwealth of Massachusetts. Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania followed in Massachusetts’ footsteps, passing similar laws and ordinances between the mid- and late-seventeenth century (Cremin, 1972).

A: In Adam's Fall, We Sinned all. B: Thy Life to Mend, This Book Attend. C: The Cat doth play, And after flay. D: A Dog will bite, A Thief at night. E: An Eagles flight, Is out of fight. F: The Idle Fool Is whipt at School.

During this time, children learned to read at home using the Holy Scriptures and catechisms (small books that summarized key religious principles) as educational texts. The primers that were used “contained simple verses, songs, and stories designed to teach at once the skills of literacy and the virtues of Christian living” (McClellan, 1999, p. 3).

The importance of faith, prayer, humility, rewards of virtue, honesty, obedience, thrift, proverbs, religious stories, the fear of death, and the importance of hard work served as major moral principles featured throughout the texts. When Indigenous people were depicted or mentioned in texts, they were portrayed as “savages and infidels,” needing salvation through English cultural norms.

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.

Charity schools , often referred to as “endowed ‘free’ schools” (Urban & Wagoner, 2009), were occasionally established when an affluent individual made provisions in his or her will, including land, to construct and manage a school for the poor. In addition, field schools were occasionally built in rural areas. Named after the abandoned fields in which they were built, these schoolhouses offered affordable education to students. The teacher’s salary came from fees students’ families paid, and teachers often boarded with a local family while serving a field school. These schools were also called rate schools, subscription schools, fee schools, and eventually district schools (Urban & Wagoner, 2009).

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.

Table 3.2: Forms of Schooling in Colonial America

Even though today’s public schools operate separate from religion, the first schools in the U.S. had strong ties to religion. Where do you see those roots still in action today, even implicitly?

American Revolutionary Era

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.

Noah Webster was one of the great advocates for mass schooling, and the purposes for which he supported schooling included teaching children not just “the usual branches of learning,” but also “submission to superiors and to laws [and] moral or social duties.” Smoothing out the “rough manners” of frontier folk was very important to Webster. Furthermore, Webster placed great responsibility among “women in forming the dispositions of youth” in order to “control…the manners of a nation” and that which “is useful” to an orderly republic (Webster, 1965, 67, 69-77). Webster’s treatise on education and his spellers (like his 1783 American Spelling Book ) were intended to develop a literate and nationalistic character to shape useful, virtuous, and law-abiding citizens with strong attachments to Federalist America.

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.

Table 3.3 summarizes the key differences among these three political groups and how they related to their views of education.

Table 3.3: Federalist, Anti-Federalist, and Democratic-Republican Stances

Pause & Ponder

Where do we see elements of these different ideologies in today’s schools? What has remained and what has changed? What approach do you see as the most valuable in terms of today’s public schools?

Early National Era

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.

Common schools were elementary schools where all students–not just wealthy boys–could attend for free. Common schools were radical in their status as tax-supported free schooling, but their conservative-leaning curriculum addressed traditional values and political allegiance. Schooling offered increasing opportunities for families’ children, especially working-class families, by teaching basic values including honesty, punctuality, inner behavioral restraints, obedience to authority, hard work, cleanliness, and respect for law, private property, and representative government (Urban & Wagoner, 2009). Horace Mann , Massachusetts’s first Secretary of Education and Whig (formerly Federalist) politician, was the leader of the common school movement, which began in the New England states and then expanded into New York, Pennsylvania, and then into westward states.

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, école 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.

The first normal school in America was established in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1839 (now Framingham State University). They were primarily used to train primary school teachers, as middle and high schools did not yet exist. The curriculum included academic subjects, classroom management and school governance, and the practice of teaching. Teacher credentialing began and was regulated by state governments. Moreover, this contributed to the professionalization of teaching, and normal schools eventually became colleges or schools of education. Many normal schools eventually became full-fledged liberal arts and research institutes. Catherine Beecher was the first well-known teacher of the time and one of the normal schools’ first teachers.

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.

How do you see the early roots of feminizing the teaching profession still in effect today?

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.

Common schools also faced conflict in Southern states, including Jefferson’s Virginia, until after the Civil War. Planters had no interest in disturbing the status quo by educating poor whites or enslaved people. Driven by Southern aristocracy, education continued to be viewed as a private family responsibility and class privilege. In fact, many southern states prohibited educating enslaved people and passed state statutes that attached criminal penalties for doing so, such as the ones below.

Enslaved people have often been depicted in American history textbooks as passive toward their owners. This is a misrepresentation of history. African Americans escaped, committed espionage on plantations, negotiated statuses, and occasionally educated themselves behind closed doors. For enslaved people, education and knowledge represented freedom and power, and once they were emancipated, they continued their relentless quest for learning by constructing their own schools throughout the South, even with minimal resources. Unlike many free whites, African Americans placed an exceptional value on literacy due to generations of bondage.

CRITICAL LENS: WORDS MATTER

You will notice in this chapter that we use the term “enslaved person” instead of “slave.” Part of critical theory involves questioning existing power structures, even in word choice. Recently, academics and historians have shifted away from using the term “slave” and have begun replacing it with “enslaved person” because it places “humans first, commodities second” ( Waldman, 2015, para. 2 ).

Even while slavery continued throughout the South, segregation continued in the North. One of the first challenges to segregation occurred in Boston, Massachusetts. Benjamin Roberts attempted to enroll his five-year-old daughter, Sarah, in a segregated white school in her neighborhood, but Sarah was refused admission due to her race. Sarah attempted to enroll in a few other schools closer to her home, but she was again denied admission for the same reason. Mr. Roberts filed a lawsuit in 1849, Sarah Roberts v. City of Boston , claiming that because his daughter had to travel much farther to attend a segregated and substandard black school, Sarah was psychologically damaged. The state courts ruled in favor of the City of Boston in 1850 because state law permitted segregated schooling. This case would be cited in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1898 and in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

Colleges throughout the eastern seaboard states and former colonies served as symbols of elite education. These institutions developed throughout the North, Mid-Atlantic, and southern states, often subsidized by state legislatures. Religious sects competed to establish colleges in multiple states in hopes of garnering more adherents to their respective sects. Baptists, Catholics, Quakers, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians were among the groups responsible for this competition. Table 3.4 includes the 25 oldest colleges in the United States and who established them.

Table 3.4: The 25 Oldest Colleges in the U.S. and Their Founders

Post Civil War and Reconstruction

Following the Civil War, significant restructuring of political, economical, social, and educational systems in the United States occurred. Schooling continued to be viewed as a necessary instrument in maintaining stability and unity. During this era, education was shaped by increasing influence of the federal government, the beginning of education in the South, the Morrill Acts, and Native American boarding schools.

Elazar (1969) asserted that “crisis compels centralization” (p. 51): when the nation undergoes a calamity, it eventually leads to the federal government exercising extra-constitutional actions on its own will or as a result of demands made by state and local governments. The post-Civil War Era provides one example of this effect. The U.S. Congress established requirements for the Southern states to reenter the Union. Radical Republicans, as they were identified after the Civil War, believed that the lack of common schooling in the South had contributed to the circumstances leading to war, so Congress required Southern states to include provisions for free public schooling in their rewritten constitutions.

Of course, southern states followed through with the requirements and drafted language supporting schools, but they created loopholes like separate and segregated schools. Black schools received substantially lower funding than White schools, creating yet another form of institutionalized racism that would have long-lasting consequences for African American communities.

Following the Civil War, nearly four million formerly enslaved people were homeless, without property, and illiterate. In response, Congress created the Freedmen’s Bureau (officially referred to as the U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands). Supervised by northern military officers, the Freedmen’s Bureau distributed food, clothing, and medical aid to formerly enslaved people and poor Whites and created over 1,000 schools throughout the southern states. The Freedmen’s Bureau effectively lasted only for seven years, but it represented a massive federal effort that provided some benefits.

In addition to Freedmen’s schools, Yankee schoolmarms also headed south as missionaries to help educate formerly enslaved people. They sought mutual benefits: to educate the illiterate and simultaneously secure themselves in the eyes of God. As missionaries, female teachers learned that their work was a calling to instill morality in the nation’s students, and this calling was pursued for the good of mankind instead of financial gain. This same missionary status fueled both the migration of teachers westward following national expansion, and the thousands of schoolmarms that migrated to the South to educate formerly enslaved people who, they believed, had to be redeemed through literacy, Christian morality, and republican virtue (Butchart, 2010).

However, African Americans were preemptively educating themselves. Formerly-enslaved people knew the connection between knowledge and freedom. Ignorance was itself oppressive; knowledge, on the other hand, was liberating. Literate African Americans were often teaching children and adults alike and creating their own one-room schoolhouses, even with limited resources. By 1866 in Georgia, African Americans were at least partially financing 96 of 123 evening schools and owned 57 school buildings (Anderson, 1988). The African American educational initiatives caught Northern missionaries off guard:

Many missionaries were astonished, and later chagrined…to discover that many ex-slaves had established their own educational collectives and associations, staffed schools entirely with black teachers, and were unwilling to allow their educational movement to be controlled by the ‘civilized’ Yankees.” (Anderson, 1988, p. 6)

In addition, industrial schools were built in the South for Black Americans. Southern policymakers, northern industrialists, and philanthropic groups partnered to establish industrial schools focused on vocational or trade skills. Southern policymakers benefitted because industrial schools resulted in segregated higher education, which further limited access to equality. Northern industrialists benefited because they gained skilled laborers. Philanthropists believed they were giving Black Americans access to education and jobs.

Two African American leaders in the late nineteenth century had different perspectives on newly-developed industrial schools. Booker T. Washington was born an enslaved person in 1856 and grew up in Virginia. He attended the Hampton Institute, whose founder, General Samuel Armstrong, emphasized that “obtaining farms or skilled jobs was far more important to African-Americans emerging from slavery than the rights of citizenship” (Foner, 2012, p. 652-653). Washington supported this view as head of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. In his famous 1895 “Atlanta Compromise” speech, Washington did not support “ceaseless agitation for full equality”; rather, he suggested, “In all the things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress” (Foner, 2012, p. 653). Washington feared that if demands for greater equality were imposed, it would result in a white backlash and destroy what little progress had been made.

W.E.B. Du Bois viewed the situation differently. Born free in Great Barrington, Massachusetts in 1868, Du Bois was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He served as a professor at Atlanta University and helped establish the NAACP in 1905 to seek legal and political equality for African Americans. He opposed Washington’s pragmatic approach, considering it a form of “submission and silence on civil and political rights” (Urban & Wagoner, 2009, p. 176).

In addition to the Freedman’s Bureau, the federal government implemented two legislative acts related to education. The Morrill Act of 1862 gave states 30,000 acres of land for each senator and representative it had in Congress in 1860. The income generated from the sale or lease of this land would provide financial support for at least one agricultural and mechanical (A&M) college, known as a land-grant institution (Urban & Wagoner, 2009). Land-grant institutions were designed to support the growing industrial economy. The second Morrill Act of 1890 required “land-grant institutions seeking increased federal support…to either provide equal access to the existing A&M colleges or establish separate institutions for the ‘people of color’ in their state” (Urban & Wagoner, 2009, p. 188). The Morrill Acts demonstrated how industrialization and westward expansion resulted in increasing involvement of the federal government in education policy to meet national needs.

Critical Lens: The “Value” of Education

The opinions of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois are prevalent in today’s options for education after high school. Some believe that technical schools have a place in society for those who do not choose to, or who are not able to afford, four-year colleges. In essence, that the four-year college experience is not needed to be a contributing member of society. Others believe that one must attend college to expand understanding for future, more “professional” careers. Who is right in these scenarios? What influences where students choose to learn in post-secondary education? It is important to critique the implicit biases we hold regarding others’ educational choices.

Native American Boarding Schools: Cultural Imperialism and Genocide

economic foundation of education assignment

Using its military, the federal government created a number of Native American boarding schools throughout the country. The first and most famous of these was the Carlisle School, founded in Pennsylvania in 1879. The federal government convinced many Native American parents that these off-reservation boarding schools would educate their children to improve their economic and social opportunities in mainstream America. In reality, this experiment was intended to deculturalize Indigenous children. Supervisors at the boarding schools destroyed children’s native clothing, cut their hair, and renamed many of them with names chosen from the Protestant Bible. The curriculum in these schools taught basic literacy and focused on industrial training, intended to sort graduates of these boarding schools into agricultural and mechanical occupations. A total of 25 off-reservation boarding schools educating nearly 30,000 students were created in several western states and territories, as well as in the upper Great Lakes region. Based in ethnocentrism , or the belief of the White, Protestant mainstream culture that they were superior to other cultures, these boarding schools relied on a harsh form of assimilation, a fundamental feature of common schooling.

Critical Lens: Indigenous Boarding Schools in the News

In the summer of 2021, the dark history of Indigenous boarding schools made headlines as Canadian authorities discovered unmarked graves and remains of children [3] killed at multiple boarding schools for Indigenous children. In July 2021, the U.S. launched a federal probe [4] into our own Indigenous boarding schools and the intergenerational trauma they have caused. These boarding schools are one way that education has been used to oppress and deculturize a particular group of Americans.

The Progressive Era

The Progressive Era was defined by social reform, and education was no exception. Many of the philosophies you learned about earlier in this chapter were established in the Progressive Era. Changes in education during this period included varying forms of progressivism, the emergence of critical theory, extending schooling beyond the primary level, and the development of teacher unions.

During the Progressive Era’s focus on social reform, different approaches emerged. One group was called administrative progressives , who wanted education to be as efficient as possible to meet the demands of industrialization and the economy. Efficiency involved centralizing neighborhood schools into larger urban systems, allowing more students to be educated for less money. Graded classes, specialized and differentiated subject areas, ringing bells, an orderly daily itinerary, and hierarchical management–with men serving as school board members, superintendents, and principals, and women at the bottom of the rung as teachers–also increased educational efficiency. Educational efficiency required preparing good workers for a rapidly changing economy. Administrative progressives adopted factory models in schools to become better at processing and testing the masses, a continued form of educational assimilation.

