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It is a blog that has information on educational philosophy. The articles address topics like
naturalism, pragmatism, idealism, realism, and Islamic philosophy of education. There are
articles on Plato, Aristotle, John Dewey, and Rousseau among others.
Idealism
Introduction
Idealism is the metaphysical and epistemological doctrine that ideas or thoughts make up
fundamental reality. Essentially it is any philosophy which argues that the only thing actually
knowable is consciousness whereas we never can be sure that matter or anything in the outside
world really exists thus the only the real things are mental entities not physical things which exist
only in the sense that they are perceived. A broad definition of idealism could include many
religious viewpoints although an idealistic viewpoint need not necessarily include God,
supernatural beings or existences after death. In general parlance, “idealism” is also used to
describe a person’s high ideals (principles or values actively pursued as a goal) the word “ideal”
excellence.
Definition:
“Idealistic philosophy takes many and varied forms but the postulate underlying all this is that
mind or spirit is the essential world stuff, that the rule reality is a material character”.
Idealism in education:
Idealism pervades all the creation and it is an underlying, unlimited and ultimate force which
regions supreme overall mind and matter. They all advocate its great importance in education and
lay more emphasis on aims and principles of education than on models, aids and devices.
The following are the aims of education according to the philosophy of idealism:
According to the idealism man is the most creation of God. Self- realization involves full of
knowledge of the self and it is the first aim of education “The aim of education especially
associated with idealism is the exhalation of personality or self-realization it is the making actual
Idealistic give greater importance to spiritual values in comparison with material attainments.
The second aim of education is to develop the child mentally, morally and above all spiritually.
“Education must enable mankind through its culture to enter more and more fully into the
spiritual realm”.
“In all things their regions an external law this all pervading energetic, self conscious and hence
eternal law this all pervading energetic. This unity is God. Education should lead and guide man
Idealists give more importance to thoughts, feelings ideals and values than to the child and his
activities. They firmly hold that curriculum should be concerned with the whole humanity and its
experience.
According to Plato the aim of life is to realize God. Which is possible only by pursing high
ideals namely Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. Three types of activities namely intellectual,
According to Herbart the idealistic aim of education is the promotion of moral values. He gave
prime importance to subjects like Literature, History, Art, Music, and Poetry together with other
History of Idealism
Plato is one of the first philosophers to discuss what might be termed idealism. Usually Plato
referred to as Platonic Realism. This is because of his doctrine describes forms or universals.
(Which are certainly non-material “ideals” in a broad sense). Plato maintained that these forms
had their own independent existence. Plato believed that “full reality” it is achieved only through
metaphysics literally means “beyond the physical” This area of Philosophy a focuses on the
nature of reality. Metaphysics attempts to find unity across the domains of experiences thought.
At the time metaphysical level there are four broad philosophical schools of thought that apply to
education today. They are idealism, realism, pragmatism (sometimes called experientialism and
existentialism). Plato was an idealist philosopher who founded the first school of philosophy in
Athens. His work forms the foundation of western philosophy. His presentation of philosophical
works in the form of “Dialogues” gave the world of philosophy the dialectic. Plato took Socrates’
maxim “virtue is knowledge” and extrapolated it into an elaborate theory of knowledge which
envisaged a level of reality beyond that immediately available to the senses but accessible to
reason and intellect. The students of Plato’s academy the first school of philosophy in Athens,
were to go beyond the concrete world of perception and come to understand the universal
“ideas” or forms which represented a higher level of reality. Plato’s idealism extended to the
concept of an ideal state as outlined in his “Republic”. This was a state ruled by an intellectual
Definition of Naturalism:
The meaning of the name “Naturalism” is strongly implied in the word itself. It is the view point
which regards the world of nature as the all in all of reality naturalism commonly known as
“Materialism” It is a philosophical paradigm whereby everything can be explained in terms of
natural causes. Naturalism by definition excludes any super natural agent or activity. “Naturalism
is not science but an assertion about science. More specifically it is the assertion that scientific
knowledge is final, leaving no room for extra scientific or Philosophy knowledge.” (R. B. Perry)
Naturalism is usually defined most briefly as the philosophical concept that the only reality is
nature, as gradually discovered by our intelligence using the tools of experience, reason and
science.
According to naturalism:
Protagonist of naturalism:
Aristotle
Comte
Hobbes
Herbert Spencer
Darwin
Samuel butler
Rousseau
The scope of modern philosophy was not limited only to issues concerning science and
metaphysics. Philosophers of this period also attempted to apply the same type of reasoning to
ethics and politics. One approach of these philosophers was to describe human beings in the
“state of nature.” That is, they attempted to strip human beings of all those attributes that they
took to be the results of social conventions. In doing so, they hoped to uncover certain
characteristics of human nature that were universal and unchanging. If this could be done, one
could then determine the most effective and legitimate forms of government.
The two most famous accounts of the state of nature prior to Rousseau’s are those of Thomas
Hobbes and John. Hobbes contends that human beings are motivated purely by self-interest, and
that the state of nature, which is the state of human beings without civil society, is the war of
every person against every other. Hobbes does say that while the state of nature may not have
existed all over the world at one particular time, it is the condition in which humans would be if
there were no sovereign. Locke’s account of the state of nature is different in that it is an
intellectual exercise to illustrate people’s obligations to one another. These obligations are
articulated in terms of natural rights, including rights to life, liberty and property. Rousseau was
also influenced by the modern natural law tradition, which attempted to answer the challenge of
skepticism through a systematic approach to human nature that, like Hobbes, emphasized self-
interest. Rousseau therefore often refers to the works of Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf,
Jean Bergerac, and Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui. Rousseau would give his own account of the state
of nature in the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, which will
be examined below.
Biography of Rousseau:
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born June 28, 1712 in Geneva and died July 2, 1778 in
Ermenonville, France. He was one of the most important philosophers of the