Curricular or pedagogical progressives were focused on changes in how and what students were learning. Many of these progressives saw schooling as a vehicle for social justice instead of assimilation. John Dewey is often referred to as America’s philosopher and the father of progressivism in education. In Democracy and Education , Dewey (1944) theorized two types of learning: “conservative,” which reproduces the status quo through cultural transmission and socialization, and “progressive,” which frames education more organically for the purposes of experiencing “growth” and broadening “potentialities” (p. 41). In this case, “progressive” learning has no predetermined outcome and is always evolving, or progressing. Democratic education, Dewey believed, must build on the existing culture or status quo and free students and adults alike toward conscious positive change based on newly-discovered information, improvements in science, and democratic input from all members of the community, which added legitimacy to a society’s growth.

Dewey and his like-minded progressives have often been referred to as social reconstructionists . They believed education could improve society. Dewey recognized “the ability of the schools to teach independent thinking and to the ability of students to analyze social problems” (Kliebard, 1995, p. 170). Dewey did not expect the school to upend society; rather, as institutions that reached virtually all youth, he saw schooling as the most effective means of developing the habits of critical thinking, cooperative learning, and problem solving so that students could, once they became adults, carry on this same activity democratically in their attempts to improve society. Their attempts were often met with contempt because such critique threatened the existing socio-political system, which conservative individuals wished to preserve.

In Germany in 1923, critical theory was developed at The Frankfurt Institute of Social Research. With roots in German Idealism, critical theorists sought to interpret and transform society by challenging the assumption that social, economic, and political institutions developed naturally and objectively. In addition, critical theorists rejected the existence of absolute truths. Instead of blind acceptance of knowledge, critical theorists encouraged questioning of widely accepted answers and challenged objectivity and neutrality, noting that these constructs avoid addressing inequality in political and economic power, social arrangements, institutional forms of discrimination, and other areas. The original Frankfurt School theorists were dedicated to ideology critique and the long-term goal of reconstructing society in order to “ensure a true, free, and just life” emancipated from “authoritarian and bureaucratic politics” (Held, 1980, p. 15).

A decade later amidst the Great Depression, America witnessed the emergence of its own Frankfurt School. In the United States, critical theory was aligned with social reconstructionism and situated in social foundations programs in various academic institutions, including its first department in Columbia University’s Teachers College. Why would this movement find its home in American education? Educators were “a positive creative force in American society” that could serve as “a mighty instrument of…collective action” (Counts, 2011, p. 21). Critique, reflection, and action, often referred to as praxis, are intrinsically educational, and these actions transcend the mere transmission of knowledge and culture. America’s social reconstructionists attempted to cultivate a specialized field that drew from many academic disciplines in order to develop professional teachers’ understanding of how schooling tended to reinforce, evangelize, or perpetuate a given social order. They repudiated a predetermined “blueprint” for training teachers, rejecting “the notion that educators, like factory hands, merely…follow blueprints” (Coe, 1935, p. 26).

A blueprint depicts a current meter rating conduit.

When education stops reproducing the status quo, when we self-reflect and become self-critical, when we attempt to produce change and social improvement, when the work of powerful and vested interests is challenged by new knowledge, this is when intellectuals and education become threatening. What developed, and what continues to be a center of conflict today over the issue of education, is a struggle over two polarizing purposes of formal schooling. The first purpose is generally described as the transmission and indoctrination of the values, customs, ideologies, beliefs, and rituals, often controlled by and aligned with more powerful social groups. The second purpose of education, often perceived as more radical, is the view that education should serve as a means of critique and social reconstruction in order to improve society.

While high schools existed in New England towns since the establishment of the Boston Latin Grammar School in 1636, it was not until the early nineteenth century that high schools started appearing in urban areas, and they were not commonly attended until the early twentieth century. While common elementary schooling focused on teaching students morality, a differentiated curriculum in the early twentieth century high schools “reflected a new, largely economic, purpose for education” (Urban & Wagoner, 2009, p. 234). Debates arose around the high school curriculum: should it teach a classical curriculum, or focus on vocational training to meet the needs of the rapidly changing economy in the U.S.? In 1918, the National Education Association published a report called “The Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education” to establish the goals of high school education, including “health, command of fundamental processes, worthy home membership, vocation, citizenship, worthy use of leisure, and ethical character” to prepare students “for their adult lives” by “fitting [them] into appropriate social and vocational roles” (Urban & Wagoner, 2009, p. 271-272). The functionalistic nature of high school also resulted in the development of extracurricular programs including, but not limited to, “athletics,” school “newspapers, and school clubs of various kinds” in order to teach “students the importance of cooperation” and to “serve…the needs of industrial society” (Urban & Wagoner, 2009, p. 272-276). This resulted in the high school becoming a major institutional mechanism in developing the future teenager.

How did these “Cardinal Principles,” published over a century ago, shape your own high school experience?

Changes beyond high school also occurred in the Progressive Era. It was also during this period that the educational ladder expanded to include not only a system of elementary and high schools, but also junior high schools, community colleges, and kindergartens, which had served as separate private institutions since the mid-nineteenth century. Not only were more children attending school at this time, they were attending for longer periods of time. Moreover, patriotism, the abolishment of German language instruction in many schools, and intelligence testing were introduced to education following World War I.

While teaching offered career opportunities for women at the time, their increasing presence in the profession was met with little pay and much exploitation. Female teachers were expected to teach more students, particularly in urban areas where immigration tended to ebb and flow. It was not unusual for teachers to forego their salaries during economic downturns, and they had little or no benefits or rights to due process (which will be discussed in Chapter 5). Male administrators and policymakers typically justified their ill-treatment of teachers by treating them as martyrs for their communities (Goldstein, 2014).

The National Education Association was established in 1857, initially to address the interests of school administrators. Today, it serves as a major interest group for the teaching profession lobbying at all levels of government. The American Federation of Teachers emerged in 1916 as an outgrowth of teacher associations in Chicago. This group joined with organized labor unions, such as the AFL-CIO (The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations) in order to increase its formative power. Both organizations continue to exist today with state and local chapters.

Stop & Investigate

Check out the websites of the National Education Association [5] and the American Federation of Teachers [6] to learn more about these organizations, what they provide, and how they support active change in the teaching profession.

Post World War II & Civil Rights Era

In the decades following World War II, the U.S. prospered, and education saw many significant shifts, especially focusing on equality of educational opportunities. In this period, ongoing inequalities in educational opportunities led to limited federal funding, Brown v. Board of Education (1954) deemed segregated schools illegal, and other minoritized groups continued to fight for equitable access to education.

The 1945 Senate committee hearings on federal aid to education highlighted ongoing inequities in schooling, as well as the fact that “education was in a state of dire need” of financial resources and more equitable funding (Ravitch, 1983, p. 5). Most school funding came from property taxes, which continued to exacerbate inequities, as will be discussed in Chapter 4 . Other changes took place following World War II to worsen already existing inequalities. After the War, “white flight” from the inner city to suburbs resulted in highly-segregated communities, falling urban property values, and rising suburban property values. White flight contributed to greater de facto segregation, and it increased segregated schooling and enhanced inequalities in school funding.

Image of Sputnik in a museum; round silver ball with leg-like antennae

In response, the federal government offered limited assistance. The National School Lunch Program was passed in 1946 in order to enhance learning through better nutrition. In response to the anxiety created over the launching of the Russian satellite Sputnik, Congress passed the 1958 National Defense Education Act, which provided increased federal funding for math, science, and foreign languages in public schools. While these examples are not exhaustive, they illustrate the piecemeal federal approach to funding public schools: if a problem was perceived as a crisis and reached the federal legislative agenda, it was more likely to attract congressional funding.

In 1965, President Johnson worked with Congress in order to pass what became known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) . The ESEA served as the largest total expenditure of federal funds for the nation’s public schools in history. Aligned with Johnson’s war against poverty, the purpose of the law included increased federal funding for school districts with high levels of poor students. The law included six Titles (sections). Title I served as the primary legislative focus and included about 80 percent of the law’s total funding. Title I funds were distributed to poorer schools districts in an attempt to remedy the unequal funding perpetuated by reliance on property taxes. Title VII, or the Bilingual Education Act of 1968, provided funds for students who were speakers of languages other than English. The other Titles provided federal funding for school libraries, textbooks and instructional materials, educational research, and funds to state departments of education to help them implement and monitor the law. This resulted in the growth of state power alongside the expansion of federal power since states gained greater oversight of federal programs and mandates.

Separate is Not Equal

A sign reading "Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site" sits in front of the original brick school building.

In 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson established the separate-but-equal doctrine. In its decision, the U.S. Supreme Court circumvented the original intent of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause, which was intended to give all persons equal rights under the law. The Court strategically interpreted the clause to mean that as long as segregated public facilities were equal, they were constitutional.

The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision ended the separate-but-equal doctrine. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) found five plaintiffs representing four different states (Delaware, Kansas, South Carolina, and Virginia) and the District of Columbia to challenge segregated primary and secondary schools. All five cases were heard under the name Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka . The Court ruled unanimously in 1954 to overturn Plessy . In his majority decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren made the following conclusion:

Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the Negro group…Any language in contrary to this finding is rejected. We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. ( 347 U.S. 483, 1954 )

After ruling segregation unconstitutional, the Court then had to consider a reasonable set of remedies in order to ensure desegregation. In 1955, The Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka II that desegregation would occur “on a racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed.” This vague language, particularly the phrase “all deliberate speed,” contributed to chaos and enabled state resistance, with each state and district deciding its own approaches or avoidance thereof (Ryan, 2010).

When integration did take place, it occurred on white terms. Integration resulted in Black teachers losing their jobs and the closing of their schools. Black students were integrated into White schools and were suddenly being taught by White teachers while being subjected to an all-white curriculum. Black students and teachers alike experienced “cultural dissonance that exacerbated student rebelliousness, especially among African American boys.” Furthermore, “the actual implementation of integration plans and court orders remained largely in the hands of white school boards” (Fairclough, 2007, p. 396-400). Due to massive resistance to desegregation, Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act as an attempt to force compliance. Following the passage of ESEA, which provided millions of federal dollars to each state, the federal government could now threaten non-compliant states (and school systems) by withholding these large sums of money annually under Title VI of the act.

A yellow school bus drives down a city street.

Many urban school systems began drawing plans to bus white and non-white children to schools across neighborhoods in order to increase racial diversity in all of a district’s schools (i.e., Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education , 1971). However, in 1974 in Milliken v. Bradley , the U.S. Supreme Court decided schools were not responsible for desegregation across district lines if their own policies had not explicitly caused the segregation. President Nixon, who opposed inter-district busing, argued that in order to protect suburban schools, inner city schools should be given additional funds and resources to compensate urban school children from the harms of past segregation and the legacies of inequitable funding (LCCHR, n.d.). According to Ryan (2010), “Nixon’s compromise, broadly conceived to mean that urban schools should be helped in ways that [did] not threaten the physical, financial, or political independence of suburban schools… continues to shape nearly every modern education reform” (p. 5). The Milliken decision halted any possibility to integrate schools effectively. Due to the existence of de facto segregation, there was no significant way to integrate students unless they crossed district boundaries.

Nixon also worked with Congress to pass the 1974 Equal Educational Opportunities Act. This legislation embodied the rights of all children to have equal educational opportunities, and it included particular consideration to students with limited English proficiency (LEP). The EEOA’s applicable breadth is exemplified the law’s intent, which prohibits states from denying equal educational opportunity on account of race, color, sex, or national origin. Moreover, the EEOA prohibits states from denying equal educational opportunity by the failure of an educational agency to take appropriate action to overcome language barriers that impede equal participation by its students in its instructional programs.

The African American Civil Rights Movement gave hope to Mexican and Asian Americans, as well as women, people with disabilities, and to a lesser extent, Native Americans. Like African Americans, Mexican Americans utilized the courts to overturn segregated schools in the southwest, particularly in Texas and California. In fact, the earliest segregation case was filed by Mexican Americans in 1931 in Lemon Grove, California [7] . Other cases would be filed in the 1940s and 1950s, including Mendez v. Westminster [8] in 1947.

When we talk about the history of desegregation in U.S. education, Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 is often the first case that comes to mind. However, desegregation cases occurred decades before in the 1930s in California. Why is desegregation of Black schools in the formal curriculum but desegregation of Latino/a communities is not? In your formal education, what have you learned about the fights for equality amongst various groups, and which groups’ voices seem to be missing?

A class action suit in San Francisco, California, led to legal rights for English Language Learners. In Lau v. Nichols (1974), parents of approximately 1,800 non-English-speaking Chinese students alleged that their Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection rights had been violated since they could neither understand nor speak English, the language of instruction, which meant their children were not benefitting from educational services. The U.S. Supreme Court concluded that the school district violated Section 601 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination based “on race, color, or national origin” in “any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” As recipients of federal funds, schools were required to respond to the needs of English language learners effectively, whether this meant implementing bilingual education, English immersion, or some other method of instruction. The Court concluded, “There is no equality of treatment by providing students with the same facilities, textbooks, teachers and curriculum, for students who do not understand English are effectively foreclosed from any meaningful education.”

As discussed in Chapter 2 , children with special needs also received increased access to education, who historically had been excluded from many educational opportunities. In 1972, Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Children (PARC) v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania [9] , guaranteed the rights of disabled children to attend free public schools. Congress followed up in 1973 by enacting the Rehabilitation Act, which guaranteed civil rights for people with disabilities, including appropriate accommodations and individualized education plans to tailor education for students based on their unique needs. Providing children with disabilities in least restrictive settings was implemented in the 1975 Education for All Handicapped Children Act.

Women continued to fight for equal pay and respect in the workplace, and some success was achieved in the passage of Title IX as one of the amendments to the 1972 Higher Education Act. Title IX “prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any federally funded education program or activity” in “colleges, universities, and elementary and secondary schools,” as well as to “any education or training program operated by a receipt of federal financial assistance,” including intercollegiate athletic activities ( The U.S. Department of Justice, n.d. ).

Native Americans were able to enjoy greater control in limited ways over reservation schools including, but not limited to, the Rough Rock Demonstration School (recently renamed Rough Rock Community School [10] ), located in northeastern Arizona. A collaboration between the Office of Economic Opportunity and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the school opened in 1966 intending to give “Navajo parents…control” over “the education of their children” and to “participate in all aspects of their schooling.” Moreover, these efforts served as an “attempt to preserve the Navajo language and culture,” which was “in contrast to the deculturalization efforts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (Spring, 2008, p. 394). Despite the fact that the history of federal and Native Indian relations consisted in genocide, relocation, dispossession, and controlled boarding school experiments, Rough Rock Demonstration School continues to provide an example of Navajo empowerment and a locally developed form of Native cultural redemption.

The 1980s and Beyond

In the 1980s and beyond, education saw increasing federal supervision and support, though ultimate control of education still remained with individual states. In this period, the Department of Education was established, A Nation at Risk led to standards-based reform like No Child Left Behind, and social emotional learning emerged.

While the federal government has no constitutional authority over public education, its power and influence over schooling has reached a pinnacle since the 1980s. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter created the federal Department of Education . Ronald Reagan, who succeeded Carter, tried and failed to abolish it. Reagan’s neo-conservative followers largely consisted of traditionalists and evangelicals. The traditionalists believed moral standards and respect for authority had been declining since the 1960s, while evangelicals (also known as the Religious Right) were concerned by increasing U.S. secularism and materialism (Foner, 2012). For example, in Engel v. Vitale (1962), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that directed prayer in public schools was a violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which forbids the state (public schools and their employees) from endorsing or favoring religion. While the Religious Right saw this decision as taking God out of America’s public schools, the Court viewed separation of church and state as necessary to protect religious freedoms from government intrusion. As established earlier in this chapter, however, the moral values taught in the public schools were often based on or connected to Protestant Christianity, so complete separation of church and state in schools was impossible.

Not all people agree with having a Department of Education. Why would the federal government choose to abolish it? What would be the benefits and drawbacks of keeping the Department of Education?

A Nation at Risk and Standards-Based Reform

In 1981, Reagan created the National Commission on Excellence in Education to address the perceived problems of educational decline. In 1983, the commission released a 71-page report entitled A Nation at Risk . The authors of the report, who were primarily from the corporate world, declared, “American students never excelled in international comparisons of student achievement and that this failure reflected systematic weaknesses in our schools and lack of talent and motivation among American educators” (Berliner & Biddle, 1995, p. 3). However, A Nation at Risk was somewhat “sensational” (Urban & Wagoner, 2009, p. 402), containing numerous claims that were uncorroborated or misleading generalizations as a pretense for a larger political agenda intended to discredit public schools and their teachers.

Developing the perception that America’s schools were in crisis, A Nation at Risk justified a top-down, punitive approach to school reform. While standards-based reform had been around for several years as primarily a state issue, it “provided new theories about ‘systemic’ reform, which emphasized renewing academic focus in schools, holding teachers accountable for educational outcomes, measured by students’ academic achievement, and aligning teacher preparation and pedagogical practice with content standards, curriculum, classroom practice, and performance standards” (DeBray, 2006, p. xi).

What are some of your own experiences with standards-based reform? How has increasing standardization of schools helped or hurt your own learning experience?

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB, 2001) was an example of standards-based reform. As a bipartisan-passed reauthorization of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, it was “the first initiative to truly bring the federal government as a regulator into American public education” (Fabricant & Fine, 2012, p. 13). Before, the federal government’s outreach typically extended only to funding; now, NCLB would hold schools, teachers, and students accountable for passing numerous standardized tests given annually in math and reading in grades 3-12. The law also required states to test English language learners for oral, written, and reading proficiency in English each year.

Critiques of NCLB include the acute focus on standardized testing and teaching to the test, uniform curricula that have little or no connection to an increasingly diverse student population, and the punitive nature of the law on students, teachers, and administrators. Madaus et al. (2009) asserted that testing “is now woven into the fabric of our nation’s culture and psyche,” which is evidenced by the fact that even “the valuation of homes in a community can increase or decrease based on these rankings” (p. 4-5). The most problematic nature of NCLB is its supporters’ assumption that uniformity, standardization, centralization, and punitive measures can compel learning and decrease achievement gaps. Assumptions that all children learn uniformly in all respects reveals a lack of understanding of the complexity of the learning process and the various demographic differences among children in a diverse society, including cultural, language, and ability differences.

CRITICAL LENS: STANDARDIZED TESTING

In a society experiencing greater diversity, it is more important than ever to realize how culture plays a significant role in shaping children’s school experiences, making standardized assessments all the more problematic as they tend to be culturally biased. Therefore, relying on standardized assessments in making conclusions about student achievement (or lack of achievement) make it all the more difficult for teachers to respond appropriately to the cognitive abilities of their students. Rote memorization and test preparation skills can easily inhibit creativity and imagination, not to mention the fact that this kind of educational focus is teacher-centered, less dynamic, and assimilatory.

In 2015, the No Child Left Behind Act (originally the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965) was reauthorized as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) . The law:

Advances equity by upholding critical protections for America’s disadvantaged and high-need students.
Requires that all students in America be taught to high academic standards that will prepare them to succeed in college and careers.
Ensures that vital information is provided to educators, families, students, and communities through annual statewide assessments that measure students’ progress toward those high standards.
Helps to support and grow local innovations, including evidence-based and place-based interventions developed by local leaders and educators.
Sustains and expands investments in increasing access to high-quality preschool.
Maintains an expectation that there will be accountability and action to effect positive change in our lowest-performing schools, where groups of students are not making progress, and where graduation rates are low over extended periods of time ( U.S. Department of Education, n.d. ).

By specifically tying federal funds to standardized assessments, standardized curricula, and accountability measures, along with requiring states and state education agencies to devote extraordinary resources toward fulfilling these mandates through oversight, America’s public schools were being governed by the federal government like never before. Increased federal influence illustrates the underlying belief that if the U.S. is going to maintain economic superiority and global competitiveness, public schooling must become a national responsibility. Contemporary goals focusing on preparing children to compete globally are significant for a number of reasons, not the least of which include the evolving nationalization of our public schools and the simultaneous loss of local authority and discretion over fundamental matters related to student learning.

Recently, educators have advocated for a more holistic approach to education beyond testing. Social emotional learning (SEL) is “the process through which we learn to recognize and manage emotions, care about others, make good decisions, behave ethically and responsibly, develop positive relationships, and avoid negative behaviors” ( Edutopia, 2011 , para. 3). Advocates of SEL note that these skills will support students’ personal development and academic performance simultaneously. Early pilots of SEL-influenced approaches to education occurred in the 1960s in New Haven, Connecticut with two low-achieving schools serving mostly African American students. By the early 1980s, these two schools’ academic performance were above the national average. In 1994, the Collaborative to Advance Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL) was established, and Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ brought this concept into popular culture (Edutopia, 2011). ASCD’s “Whole Child Approach” continues to advocate for education that keeps students healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged ( ASCD, n.d.).

What social emotional learning (SEL) skills did you learn at school or wish you learned? How will this impact your future classroom instruction?

Education in the United States has a complicated past entrenched in religious, economic, national, and international concerns. In Colonial America, Puritans in Massachusetts knew education would teach children the ways of religion and laws, vital to survival in a new world. Meanwhile, the Middle and Southern Colonies viewed education as a commodity for the wealthy families who could afford it. After the American Revolution, Federalists, Anti-Federalists, and Democratic-Republican Societies all had different perceptions of how schools should be organized to support our newly-established independent nation. In the Early National Era, common schools, normal schools, and higher education grew as education became more widely established. Following the Civil War, the federal government was increasingly involved in education, including the temporary creation of the Freedmen’s Bureau and subsequent federal funding of agricultural and mechanical colleges with the passage of the Morrill Acts. In the Progressive Era, efforts to maximize the efficiency of educational systems and to utilize education as a venue for social reform prevailed. After World War II, equitable access to education became a primary focus, as “separate-but-equal” doctrines were overthrown and schools grappled with institutional discrimination against non-White students, students with disabilities, women, and English Learners. The 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act provided federal funds to public schools, while states and local school districts continued to exercise considerable discretion over curriculum, assessments, and teacher certification. In the 1980s and beyond, increased pressures for standardization and accountability resulted in standards-based reform, including the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001. More recently, education has been leveraged to support all of a students’ developmental needs, not just academic. Common educational philosophies including perennialism, essentialism, progressivism, and social reconstructionism reflect varying beliefs about the roles education should fill.

Like learning, teaching is always developing; it is never realized once and for all. Our public schools have always served as sites of moral, economic, political, religious and social conflict and assimilation into a narrowly defined standard image of what it means to be an American. According to Britzman (as quoted by Kelle, 1996), “the context of teaching is political, it is an ideological context that privileges the interests, values, and practices necessary to maintain the status quo.” Teaching is by no means “innocent of ideology,” she declares. Rather, the context of education tends to preserve “the institutional values of compliance to authority, social conformity, efficiency, standardization, competition, and the objectification of knowledge” (p. 66-67).

It should be no surprise then that contemporary debates over public education continue to reflect our deepest ideological differences. As Tyack and Cuban (1995) have noted in their historical study of school reform, the nation’s perception toward schooling often “shift[s]… from panacea to scapegoat” (p. 14). We would go a long way in solving academic achievement and closing educational gaps by addressing the broader structural issues that institutionalize and perpetuate poverty and inequality.

https://www.pbs.org/onlyateacher/john.html ↵
https://iep.utm.edu/freire/ ↵
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57592243 ↵
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/11/1013772743/indian-boarding-school-gravesites-federal-investigation ↵
https://www.nea.org/ ↵
https://www.aft.org/ ↵
https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/lemon-grove-incident/ ↵
https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/mendez-v-westminster/ ↵
http://www.pilcop.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/PARC-Consent-Decree.pdf ↵
http://www.roughrock.k12.az.us/default.htm ↵

The fundamental nature of knowledge, reality and existence; in the case of a philosophy of education, what one believes to be true about the essentials of education.

Educational philosophy suggesting that human nature is constant, and that the focus of education should be on teaching concepts that remain true over time.

Educational philosophy that suggests that there are skills and knowledge that all people should possess.

Educational philosophy emphasizing real-world problem solving and individual development, with the teacher serving as a "guide on the side."

Significant 20th century educator also known as the father of progressivism. Advocate for student-centered, problem-based learning. Published several books outlining the role of democracy in education to create thoughtful, productive citizens.

Educational philosophy asserting that schools, teachers, and students should take the lead in addressing social problems and improving society.

Brazilian philosopher and educator who was one of the most influential thinkers in the ideas behind social reconstructionism. Believed that education should be student-centered and avoid the "banking model" of teachers depositing information into students. Wrote several books, including "Pedagogy of the Oppressed."

First compulsory education law in the New World.

Required towns of fifty or more families to hire a schoolmaster to teach children basic literacy. Also known as the Old Deluder Satan Act.

Required towns of fifty or more families to hire a schoolmaster to teach children basic literacy. Also known as the Law of 1647.

Model of schooling in Colonial America in which parents sent children to a local woman who would teach basic literacy skills for a small fee.

Model of schooling in Colonial America to teach boys subjects like classical literature, reading, writing, and math in preparation to attend Harvard University. First established in Boston in 1635.

Model of schooling in Colonial America in which a highly educated minister opened his home to young scholars and often taught secular subjects.

Model of schooling in Colonial America established when an affluent individual made provisions in his or her will, including land, to construct and manage a school for the poor. Also called endowed free schools.

Model of schooling in Colonial America involving schools being built in abandoned fields in rural areas to offer affordable education to students. Teachers received payment from families and boarded with families. Also called rate schools, subscription schools, fee schools, and eventually district schools.

American Revolutionary Era group supporting mass schooling for nationalistic purposes, such as preserving order, morality, and a nationalistic character, but opposing tax-supported schooling. Included Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, John Adams, and Noah Webster.

Federalist who supported mass schooling and wrote his "American Spelling Book" in 1783.

Political group in the American Revolutionary Era that opposed a strong central government, preferring instead state and local forms of government. Included Thomas Jefferson.

Anti-Federalist and third U.S. president who proposed a tiered schooling model in Virginia.

Political group in the American Revoutionary Era that supported universal, government-funded schooling. Members of these political clubs included artisans, teachers, ship builders, innkeepers, and working class individuals.

Elementary schools where all students--not just wealthy boys--could attend for free. Developed in the 1800s by Horace Mann.

Massachusetts’s first Secretary of Education and leader of the common school movement.

Teacher training institutions championed by Horace Mann that arose during the Common School Movement.

First well-known teacher of the Common School Movement and one of the normal schools’ first teachers.

Distributed food, clothing, and medical aid to formerly enslaved people and poor Whites and created over 1,000 schools throughout the southern states after the Civil War.

Post-Civil War schools built for Black Americans in the South; focused on vocational or trade skills.

Born an enslaved person in Virginia. Attended the Hampton Institute and later led the Tuskegee Institute. Famous for his 1895 "Atlanta Compromise" speech.

First African American to earn a Ph.D. at Harvard University. Helped establish the NAACP. Known for "The Souls of Black Folk," among other writings.

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; founded in 1905 to seek legal and political equality for African Americans.

Gave states 30,000 acres of land for each senator and representative it had in Congress in 1860. The income generated from the sale or lease of this land would provide financial support for at least one agricultural and mechanical (A&M) college, known as a land-grant institution.

Required land-grant institutions seeking increased federal support to either provide equal access to the existing A&M colleges or establish separate institutions for the People of Color in their state.

Judging or evaluating another culture based on your own culture.

Group in the early 1900s who wanted education to be as efficient as possible to meet the demands of industrialization and the economy.

Group in the early 1900s focused on changes in how and what students were learning; saw schooling as a vehicle for social justice instead of assimilation. Also called pedagogical progressives.

Group in the early 1900s focused on changes in how and what students were learning; saw schooling as a vehicle for social justice instead of assimilation. Also called curricular progressives.

Group of progressive educators, like John Dewey, who ascribed to the educational philosophy of social reconstructionism, meaning they believed education could improve society.

Approach of constructing meaning through recognizing issues of power, access, and equity; often involves questioning and challenging the status quo.

Largest labor union in the U.S., established in 1857 to represent educators.

Second largest labor union for teachers in the U.S., founded in Chicago in 1916.

Part of Civil Rights Act of 1964 that bans bans discrimination based on sex in places such as schools.

Established in 1979 by President Carter to provide federal oversight of education, though individual states still preserved primary control of educational decisions.

71-page report released in 1983 that sensationalized a "crisis" in American schooling that led to standards-based reform.

Standards-based reform passed in 2001 as a reauthorization of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Increased educational accountability through standardized testing.

2015 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965) and No Child Left Behind Act (2002). Shifted accountability provisions to individual states.

Process through which students learn to recognize and manage emotions, care about others, make good decisions, behave ethically and responsibly, develop positive relationships, and avoid negative behaviors.

Foundations of American Education: A Critical Lens Copyright © by Melissa Wells and Courtney Clayton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Yfed2101 - introduction to foundations of education.

YEAR: YEAR 1, SEMESTER 2 COURSE TITLE: Introduction to Foundations of Education COURSE CODE: YFED2101 DURATION: 45 HOURS NO. OF CREDITS: 3 PRE-REQUISITE: YTET1101 – The Emerging Teacher

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This course Introduction to Foundation in Education is an introduction to the philosophical, historical and sociology of education in the Caribbean. It is built on the belief that theories of knowledge and reality are socially constructed (Burger and Luckmann, 1966). History, principles, and contexts of philosophy and sociology are explored and assessed in relation to their respective application to curriculum development, current policies, practices and trends in teaching and learning in Caribbean schools. The content is divided into four units under the following headings (1) Understanding the Foundations of Education, (2) Philosophical Foundations of Education (3) Historical and Sociological Foundations of Education and (5) Political, Economic, and Legal Foundations of Education. Through authentic assessment, problem solving and reflective learning experiences, student teachers will be guided into developing their personal philosophy of teaching.

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Philosophy of Education

Philosophy of education is the branch of applied or practical philosophy concerned with the nature and aims of education and the philosophical problems arising from educational theory and practice. Because that practice is ubiquitous in and across human societies, its social and individual manifestations so varied, and its influence so profound, the subject is wide-ranging, involving issues in ethics and social/political philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and language, and other areas of philosophy. Because it looks both inward to the parent discipline and outward to educational practice and the social, legal, and institutional contexts in which it takes place, philosophy of education concerns itself with both sides of the traditional theory/practice divide. Its subject matter includes both basic philosophical issues (e.g., the nature of the knowledge worth teaching, the character of educational equality and justice, etc.) and problems concerning specific educational policies and practices (e.g., the desirability of standardized curricula and testing, the social, economic, legal and moral dimensions of specific funding arrangements, the justification of curriculum decisions, etc.). In all this the philosopher of education prizes conceptual clarity, argumentative rigor, the fair-minded consideration of the interests of all involved in or affected by educational efforts and arrangements, and informed and well-reasoned valuation of educational aims and interventions.

Philosophy of education has a long and distinguished history in the Western philosophical tradition, from Socrates’ battles with the sophists to the present day. Many of the most distinguished figures in that tradition incorporated educational concerns into their broader philosophical agendas (Curren 2000, 2018; Rorty 1998). While that history is not the focus here, it is worth noting that the ideals of reasoned inquiry championed by Socrates and his descendants have long informed the view that education should foster in all students, to the extent possible, the disposition to seek reasons and the ability to evaluate them cogently, and to be guided by their evaluations in matters of belief, action and judgment. This view, that education centrally involves the fostering of reason or rationality, has with varying articulations and qualifications been embraced by most of those historical figures; it continues to be defended by contemporary philosophers of education as well (Scheffler 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988, 1997, 2007, 2017). As with any philosophical thesis it is controversial; some dimensions of the controversy are explored below.

This entry is a selective survey of important contemporary work in Anglophone philosophy of education; it does not treat in detail recent scholarship outside that context.

1. Problems in Delineating the Field

2. analytic philosophy of education and its influence, 3.1 the content of the curriculum and the aims and functions of schooling, 3.2 social, political and moral philosophy, 3.3 social epistemology, virtue epistemology, and the epistemology of education, 3.4 philosophical disputes concerning empirical education research, 4. concluding remarks, other internet resources, related entries.

The inward/outward looking nature of the field of philosophy of education alluded to above makes the task of delineating the field, of giving an over-all picture of the intellectual landscape, somewhat complicated (for a detailed account of this topography, see Phillips 1985, 2010). Suffice it to say that some philosophers, as well as focusing inward on the abstract philosophical issues that concern them, are drawn outwards to discuss or comment on issues that are more commonly regarded as falling within the purview of professional educators, educational researchers, policy-makers and the like. (An example is Michael Scriven, who in his early career was a prominent philosopher of science; later he became a central figure in the development of the field of evaluation of educational and social programs. See Scriven 1991a, 1991b.) At the same time, there are professionals in the educational or closely related spheres who are drawn to discuss one or another of the philosophical issues that they encounter in the course of their work. (An example here is the behaviorist psychologist B.F. Skinner, the central figure in the development of operant conditioning and programmed learning, who in works such as Walden Two (1948) and Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1972) grappled—albeit controversially—with major philosophical issues that were related to his work.)

What makes the field even more amorphous is the existence of works on educational topics, written by well-regarded philosophers who have made major contributions to their discipline; these educational reflections have little or no philosophical content, illustrating the truth that philosophers do not always write philosophy. However, despite this, works in this genre have often been treated as contributions to philosophy of education. (Examples include John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education [1693] and Bertrand Russell’s rollicking pieces written primarily to raise funds to support a progressive school he ran with his wife. (See Park 1965.)

Finally, as indicated earlier, the domain of education is vast, the issues it raises are almost overwhelmingly numerous and are of great complexity, and the social significance of the field is second to none. These features make the phenomena and problems of education of great interest to a wide range of socially-concerned intellectuals, who bring with them their own favored conceptual frameworks—concepts, theories and ideologies, methods of analysis and argumentation, metaphysical and other assumptions, and the like. It is not surprising that scholars who work in this broad genre also find a home in the field of philosophy of education.

As a result of these various factors, the significant intellectual and social trends of the past few centuries, together with the significant developments in philosophy, all have had an impact on the content of arguments and methods of argumentation in philosophy of education—Marxism, psycho-analysis, existentialism, phenomenology, positivism, post-modernism, pragmatism, neo-liberalism, the several waves of feminism, analytic philosophy in both its ordinary language and more formal guises, are merely the tip of the iceberg.

Conceptual analysis, careful assessment of arguments, the rooting out of ambiguity, the drawing of clarifying distinctions—all of which are at least part of the philosophical toolkit—have been respected activities within philosophy from the dawn of the field. No doubt it somewhat over-simplifies the complex path of intellectual history to suggest that what happened in the twentieth century—early on, in the home discipline itself, and with a lag of a decade or more in philosophy of education—is that philosophical analysis came to be viewed by some scholars as being the major philosophical activity (or set of activities), or even as being the only viable or reputable activity. In any case, as they gained prominence and for a time hegemonic influence during the rise of analytic philosophy early in the twentieth century analytic techniques came to dominate philosophy of education in the middle third of that century (Curren, Robertson, & Hager 2003).

The pioneering work in the modern period entirely in an analytic mode was the short monograph by C.D. Hardie, Truth and Fallacy in Educational Theory (1941; reissued in 1962). In his Introduction, Hardie (who had studied with C.D. Broad and I.A. Richards) made it clear that he was putting all his eggs into the ordinary-language-analysis basket:

The Cambridge analytical school, led by Moore, Broad and Wittgenstein, has attempted so to analyse propositions that it will always be apparent whether the disagreement between philosophers is one concerning matters of fact, or is one concerning the use of words, or is, as is frequently the case, a purely emotive one. It is time, I think, that a similar attitude became common in the field of educational theory. (Hardie 1962: xix)

About a decade after the end of the Second World War the floodgates opened and a stream of work in the analytic mode appeared; the following is merely a sample. D. J. O’Connor published An Introduction to Philosophy of Education (1957) in which, among other things, he argued that the word “theory” as it is used in educational contexts is merely a courtesy title, for educational theories are nothing like what bear this title in the natural sciences. Israel Scheffler, who became the paramount philosopher of education in North America, produced a number of important works including The Language of Education (1960), which contained clarifying and influential analyses of definitions (he distinguished reportive, stipulative, and programmatic types) and the logic of slogans (often these are literally meaningless, and, he argued, should be seen as truncated arguments), Conditions of Knowledge (1965), still the best introduction to the epistemological side of philosophy of education, and Reason and Teaching (1973 [1989]), which in a wide-ranging and influential series of essays makes the case for regarding the fostering of rationality/critical thinking as a fundamental educational ideal (cf. Siegel 2016). B. O. Smith and R. H. Ennis edited the volume Language and Concepts in Education (1961); and R.D. Archambault edited Philosophical Analysis and Education (1965), consisting of essays by a number of prominent British writers, most notably R. S. Peters (whose status in Britain paralleled that of Scheffler in the United States), Paul Hirst, and John Wilson. Topics covered in the Archambault volume were typical of those that became the “bread and butter” of analytic philosophy of education (APE) throughout the English-speaking world—education as a process of initiation, liberal education, the nature of knowledge, types of teaching, and instruction versus indoctrination.

Among the most influential products of APE was the analysis developed by Hirst and Peters (1970) and Peters (1973) of the concept of education itself. Using as a touchstone “normal English usage,” it was concluded that a person who has been educated (rather than instructed or indoctrinated) has been (i) changed for the better; (ii) this change has involved the acquisition of knowledge and intellectual skills and the development of understanding; and (iii) the person has come to care for, or be committed to, the domains of knowledge and skill into which he or she has been initiated. The method used by Hirst and Peters comes across clearly in their handling of the analogy with the concept of “reform”, one they sometimes drew upon for expository purposes. A criminal who has been reformed has changed for the better, and has developed a commitment to the new mode of life (if one or other of these conditions does not hold, a speaker of standard English would not say the criminal has been reformed). Clearly the analogy with reform breaks down with respect to the knowledge and understanding conditions. Elsewhere Peters developed the fruitful notion of “education as initiation”.

The concept of indoctrination was also of great interest to analytic philosophers of education, for, it was argued, getting clear about precisely what constitutes indoctrination also would serve to clarify the border that demarcates it from acceptable educational processes. Thus, whether or not an instructional episode was a case of indoctrination was determined by the content taught, the intention of the instructor, the methods of instruction used, the outcomes of the instruction, or by some combination of these. Adherents of the different analyses used the same general type of argument to make their case, namely, appeal to normal and aberrant usage. Unfortunately, ordinary language analysis did not lead to unanimity of opinion about where this border was located, and rival analyses of the concept were put forward (Snook 1972). The danger of restricting analysis to ordinary language (“normal English usage”) was recognized early on by Scheffler, whose preferred view of analysis emphasized

first, its greater sophistication as regards language, and the interpenetration of language and inquiry, second, its attempt to follow the modern example of the sciences in empirical spirit, in rigor, in attention to detail, in respect for alternatives, and in objectivity of method, and third, its use of techniques of symbolic logic brought to full development only in the last fifty years… It is…this union of scientific spirit and logical method applied toward the clarification of basic ideas that characterizes current analytic philosophy [and that ought to characterize analytic philosophy of education]. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 9–10])

After a period of dominance, for a number of important reasons the influence of APE went into decline. First, there were growing criticisms that the work of analytic philosophers of education had become focused upon minutiae and in the main was bereft of practical import. (It is worth noting that a 1966 article in Time , reprinted in Lucas 1969, had put forward the same criticism of mainstream philosophy.) Second, in the early 1970’s radical students in Britain accused Peters’ brand of linguistic analysis of conservatism, and of tacitly giving support to “traditional values”—they raised the issue of whose English usage was being analyzed?

Third, criticisms of language analysis in mainstream philosophy had been mounting for some time, and finally after a lag of many years were reaching the attention of philosophers of education; there even had been a surprising degree of interest on the part of the general reading public in the United Kingdom as early as 1959, when Gilbert Ryle, editor of the journal Mind , refused to commission a review of Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things (1959)—a detailed and quite acerbic critique of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and its espousal of ordinary language analysis. (Ryle argued that Gellner’s book was too insulting, a view that drew Bertrand Russell into the fray on Gellner’s side—in the daily press, no less; Russell produced a list of insulting remarks drawn from the work of great philosophers of the past. See Mehta 1963.)

Richard Peters had been given warning that all was not well with APE at a conference in Canada in 1966; after delivering a paper on “The aims of education: A conceptual inquiry” that was based on ordinary language analysis, a philosopher in the audience (William Dray) asked Peters “ whose concepts do we analyze?” Dray went on to suggest that different people, and different groups within society, have different concepts of education. Five years before the radical students raised the same issue, Dray pointed to the possibility that what Peters had presented under the guise of a “logical analysis” was nothing but the favored usage of a certain class of persons—a class that Peters happened to identify with (see Peters 1973, where to the editor’s credit the interaction with Dray is reprinted).

Fourth, during the decade of the seventies when these various critiques of analytic philosophy were in the process of eroding its luster, a spate of translations from the Continent stimulated some philosophers of education in Britain and North America to set out in new directions, and to adopt a new style of writing and argumentation. Key works by Gadamer, Foucault and Derrida appeared in English, and these were followed in 1984 by Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition . The classic works of Heidegger and Husserl also found new admirers; and feminist philosophers of education were finding their voices—Maxine Greene published a number of pieces in the 1970s and 1980s, including The Dialectic of Freedom (1988); the influential book by Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education , appeared the same year as the work by Lyotard, followed a year later by Jane Roland Martin’s Reclaiming a Conversation . In more recent years all these trends have continued. APE was and is no longer the center of interest, although, as indicated below, it still retains its voice.

3. Areas of Contemporary Activity

As was stressed at the outset, the field of education is huge and contains within it a virtually inexhaustible number of issues that are of philosophical interest. To attempt comprehensive coverage of how philosophers of education have been working within this thicket would be a quixotic task for a large single volume and is out of the question for a solitary encyclopedia entry. Nevertheless, a valiant attempt to give an overview was made in A Companion to the Philosophy of Education (Curren 2003), which contains more than six-hundred pages divided into forty-five chapters each of which surveys a subfield of work. The following random selection of chapter topics gives a sense of the enormous scope of the field: Sex education, special education, science education, aesthetic education, theories of teaching and learning, religious education, knowledge, truth and learning, cultivating reason, the measurement of learning, multicultural education, education and the politics of identity, education and standards of living, motivation and classroom management, feminism, critical theory, postmodernism, romanticism, the purposes of universities, affirmative action in higher education, and professional education. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education (Siegel 2009) contains a similarly broad range of articles on (among other things) the epistemic and moral aims of education, liberal education and its imminent demise, thinking and reasoning, fallibilism and fallibility, indoctrination, authenticity, the development of rationality, Socratic teaching, educating the imagination, caring and empathy in moral education, the limits of moral education, the cultivation of character, values education, curriculum and the value of knowledge, education and democracy, art and education, science education and religious toleration, constructivism and scientific methods, multicultural education, prejudice, authority and the interests of children, and on pragmatist, feminist, and postmodernist approaches to philosophy of education.

Given this enormous range, there is no non-arbitrary way to select a small number of topics for further discussion, nor can the topics that are chosen be pursued in great depth. The choice of those below has been made with an eye to highlighting contemporary work that makes solid contact with and contributes to important discussions in general philosophy and/or the academic educational and educational research communities.

The issue of what should be taught to students at all levels of education—the issue of curriculum content—obviously is a fundamental one, and it is an extraordinarily difficult one with which to grapple. In tackling it, care needs to be taken to distinguish between education and schooling—for although education can occur in schools, so can mis-education, and many other things can take place there that are educationally orthogonal (such as the provision of free or subsidized lunches and the development of social networks); and it also must be recognized that education can occur in the home, in libraries and museums, in churches and clubs, in solitary interaction with the public media, and the like.

In developing a curriculum (whether in a specific subject area, or more broadly as the whole range of offerings in an educational institution or system), a number of difficult decisions need to be made. Issues such as the proper ordering or sequencing of topics in the chosen subject, the time to be allocated to each topic, the lab work or excursions or projects that are appropriate for particular topics, can all be regarded as technical issues best resolved either by educationists who have a depth of experience with the target age group or by experts in the psychology of learning and the like. But there are deeper issues, ones concerning the validity of the justifications that have been given for including/excluding particular subjects or topics in the offerings of formal educational institutions. (Why should evolution or creation “science” be included, or excluded, as a topic within the standard high school subject Biology? Is the justification that is given for teaching Economics in some schools coherent and convincing? Do the justifications for including/excluding materials on birth control, patriotism, the Holocaust or wartime atrocities in the curriculum in some school districts stand up to critical scrutiny?)

The different justifications for particular items of curriculum content that have been put forward by philosophers and others since Plato’s pioneering efforts all draw, explicitly or implicitly, upon the positions that the respective theorists hold about at least three sets of issues.

First, what are the aims and/or functions of education (aims and functions are not necessarily the same)? Many aims have been proposed; a short list includes the production of knowledge and knowledgeable students, the fostering of curiosity and inquisitiveness, the enhancement of understanding, the enlargement of the imagination, the civilizing of students, the fostering of rationality and/or autonomy, and the development in students of care, concern and associated dispositions and attitudes (see Siegel 2007 for a longer list). The justifications offered for all such aims have been controversial, and alternative justifications of a single proposed aim can provoke philosophical controversy. Consider the aim of autonomy. Aristotle asked, what constitutes the good life and/or human flourishing, such that education should foster these (Curren 2013)? These two formulations are related, for it is arguable that our educational institutions should aim to equip individuals to pursue this good life—although this is not obvious, both because it is not clear that there is one conception of the good or flourishing life that is the good or flourishing life for everyone, and it is not clear that this is a question that should be settled in advance rather than determined by students for themselves. Thus, for example, if our view of human flourishing includes the capacity to think and act autonomously, then the case can be made that educational institutions—and their curricula—should aim to prepare, or help to prepare, autonomous individuals. A rival justification of the aim of autonomy, associated with Kant, champions the educational fostering of autonomy not on the basis of its contribution to human flourishing, but rather the obligation to treat students with respect as persons (Scheffler 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988). Still others urge the fostering of autonomy on the basis of students’ fundamental interests, in ways that draw upon both Aristotelian and Kantian conceptual resources (Brighouse 2005, 2009). It is also possible to reject the fostering of autonomy as an educational aim (Hand 2006).

Assuming that the aim can be justified, how students should be helped to become autonomous or develop a conception of the good life and pursue it is of course not immediately obvious, and much philosophical ink has been spilled on the general question of how best to determine curriculum content. One influential line of argument was developed by Paul Hirst, who argued that knowledge is essential for developing and then pursuing a conception of the good life, and because logical analysis shows, he argued, that there are seven basic forms of knowledge, the case can be made that the function of the curriculum is to introduce students to each of these forms (Hirst 1965; see Phillips 1987: ch. 11). Another, suggested by Scheffler, is that curriculum content should be selected so as “to help the learner attain maximum self-sufficiency as economically as possible.” The relevant sorts of economy include those of resources, teacher effort, student effort, and the generalizability or transfer value of content, while the self-sufficiency in question includes

self-awareness, imaginative weighing of alternative courses of action, understanding of other people’s choices and ways of life, decisiveness without rigidity, emancipation from stereotyped ways of thinking and perceiving…empathy… intuition, criticism and independent judgment. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 123–5])

Both impose important constraints on the curricular content to be taught.

Second, is it justifiable to treat the curriculum of an educational institution as a vehicle for furthering the socio-political interests and goals of a dominant group, or any particular group, including one’s own; and relatedly, is it justifiable to design the curriculum so that it serves as an instrument of control or of social engineering? In the closing decades of the twentieth century there were numerous discussions of curriculum theory, particularly from Marxist and postmodern perspectives, that offered the sobering analysis that in many educational systems, including those in Western democracies, the curriculum did indeed reflect and serve the interests of powerful cultural elites. What to do about this situation (if it is indeed the situation of contemporary educational institutions) is far from clear and is the focus of much work at the interface of philosophy of education and social/political philosophy, some of which is discussed in the next section. A closely related question is this: ought educational institutions be designed to further pre-determined social ends, or rather to enable students to competently evaluate all such ends? Scheffler argued that we should opt for the latter: we must

surrender the idea of shaping or molding the mind of the pupil. The function of education…is rather to liberate the mind, strengthen its critical powers, [and] inform it with knowledge and the capacity for independent inquiry. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 139])

Third, should educational programs at the elementary and secondary levels be made up of a number of disparate offerings, so that individuals with different interests and abilities and affinities for learning can pursue curricula that are suitable? Or should every student pursue the same curriculum as far as each is able?—a curriculum, it should be noted, that in past cases nearly always was based on the needs or interests of those students who were academically inclined or were destined for elite social roles. Mortimer Adler and others in the late twentieth century sometimes used the aphorism “the best education for the best is the best education for all.”

The thinking here can be explicated in terms of the analogy of an out-of-control virulent disease, for which there is only one type of medicine available; taking a large dose of this medicine is extremely beneficial, and the hope is that taking only a little—while less effective—is better than taking none at all. Medically, this is dubious, while the educational version—forcing students to work, until they exit the system, on topics that do not interest them and for which they have no facility or motivation—has even less merit. (For a critique of Adler and his Paideia Proposal , see Noddings 2015.) It is interesting to compare the modern “one curriculum track for all” position with Plato’s system outlined in the Republic , according to which all students—and importantly this included girls—set out on the same course of study. Over time, as they moved up the educational ladder it would become obvious that some had reached the limit imposed upon them by nature, and they would be directed off into appropriate social roles in which they would find fulfillment, for their abilities would match the demands of these roles. Those who continued on with their education would eventually become members of the ruling class of Guardians.

The publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971 was the most notable event in the history of political philosophy over the last century. The book spurred a period of ferment in political philosophy that included, among other things, new research on educationally fundamental themes. The principles of justice in educational distribution have perhaps been the dominant theme in this literature, and Rawls’s influence on its development has been pervasive.

Rawls’s theory of justice made so-called “fair equality of opportunity” one of its constitutive principles. Fair equality of opportunity entailed that the distribution of education would not put the children of those who currently occupied coveted social positions at any competitive advantage over other, equally talented and motivated children seeking the qualifications for those positions (Rawls 1971: 72–75). Its purpose was to prevent socio-economic differences from hardening into social castes that were perpetuated across generations. One obvious criticism of fair equality of opportunity is that it does not prohibit an educational distribution that lavished resources on the most talented children while offering minimal opportunities to others. So long as untalented students from wealthy families were assigned opportunities no better than those available to their untalented peers among the poor, no breach of the principle would occur. Even the most moderate egalitarians might find such a distributive regime to be intuitively repugnant.

Repugnance might be mitigated somewhat by the ways in which the overall structure of Rawls’s conception of justice protects the interests of those who fare badly in educational competition. All citizens must enjoy the same basic liberties, and equal liberty always has moral priority over equal opportunity: the former can never be compromised to advance the latter. Further, inequality in the distribution of income and wealth are permitted only to the degree that it serves the interests of the least advantaged group in society. But even with these qualifications, fair equality of opportunity is arguably less than really fair to anyone. The fact that their education should secure ends other than access to the most selective social positions—ends such as artistic appreciation, the kind of self-knowledge that humanistic study can furnish, or civic virtue—is deemed irrelevant according to Rawls’s principle. But surely it is relevant, given that a principle of educational justice must be responsive to the full range of educationally important goods.

Suppose we revise our account of the goods included in educational distribution so that aesthetic appreciation, say, and the necessary understanding and virtue for conscientious citizenship count for just as much as job-related skills. An interesting implication of doing so is that the rationale for requiring equality under any just distribution becomes decreasingly clear. That is because job-related skills are positional whereas the other educational goods are not (Hollis 1982). If you and I both aspire to a career in business management for which we are equally qualified, any increase in your job-related skills is a corresponding disadvantage to me unless I can catch up. Positional goods have a competitive structure by definition, though the ends of civic or aesthetic education do not fit that structure. If you and I aspire to be good citizens and are equal in civic understanding and virtue, an advance in your civic education is no disadvantage to me. On the contrary, it is easier to be a good citizen the better other citizens learn to be. At the very least, so far as non-positional goods figure in our conception of what counts as a good education, the moral stakes of inequality are thereby lowered.

In fact, an emerging alternative to fair equality of opportunity is a principle that stipulates some benchmark of adequacy in achievement or opportunity as the relevant standard of distribution. But it is misleading to represent this as a contrast between egalitarian and sufficientarian conceptions. Philosophically serious interpretations of adequacy derive from the ideal of equal citizenship (Satz 2007; Anderson 2007). Then again, fair equality of opportunity in Rawls’s theory is derived from a more fundamental ideal of equality among citizens. This was arguably true in A Theory of Justice but it is certainly true in his later work (Dworkin 1977: 150–183; Rawls 1993). So, both Rawls’s principle and the emerging alternative share an egalitarian foundation. The debate between adherents of equal opportunity and those misnamed as sufficientarians is certainly not over (e.g., Brighouse & Swift 2009; Jacobs 2010; Warnick 2015). Further progress will likely hinge on explicating the most compelling conception of the egalitarian foundation from which distributive principles are to be inferred. Another Rawls-inspired alternative is that a “prioritarian” distribution of achievement or opportunity might turn out to be the best principle we can come up with—i.e., one that favors the interests of the least advantaged students (Schouten 2012).

The publication of Rawls’s Political Liberalism in 1993 signaled a decisive turning point in his thinking about justice. In his earlier book, the theory of justice had been presented as if it were universally valid. But Rawls had come to think that any theory of justice presented as such was open to reasonable rejection. A more circumspect approach to justification would seek grounds for justice as fairness in an overlapping consensus between the many reasonable values and doctrines that thrive in a democratic political culture. Rawls argued that such a culture is informed by a shared ideal of free and equal citizenship that provided a new, distinctively democratic framework for justifying a conception of justice. The shift to political liberalism involved little revision on Rawls’s part to the content of the principles he favored. But the salience it gave to questions about citizenship in the fabric of liberal political theory had important educational implications. How was the ideal of free and equal citizenship to be instantiated in education in a way that accommodated the range of reasonable values and doctrines encompassed in an overlapping consensus? Political Liberalism has inspired a range of answers to that question (cf. Callan 1997; Clayton 2006; Bull 2008).

Other philosophers besides Rawls in the 1990s took up a cluster of questions about civic education, and not always from a liberal perspective. Alasdair Macintyre’s After Virtue (1984) strongly influenced the development of communitarian political theory which, as its very name might suggest, argued that the cultivation of community could preempt many of the problems with conflicting individual rights at the core of liberalism. As a full-standing alternative to liberalism, communitarianism might have little to recommend it. But it was a spur for liberal philosophers to think about how communities could be built and sustained to support the more familiar projects of liberal politics (e.g., Strike 2010). Furthermore, its arguments often converged with those advanced by feminist exponents of the ethic of care (Noddings 1984; Gilligan 1982). Noddings’ work is particularly notable because she inferred a cogent and radical agenda for the reform of schools from her conception of care (Noddings 1992).

One persistent controversy in citizenship theory has been about whether patriotism is correctly deemed a virtue, given our obligations to those who are not our fellow citizens in an increasingly interdependent world and the sordid history of xenophobia with which modern nation states are associated. The controversy is partly about what we should teach in our schools and is commonly discussed by philosophers in that context (Galston 1991; Ben-Porath 2006; Callan 2006; Miller 2007; Curren & Dorn 2018). The controversy is related to a deeper and more pervasive question about how morally or intellectually taxing the best conception of our citizenship should be. The more taxing it is, the more constraining its derivative conception of civic education will be. Contemporary political philosophers offer divergent arguments about these matters. For example, Gutmann and Thompson claim that citizens of diverse democracies need to “understand the diverse ways of life of their fellow citizens” (Gutmann & Thompson 1996: 66). The need arises from the obligation of reciprocity which they (like Rawls) believe to be integral to citizenship. Because I must seek to cooperate with others politically on terms that make sense from their moral perspective as well as my own, I must be ready to enter that perspective imaginatively so as to grasp its distinctive content. Many such perspectives prosper in liberal democracies, and so the task of reciprocal understanding is necessarily onerous. Still, our actions qua deliberative citizen must be grounded in such reciprocity if political cooperation on terms acceptable to us as (diversely) morally motivated citizens is to be possible at all. This is tantamount to an imperative to think autonomously inside the role of citizen because I cannot close-mindedly resist critical consideration of moral views alien to my own without flouting my responsibilities as a deliberative citizen.

Civic education does not exhaust the domain of moral education, even though the more robust conceptions of equal citizenship have far-reaching implications for just relations in civil society and the family. The study of moral education has traditionally taken its bearings from normative ethics rather than political philosophy, and this is largely true of work undertaken in recent decades. The major development here has been the revival of virtue ethics as an alternative to the deontological and consequentialist theories that dominated discussion for much of the twentieth century.

The defining idea of virtue ethics is that our criterion of moral right and wrong must derive from a conception of how the ideally virtuous agent would distinguish between the two. Virtue ethics is thus an alternative to both consequentialism and deontology which locate the relevant criterion in producing good consequences or meeting the requirements of moral duty respectively. The debate about the comparative merits of these theories is not resolved, but from an educational perspective that may be less important than it has sometimes seemed to antagonists in the debate. To be sure, adjudicating between rival theories in normative ethics might shed light on how best to construe the process of moral education, and philosophical reflection on the process might help us to adjudicate between the theories. There has been extensive work on habituation and virtue, largely inspired by Aristotle (Burnyeat 1980; Peters 1981). But whether this does anything to establish the superiority of virtue ethics over its competitors is far from obvious. Other aspects of moral education—in particular, the paired processes of role-modelling and identification—deserve much more scrutiny than they have received (Audi 2017; Kristjánsson 2015, 2017).

Related to the issues concerning the aims and functions of education and schooling rehearsed above are those involving the specifically epistemic aims of education and attendant issues treated by social and virtue epistemologists. (The papers collected in Kotzee 2013 and Baehr 2016 highlight the current and growing interactions among social epistemologists, virtue epistemologists, and philosophers of education.)

There is, first, a lively debate concerning putative epistemic aims. Alvin Goldman argues that truth (or knowledge understood in the “weak” sense of true belief) is the fundamental epistemic aim of education (Goldman 1999). Others, including the majority of historically significant philosophers of education, hold that critical thinking or rationality and rational belief (or knowledge in the “strong” sense that includes justification) is the basic epistemic educational aim (Bailin & Siegel 2003; Scheffler 1965, 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988, 1997, 2005, 2017). Catherine Z. Elgin (1999a,b) and Duncan Pritchard (2013, 2016; Carter & Pritchard 2017) have independently urged that understanding is the basic aim. Pritchard’s view combines understanding with intellectual virtue ; Jason Baehr (2011) systematically defends the fostering of the intellectual virtues as the fundamental epistemic aim of education. This cluster of views continues to engender ongoing discussion and debate. (Its complex literature is collected in Carter and Kotzee 2015, summarized in Siegel 2018, and helpfully analyzed in Watson 2016.)

A further controversy concerns the places of testimony and trust in the classroom: In what circumstances if any ought students to trust their teachers’ pronouncements, and why? Here the epistemology of education is informed by social epistemology, specifically the epistemology of testimony; the familiar reductionism/anti-reductionism controversy there is applicable to students and teachers. Anti-reductionists, who regard testimony as a basic source of justification, may with equanimity approve of students’ taking their teachers’ word at face value and believing what they say; reductionists may balk. Does teacher testimony itself constitute good reason for student belief?

The correct answer here seems clearly enough to be “it depends”. For very young children who have yet to acquire or develop the ability to subject teacher declarations to critical scrutiny, there seems to be little alternative to accepting what their teachers tell them. For older and more cognitively sophisticated students there seem to be more options: they can assess them for plausibility, compare them with other opinions, assess the teachers’ proffered reasons, subject them to independent evaluation, etc. Regarding “the teacher says that p ” as itself a good reason to believe it appears moreover to contravene the widely shared conviction that an important educational aim is helping students to become able to evaluate candidate beliefs for themselves and believe accordingly. That said, all sides agree that sometimes believers, including students, have good reasons simply to trust what others tell them. There is thus more work to do here by both social epistemologists and philosophers of education (for further discussion see Goldberg 2013; Siegel 2005, 2018).

A further cluster of questions, of long-standing interest to philosophers of education, concerns indoctrination : How if at all does it differ from legitimate teaching? Is it inevitable, and if so is it not always necessarily bad? First, what is it? As we saw earlier, extant analyses focus on the aims or intentions of the indoctrinator, the methods employed, or the content transmitted. If the indoctrination is successful, all have the result that students/victims either don’t, won’t, or can’t subject the indoctrinated material to proper epistemic evaluation. In this way it produces both belief that is evidentially unsupported or contravened and uncritical dispositions to believe. It might seem obvious that indoctrination, so understood, is educationally undesirable. But it equally seems that very young children, at least, have no alternative but to believe sans evidence; they have yet to acquire the dispositions to seek and evaluate evidence, or the abilities to recognize evidence or evaluate it. Thus we seem driven to the views that indoctrination is both unavoidable and yet bad and to be avoided. It is not obvious how this conundrum is best handled. One option is to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable indoctrination. Another is to distinguish between indoctrination (which is always bad) and non-indoctrinating belief inculcation, the latter being such that students are taught some things without reasons (the alphabet, the numbers, how to read and count, etc.), but in such a way that critical evaluation of all such material (and everything else) is prized and fostered (Siegel 1988: ch. 5). In the end the distinctions required by the two options might be extensionally equivalent (Siegel 2018).

Education, it is generally granted, fosters belief : in the typical propositional case, Smith teaches Jones that p , and if all goes well Jones learns it and comes to believe it. Education also has the task of fostering open-mindedness and an appreciation of our fallibility : All the theorists mentioned thus far, especially those in the critical thinking and intellectual virtue camps, urge their importance. But these two might seem at odds. If Jones (fully) believes that p , can she also be open-minded about it? Can she believe, for example, that earthquakes are caused by the movements of tectonic plates, while also believing that perhaps they aren’t? This cluster of italicized notions requires careful handling; it is helpfully discussed by Jonathan Adler (2002, 2003), who recommends regarding the latter two as meta-attitudes concerning one’s first-order beliefs rather than lessened degrees of belief or commitments to those beliefs.

Other traditional epistemological worries that impinge upon the epistemology of education concern (a) absolutism , pluralism and relativism with respect to knowledge, truth and justification as these relate to what is taught, (b) the character and status of group epistemologies and the prospects for understanding such epistemic goods “universalistically” in the face of “particularist” challenges, (c) the relation between “knowledge-how” and “knowledge-that” and their respective places in the curriculum, (d) concerns raised by multiculturalism and the inclusion/exclusion of marginalized perspectives in curriculum content and the classroom, and (e) further issues concerning teaching and learning. (There is more here than can be briefly summarized; for more references and systematic treatment cf. Bailin & Siegel 2003; Carter & Kotzee 2015; Cleverley & Phillips 1986; Robertson 2009; Siegel 2004, 2017; and Watson 2016.)

The educational research enterprise has been criticized for a century or more by politicians, policymakers, administrators, curriculum developers, teachers, philosophers of education, and by researchers themselves—but the criticisms have been contradictory. Charges of being “too ivory tower and theory-oriented” are found alongside “too focused on practice and too atheoretical”; but in light of the views of John Dewey and William James that the function of theory is to guide intelligent practice and problem-solving, it is becoming more fashionable to hold that the “theory v. practice” dichotomy is a false one. (For an illuminating account of the historical development of educational research and its tribulations, see Lagemann 2000.)

A similar trend can be discerned with respect to the long warfare between two rival groups of research methods—on one hand quantitative/statistical approaches to research, and on the other hand the qualitative/ethnographic family. (The choice of labels here is not entirely risk-free, for they have been contested; furthermore the first approach is quite often associated with “experimental” studies, and the latter with “case studies”, but this is an over-simplification.) For several decades these two rival methodological camps were treated by researchers and a few philosophers of education as being rival paradigms (Kuhn’s ideas, albeit in a very loose form, have been influential in the field of educational research), and the dispute between them was commonly referred to as “the paradigm wars”. In essence the issue at stake was epistemological: members of the quantitative/experimental camp believed that only their methods could lead to well-warranted knowledge claims, especially about the causal factors at play in educational phenomena, and on the whole they regarded qualitative methods as lacking in rigor; on the other hand the adherents of qualitative/ethnographic approaches held that the other camp was too “positivistic” and was operating with an inadequate view of causation in human affairs—one that ignored the role of motives and reasons, possession of relevant background knowledge, awareness of cultural norms, and the like. Few if any commentators in the “paradigm wars” suggested that there was anything prohibiting the use of both approaches in the one research program—provided that if both were used, they were used only sequentially or in parallel, for they were underwritten by different epistemologies and hence could not be blended together. But recently the trend has been towards rapprochement, towards the view that the two methodological families are, in fact, compatible and are not at all like paradigms in the Kuhnian sense(s) of the term; the melding of the two approaches is often called “mixed methods research”, and it is growing in popularity. (For more detailed discussion of these “wars” see Howe 2003 and Phillips 2009.)

The most lively contemporary debates about education research, however, were set in motion around the turn of the millennium when the US Federal Government moved in the direction of funding only rigorously scientific educational research—the kind that could establish causal factors which could then guide the development of practically effective policies. (It was held that such a causal knowledge base was available for medical decision-making.) The definition of “rigorously scientific”, however, was decided by politicians and not by the research community, and it was given in terms of the use of a specific research method—the net effect being that the only research projects to receive Federal funding were those that carried out randomized controlled experiments or field trials (RFTs). It has become common over the last decade to refer to the RFT as the “gold standard” methodology.

The National Research Council (NRC)—an arm of the US National Academies of Science—issued a report, influenced by postpostivistic philosophy of science (NRC 2002), that argued that this criterion was far too narrow. Numerous essays have appeared subsequently that point out how the “gold standard” account of scientific rigor distorts the history of science, how the complex nature of the relation between evidence and policy-making has been distorted and made to appear overly simple (for instance the role of value-judgments in linking empirical findings to policy directives is often overlooked), and qualitative researchers have insisted upon the scientific nature of their work. Nevertheless, and possibly because it tried to be balanced and supported the use of RFTs in some research contexts, the NRC report has been the subject of symposia in four journals, where it has been supported by a few and attacked from a variety of philosophical fronts: Its authors were positivists, they erroneously believed that educational inquiry could be value neutral and that it could ignore the ways in which the exercise of power constrains the research process, they misunderstood the nature of educational phenomena, and so on. This cluster of issues continues to be debated by educational researchers and by philosophers of education and of science, and often involves basic topics in philosophy of science: the constitution of warranting evidence, the nature of theories and of confirmation and explanation, etc. Nancy Cartwright’s important recent work on causation, evidence, and evidence-based policy adds layers of both philosophical sophistication and real world practical analysis to the central issues just discussed (Cartwright & Hardie 2012, Cartwright 2013; cf. Kvernbekk 2015 for an overview of the controversies regarding evidence in the education and philosophy of education literatures).

As stressed earlier, it is impossible to do justice to the whole field of philosophy of education in a single encyclopedia entry. Different countries around the world have their own intellectual traditions and their own ways of institutionalizing philosophy of education in the academic universe, and no discussion of any of this appears in the present essay. But even in the Anglo-American world there is such a diversity of approaches that any author attempting to produce a synoptic account will quickly run into the borders of his or her competence. Clearly this has happened in the present case.

Fortunately, in the last thirty years or so resources have become available that significantly alleviate these problems. There has been a flood of encyclopedia entries, both on the field as a whole and also on many specific topics not well-covered in the present essay (see, as a sample, Burbules 1994; Chambliss 1996b; Curren 1998, 2018; Phillips 1985, 2010; Siegel 2007; Smeyers 1994), two “Encyclopedias” (Chambliss 1996a; Phillips 2014), a “Guide” (Blake, Smeyers, Smith, & Standish 2003), a “Companion” (Curren 2003), two “Handbooks” (Siegel 2009; Bailey, Barrow, Carr, & McCarthy 2010), a comprehensive anthology (Curren 2007), a dictionary of key concepts in the field (Winch & Gingell 1999), and a good textbook or two (Carr 2003; Noddings 2015). In addition there are numerous volumes both of reprinted selections and of specially commissioned essays on specific topics, some of which were given short shrift here (for another sampling see A. Rorty 1998, Stone 1994), and several international journals, including Theory and Research in Education , Journal of Philosophy of Education , Educational Theory , Studies in Philosophy and Education , and Educational Philosophy and Theory . Thus there is more than enough material available to keep the interested reader busy.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

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Acknowledgments

The authors and editors would like to thank Randall Curren for sending a number of constructive suggestions for the Summer 2018 update of this entry.

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Foundation of Education

UNIT 1: GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO EDUCATION

GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO EDUCATION

K ey unit competence : Analyse the components and linkages between elements of the national education system

1.1. Introduction to Foundations of Education

Activity 1.

1. Observe your weekly time table and identify how frequent the subject of foundation of education (FoE) is scheduled and periods lengths it is taught in comparison with other subjects. Has anybody ever told you something about foundations of education (FOE)?

2. What perceptions and expectations do you have about the course of FoE with regards to new knowledge, importance etc?

Foundations of Education (FoE) is a critical course for TTC student teachers in all options as it encompasses educational topics that equip student teachers with basic principles, theories required for knowledge transfer and progressive acquisition of professional competences. The course provides students teachers with knowledge, skills and attitudes that enable them to apply different theories, pedagogical approaches, teaching methods and techniques taking into consideration learner’s ages and needs in different learning environment or contexts.

In Year one, student teachers will be equipped with competences about the elements indicated in the following chart:

Write a friendly letter to your colleague from the ordinary level to share your perception about Foundations of Education subject. Please highlight knowledge and skills you expect to gain in this subject by the end of Year one.

1. Read the following paragraph and write down the terms that have relationship with education! The government of Rwanda is interested in competence based teaching. This philosophy of education will help all educational institutions to produce competent learners. However, this will be achieved if only curriculum, instructions, didactic aids and other academic related activities are reviewed and adjusted in competence based approach perspective. You are all called to show positive attitudes toward this new philosophy being either in general education, vocational training or professional education. We start with a Competence Based curriculum, we go through with Competences and we end up with Competent People!!!

2. Write other terms you think can be related to education.

Education

According to Oxford University Press, East Africa (2011), the term ‘education’ in its literal meaning is derived from two Latin words: ‘educare’ which means to rear, to bring up or to nourish a child. ‘educere’ which means to bring forth, to lead, to draw out or to train. Therefore, to educate a child would mean drawing or leading out what is in the child, i.e. facilitating the realization and development of the child’s potential and talents.

According to Plato, education is the process of guiding people toward the truth.

J.J. Rousseau defines education as the process of helping learners to learn according to knowledge, skills and attitudes which result into changing the behavior.

DURKHEIM (1968, 41) defines education in its totality saying that it is: the action exercised by the adult generations on those who are not yet mature for the social life.

Therefore, education is a process of transmitting or teaching knowledge, values, skills, competences and correct social behaviours, to prepare someone for life and for social, political, economic participation, for a better society where there is happiness and satisfaction of its members, due to the activities of educated people. This process may be carried out by adults, schools, colleges, universities, churches or special institution or person.

Learning : It refers to the process of acquiring knowledge, skills or attitudes through study, experience or teaching. Learning is a lifelong process that leads to long-term changes in behavioural potentials.

Teaching : It is the activity of educating or instructing; activity of imparting knowledge or skills. It is the act, practice, occupation or profession of a teacher.

Instruction : It is defined as transmission of knowledge judged necessary to a child (learner)

Schooling : It is the action of undertaking educational programs in an institution such as a school for the purpose of acquiring knowledge, skills, attitudes and values.

School: An institution where instruction is given.

Academics : Areas of study that are required by formal education to conform to a set of standards, often without a direct application. Vocational Training: Practical instruction which prepares an individual to take up a specific occupation.

Didactics: This refers to the science of teaching. Didactics comes from the Greek word” didactikos” which means to “teach” which is similar to “instruct” Curriculum: A curriculum is a broad concept which includes all planned activities and subjects which takes place during the normal school day. It also includes after school planned co-curricular activities such as sport, clubs and drama. These takes place within a specific system and aim to lead and assist student so that they can be useful citizens within the community (REB the teacher training colleges competence based curriculum orientation manual, 2019). Pedagogy: This is the art or a science of helping a child learn. Initially, a pedagogue was the slave in charge of taking the child to everywhere especially to school.

Progressively, pedagogue came to lose its etymological meaning of accompanying a person and by extension, a pedagogue appeared later (dates 1485 and was mostly used in 19th century) to become synonymous of master, teacher or tutor.

According to DURKHEM (1911): Pedagogy is the practical theory of Education.

Pedagogy is a discipline whose concern is the education of a child. It implies the science of the child, the knowledge of educational techniques and the art to put them into practice.

Observe the picture below showing different people successfully working in different domains.

The purpose of education is defined differently in different societies and has continued to evolve and change throughout history. Broadly speaking, there are personal purposes for growth and self-improvement; political purposes for improved citizenship, social functioning; and economic purposes for having a skilled workforce.

Generally, the aims of education are:

– Bring people to their full potential;

– Develop intellectual basic skills such as reading and math, for a literate society;

– Improve social skills and sense of moral responsibility for a better society;

– Prepare people for success in life (socially and economically);

– Prepare people with skills to join the workforce and contribute to the economy;

– Develop skills and curiosity so that individuals can learn on their own;

– Promote the democratic process (sharing views, debating, making decisions, taking action to solve problems, evaluating progress made, etc.);

Rwandan Education Sector Objectives

The Education Sector objectives are the reference point by which educational issues are included into other Rwandan policy documents. These objectives are aligned with those recommended in the Eastern African Curriculum Framework proposals.

The Government of Rwanda through Law number 36/2018 of 29th June, 2018 determining the organization of education revised the objectives of the sector. They are to:

– Provide Rwandans with adequate skills at all levels of general education as well as technical and vocational skills;

– Offer quality courses and education at all levels;

– Promote science, technology and research in order to equip Rwandans with capacity to speed up national development;

– Promote the culture of peace, tolerance, justice, respect for human rights, solidarity, democracy and that of avoiding any form of discrimination or favouritism;

– Provide each Rwandan with an integrated education based on ethical values, science and social welfare and directed towards building a nation to ensure its sustainable development;

– Instil into Rwandans, the love of a job well done, the value of hard work, punctuality and promotion of competence; – Train the Rwandan to have freedom of thought, be innovative, have abilities to acquire and be analytical towards other people’s opinions and to communicate his or her own ideas, to be patriotic and encourage him or her to be updated on the situation prevailing elsewhere;

– Eliminate all grounds and obstacles that hinder the development of girls and women education as well as of any other groups that need special attention.

Activity 1.4

Observe the pictures below and answers to questions.

Formal education

• Formal education corresponds to a systematic, organized education model, structured and administered according to a given set of laws and norms, presenting a rigid and prescribed curriculum in regards with objectives, content and methodology. It is classroom-based and provided by trained teachers. It leads to some form of certification at the end of a course or level.

• Formal education is important for standardization and ensuring learners achieve basic academic competencies.

Informal education

• Informal education does not correspond to an organized and systematic view of education. it happens outside the classroom, through communitybased organizations, museums, libraries, mass media and at home. These are some examples of activities under informal education: visits to museums or to scientific exhibits; listening to radio broadcasting or watching TV programmes on educational or scientific themes; reading texts on sciences, education, technology in journals and magazines.

• Informal education is generally more flexible and individualized but also more short-term than formal education. There is no control over the performed activities; it does not necessarily provide degrees or diplomas; it supplements both formal and non-formal education.

• Informal education is important for developing life skills and talents.

• Some students feel intimidated by a formal educational environment yet thrive in a more relaxed informal educational environment.

• It supplements both formal and non-formal education.

Non-formal education

• Non-formal education is any organized learning activity outside the structure of formal educational system that is consciously aimed at meeting specific learning needs of particular groups of children, youths or adults in the community.

• It includes various kinds of educational activities such as skill training, health and family planning, sensitization in project creation and management.

• The defining characteristics of non-formal education are that it is an edition, alternative and/or a complement to formal education within the lifelong learning process.

• Examples of non-formal education: Capacity building sessions (training), Civic education training “Itorero”, Community sports programs, adult literacy programs.

Fill the following learning environments in the T-chart according to whether they are formal or informal education: park, museum, computer lab, primary classroom, university, carpenter’s workshop, science lab, home.

Bearing in mind the three historical eras (Pre-colonial, Colonial and Post-Colonial Periods) and their effect on the history of education, fill in the K&L of the following KWL chart and highlight what you know (K) and what you want to know (W) about the history of Rwandan education.

The historical development of education in Rwanda is linked with the political history of the country as the major changes in education were dictated by political changes. As Rwanda has wide history, it is important to take into account the three main periods such as pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial period. These periods describe the development of education in Rwanda as discussed below.

Before Adolescence, education in Rwanda was informal and delivered largely through the family. Non formal education was organised for adolescent. Young adolescents were trained through Urubohero for girls and Itorero for boys.

During Urubohero sessions, girls learnt households keeping and other skills that prepared them to be effective prospective wives. Among these skills, there is basket making and other handicrafts.

Boys were trained in Itorero. Courses they received included the military and war skills, iron smith and foundry, poetry…

1.5.2 Education during the colonial period

With the arrival of catholic missionaries in 1900, small schools were built nearby their churches. Rwandan children especially boys started to attend them though they were in small number. In these schools, they received rudimentary skills such as writing, reading and calculations with the purpose of enhancing evangelical mission.

Later with the arrival of Belgians, the educational system was strengthened. Churches were supported reinforcing their education.

Apart from primary schools, secondary ones were also created. The purpose of secondary education was to prepare carefully sons of chiefs (abatware) for colonial administrative activities. Therefore, prestigious schools such Astrida secondary school, were attended by these authorities ‘children.

It is important to note that during this period, the curriculum that taught was based on Belgian curriculum and context.

The educational system left by Belgians was as follows:

– Primary: 6 years of primary education (1– 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6)

– Post-primary:

2 years of vocational training (Enseignement artisanal et ménager)

– Secondary:

• 4 years of teacher and professional education with one year preparatory (7– 1– 2 – 3 – 4);

• 7 years of general education (7– 6 – 5 – 4 – 3 – 2 – 1)

1.5.3. Education under the first and second Republic

During the first Republic and second one, primary and secondary schools increased in number. The intention was schooling all children at the age of attending the school. With this regard, double shift was applied in primary schools to have a big number of children accessing primary education. In 1963, National University of Rwanda was created in Butare at Ruhande. According to educational law of 1966, schools were classified into two categories: public schools and private ones.

The structure of education system left by the second Republic 2nd Republic before the 1979/1980 reform was structured as follows:

Primary education :

6 years including 3 years of lower primary and 3 years of upper primary.

– Post- primary education :

3 years (CERAR -Centre d’Enseignement Rural et Artisanal au Rwanda- for boys and Section familiale for girls) for vocational training (farming, construction, carpentry, culinary, …)

– Secondary:

• 3 years for ordinary level (1– 2 – 3)

• 2 years of short cycle of advanced level for technical and professional training after ordinary level (4– 5) with a D5 certificate at the end of the program. The leavers were not qualified for tertiary education.

• 4 years of advanced level for technical and professional training after ordinary level (4 – 5 – 6– 7 with a D7 certificate at the end of the program. The leavers were qualified for further studies in tertiary education after some years of professional work.

• 3 years of general education after ordinary level (4 – 5 – 6). The leavers were qualified for further studies in tertiary education immediately after Senior 6.

– Tertiary education was for 3 years and the leavers were qualified as ‘Baccalauréat’ holders (diploma holders).

The 1978 education system reform introduced a new education structure of 8 years of primary education where the language of instruction was the mother tongue (Kinyarwanda) from Primary 1 up to Primary 8 and 6 years of secondary education where the language of instruction was French. There was no lower secondary, the choice of career path and specialization in various disciplines of study started immediately after primary education (starting from senior one).

The reform was made effective in the academic year 1979/1980. It continued up to 1991. The reform made the following structure of the education system:

8 years for primary education:

3 year of lower primary; 3 years of upper primary and 2 years for …… the language of instruction was Kinyarwanda.

– 3 years for post primary education (ERAI: Enseignement Rural Artisanal Integré)

– 6 years for secondary education (without ordinary level).

The choice of career path and specialization in branches of study started immediately after primary education. The language of instruction was French.

– Tertiary education lasted between depending upon the faculties.

Though both 1st and 2nd Republics made a significant step in increasing the number of both primary and secondary schools and hence increased the number of children in these schools, education was ethnically and regionally discriminative. Girls were also few in the schools compared to boys.

1.5.4. Summary of changes of education system after the genocide against Tutsi

After 1994 genocide, schools were rehabilitated and new ones were constructed. The number of children attending the school has been far increased compared to those who attended before the genocide.

Different government policies have been implemented to ensure that there is a high literacy rate among the population.

To meet Universal Primary Education and Education for All, Rwanda has introduced a program of Nine and twelve Years Basic Education - 9 and 12 years basic education (9/12YBE), a program which required to building a significant number of schools as way of responding to the growing demand of enrolment. This education is against any discrimination be it ethnical, regional and gender-based.

Since 1994, the education system in Rwanda has undergone remarkable reforms. Progress has been made over two decades in the areas of education and skills development. However, barriers still remain especially in terms of the competences required for the labour market and for international competitiveness.

Such historical educational changes have dictated the change in curriculum as far as a high quality curriculum is regarded as the foundation of an effective education. Its adequacy, relevance and coherence have to be regularly updated to keep pace with the changing global situation and to address issues which conflict educational principles.

In line with efforts to improve the quality of the curriculum, Rwanda has been through different phases of significant change in recent decades as highlighted below:

• 1996: a major review restructured the education system to provide 6 years of primary, 3 years of lower secondary and 3 years of upper secondary schooling. The curriculum and syllabi were harmonised and elaborated and the language of instruction in lower primary became Kinyarwanda with French or English as the languages of learning from upper primary onwards.

2009: There have been mini-curriculum reviews in some learning areas and subjects to address the issues of relevance, adequacy and alignment to the teaching and learning processes. Compulsory and elective vocational subjects in lower and upper secondary were constituted to provide the learners with general knowledge and vocational competences.

2009: The language of instruction shifted from French into English from P4 onward for all subjects exclusive of Kinyarwanda. This reform was initiated to align Rwanda with regional English-speaking nations, strengthen Rwanda’s relationship with the Commonwealth, and increase Rwanda’s competitiveness in regional and global settings.

• 2009: The 9YBE program became the catalyst for the expansion of education from P1 to S3 using unconventional construction methods, teacher specialization, double shifting and reduction of subject areas.

• 2011: ECD Policy adopted and an attempt made to formalize the sub-sector

• 2013: Teacher Training Colleges began offering an ECE option.

• 2014-2015: A major education reform was undertaken to move from knowledge-based to a Competence-Based Curriculum (CBC).

• 2016-2018: The roll-out of CBC happened in a three-year phased approach (2016-2018) starting with P1, P4, S1, S4.

• 2016-2019: UR-CE and REB revised the Teacher Training College curriculum to equip future teachers with knowledge, skills attitudes required to implement the CBC introduced in pre-primary and primary education.

Complete the “L” column left from the KWL chart (Activity 1.5.) with everything you think you learnt

Formal education is typically divided into different levels with respect to age groups of students. Each level has its specific aim and certification which differs from another level. For example: pre-primary, primary, secondary, vocational, and tertiary (University or college education).

In Rwanda, the education system has the following structure:

Pre-primary Education

Pre-primary is organized in nursery schools for a period of three years for children of 3 to 6 years of age. It is established to prepare children to enter primary school. This education aims to encourage the socialisation of children and to stimulate their learning potentials by allowing them to engage and play with other children and to practice physical, rhythmic and manual activities. Initially pre-primary was not obligatory and was in the hands of parents and the private sector and the role of the government was to give limited support in terms of learning materials and provision of syllabus to follow. The policy now is to provide nursery education at village level and to encourage public private partnership at local level.

Primary Education

Primary education in Rwanda is free and compulsory for 6 years. The official school enrolment age at this level is from 6 or 7 years to 11 or 12 years. All children sit for national examinations at the end of primary 6 for selection into secondary education. The dramatic increase in enrolment has required a double shift system to be implemented in primary schools across the country.

Secondary Education

Secondary education in Rwanda is for 6 years, composed of 3 years of lower secondary or ordinary level (O- Level) and 3 years of upper secondary or advanced level (A-Level). The official school age for this level is from 13 years to 18 years although there are some children who start school early and join secondary by the age of 12. Lower secondary education is free and compulsory and the government, in partnership with the community, is building additional classrooms to increase access into upper secondary so that it also gradually becomes free and compulsory. All children sit for national examinations at the end of lower secondary for selection into upper secondary or technical and vocational education.

S econdary education

in Rwanda is for 6 years, composed of 3 years of lower secondary or ordinary level (O- Level) and 3 years of upper secondary or advanced level (A-Level). The official school age for this level is from 13 years to 18 years although there are some children who start school early and join secondary by the age of 12. Lower secondary education is free and compulsory and the government, in partnership with the community, is building additional classrooms to increase access into upper secondary so that it also gradually becomes free and compulsory. All children sit for national examinations at the end of lower secondary for selection into upper secondary or technical and vocational education.

Draw a framework chart showing the education progression from nursery up to university and show the links between educational levels. Remember to add a brief description under each level.

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10 Philosophical Foundations of Education

Philosophical foundations of education.

In this section, we will explore philosophical foundations of education in the United States.

Chapter Outline

Philosophical foundations, perennialism, essentialism, progressivism, social reconstructionism.

Table 3.1: Four Key Educational Philosophies

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Common educational philosophies including perennialism, essentialism, progressivism, and social reconstructionism reflect varying beliefs about the roles education should fill.

Season 2: Episode 8 – The Final Exam

It’s February 2020, and Warner Elementary’s star is rising. It’s showing so much progress this year that it might be able to go from one of the lowest performing schools in Tennessee to one of the best. Now it’s just time to hunker down and work until the big state test at the end of the year. But we all know what happens next. First, a natural disaster in Nashville. Then, a global pandemic. And at a school with low-income students, these challenges hit especially hard. “I’m tired of fighting for kids. One person can’t consistently carry that burden,” Warner principal Ricki Gibbs said. “I was at a point where I was going to say, ‘You can have Warner. This is too much.’” In this dramatic final episode of Season 2, crisis brings Warner’s challenges to a breaking point.

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Source: K. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy , Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977, with some notes by R. Rojas.

The economic conditions of existence of the three great classes into which modern bourgeois society is divided are analysed under the first three headings; the interconnection of the other three headings is self-evident. The first part of the first book, dealing with Capital, comprises the following chapters: 1. The commodity, 2. Money or simple circulation; 3. Capital in general. The present part consists of the first two chapters. The entire material lies before me in the form of monographs, which were written not for publication but for self-clarification at widely separated periods; their remoulding into an integrated whole according to the plan I have indicated will depend upon circumstances. A general introduction, which I had drafted, is omitted, since on further consideration it seems to me confusing to anticipate results which still have to be substantiated, and the reader who really wishes to follow me will have to decide to advance from the particular to the general. A few brief remarks regarding the course of my study of political economy are appropriate here. Although I studied jurisprudence, I pursued it as a subject subordinated to philosophy and history. In the year 1842-43, as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, I first found myself in the embarrassing position of having to discuss what is known as material interests. The deliberations of the Rhenish Landtag on forest thefts and the division of landed property; the official polemic started by Herr von Schaper, then Oberprasident of the Rhine Province, against the Rheinische Zeitung about the condition of the Moselle peasantry, and finally the debates on free trade and protective tariffs caused me in the first instance to turn my attention to economic questions. On the other hand, at that time when good intentions “to push forward” often took the place of factual knowledge, an echo of French socialism and communism, slightly tinged by philosophy, was noticeable in the Rheinische Zeitung. I objected to this dilettantism, but at the same time frankly admitted in a controversy with the Allgemeine Augsburger Zeitung that my previous studies did not allow me to express any opinion on the content of the French theories. When the publishers of the Rheinische Zeitung conceived the illusion that by a more compliant policy on the part of the paper it might be possible to secure the abrogation of the death sentence passed upon it, I eagerly grasped the opportunity to withdraw from the public stage to my study. The first work which I undertook to dispel the doubts assailing me was a critical re-examination of the Hegelian philosophy of law; the introduction to this work being published in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher issued in Paris in 1844. My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in the material conditions of life, the totality of which Hegel, following the example of English and French thinkers of the eighteenth century, embraces within the term “civil society”; that the anatomy of this civil society, however, has to be sought in political economy. The study of this, which I began in Paris, I continued in Brussels, where I moved owing to an expulsion order issued by M. Guizot. The general conclusion at which I arrived and which, once reached, became the guiding principle of my studies can be summarised as follows.

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.

Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, [A] feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals' social conditions of existence – but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation. Frederick Engels, with whom I maintained a constant exchange of ideas by correspondence since the publication of his brilliant essay on the critique of economic categories (printed in the Deutsch-Franz�sische Jahrb�cher, arrived by another road (compare his Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England ) at the same result as I, and when in the spring of 1845 he too came to live in Brussels, we decided to set forth together our conception as opposed to the ideological one of German philosophy, in fact to settle accounts with our former philosophical conscience. The intention was carried out in the form of a critique of post-Hegelian philosophy. The manuscript [The German Ideology], two large octavo volumes, had long ago reached the publishers in Westphalia when we were informed that owing to changed circumstances it could not be printed. We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly since we had achieved our main purpose – self-clarification. Of the scattered works in which at that time we presented one or another aspect of our views to the public, I shall mention only the Manifesto of the Communist Party, jointly written by Engels and myself, and a Discours sur le libre echange, which I myself published. The salient points of our conception were first outlined in an academic, although polemical, form in my Misere de la philosophie ..., this book which was aimed at Proudhon appeared in 1847. The publication of an essay on Wage-Labour [Wage-Labor and Capital] written in German in which I combined the lectures I had held on this subject at the German Workers' Association in Brussels, was interrupted by the February Revolution and my forcible removal from Belgium in consequence. The publication of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1848 and 1849 and subsequent events cut short my economic studies, which I could only resume in London in 1850. The enormous amount of material relating to the history of political economy assembled in the British Museum, the fact that London is a convenient vantage point for the observation of bourgeois society, and finally the new stage of development which this society seemed to have entered with the discovery of gold in California and Australia, induced me to start again from the very beginning and to work carefully through the new material. These studies led partly of their own accord to apparently quite remote subjects on which I had to spend a certain amount of time. But it was in particular the imperative necessity of earning my living which reduced the time at my disposal. My collaboration, continued now for eight years, with the New York Tribune, the leading Anglo-American newspaper, necessitated an excessive fragmentation of my studies, for I wrote only exceptionally newspaper correspondence in the strict sense. Since a considerable part of my contributions consisted of articles dealing with important economic events in Britain and on the continent, I was compelled to become conversant with practical detail which, strictly speaking, lie outside the sphere of political economy. This sketch of the course of my studies in the domain of political economy is intended merely to show that my views – no matter how they may be judged and how little they conform to the interested prejudices of the ruling classes – are the outcome of conscientious research carried on over many years. At the entrance to science, as at the entrance to hell, the demand must be made: Qui si convien lasciare ogni sospetto Ogni vilta convien che qui sia morta.

A. As a second footnote to the Communist Manifesto, Engels wrote in 1888:

In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organization existing previous to recorded history, [was] all but unknown. Since then, August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Georg Ludwig von Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and, by and by, village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organization of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Lewis Henry Morgan's (1818-1861) crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of the primeval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this dissolution in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State , second edition, Stuttgart, 1886.

Thus, as the science of understanding pre-history progressed (pre-history being that time before written records of human civilization exist), Marx & Engels changed their understanding and descriptions accordingly. In the above text, Marx mentions “Asiatic” modes of production. In the idea of an Asiatic mode of production, Marx and Engels were following Hegel’s schema, see: The Oriental Realm ). They later dropped the idea of a distinctive Asiatic mode of production, and kept four basic forms: tribal, ancient, feudal, and capitalist.

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Otherwise stated, I try to respond to the question: How well does teaching economics obeys to what the economic theory has told us on the role of education? Section I provides an introduction to the subject. Section II links economics and education and the inherent issues involved. Section III provides a review of literature in the field.
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Michael Lovenheim & Sarah Turner. "Economics of Education", Worth Publishers, 2018. The book divides into Parts I-IV. Part I (Chapters 1-3) is an overview of the structure of the education market and the empirical tools we use to analyze it. Part II (Chapters 4-7) gives the theoretical framework for education production and investment.
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"Economic Foundations of Education" is an invaluable resource for educators, policymakers, economists, and anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the economic forces at play in shaping the landscape of education. By bridging the gap between economics and education, this book contributes to a more informed dialogue on how to create effective ...
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The NBER Health Economics Program has historically studied the determinants and consequences of differences in health outcomes, with a focus on education, health insurance coverage, obesity, and risky behaviors such as smoking and drinking. Since the last program report, in 2015, the program has …. 12/31/2022.
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Reviewed by Erin Weldon, Director of Instructional Design and Development, Trine University on 4/15/24 Comprehensiveness rating: 5 see less. Foundations of Education provides a comprehensive exploration of education, delving into historical aspects of education in the United States, philosophical foundations, ethics, and legal points.
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Recognizes influence of social, economic, and political systems. Believes schools can lead to collaborative change to develop a better society and enhance social justice. ... 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 ...
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GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO EDUCATION. Key unit competence: Analyse the components and linkages between elements of the national education system. 1.1. Introduction to Foundations of Education. Activity 1. 1. Observe your weekly time table and identify how frequent the subject of foundation of education (FoE) is scheduled and periods lengths it is taught in comparison with other subjects.
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Source: K. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977, with some notes by R. Rojas. I examine the system of bourgeois economy in the following order: capital, landed property, wage-labour; the State, foreign trade, world market. The economic conditions of existence of the three great classes ...
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Productivity in Higher Education

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Chapter 3: Philosophical and Historical Foundations of Education in the United States

Chapter Outline

Differing Approaches to Progressivism

Increasing Access to Education for Minoritized Groups

Social Emotional Learning

PAUSE & PONDER

Historical Foundations

Colonial America

American Revolutionary Era

Pause & Ponder

Early National Era

CRITICAL LENS: WORDS MATTER

Post Civil War and Reconstruction

Critical Lens: The “Value” of Education

Native American Boarding Schools: Cultural Imperialism and Genocide

Critical Lens: Indigenous Boarding Schools in the News

The Progressive Era

Stop & Investigate

Post World War II & Civil Rights Era

Separate is Not Equal

The 1980s and Beyond

A Nation at Risk and Standards-Based Reform

CRITICAL LENS: STANDARDIZED TESTING

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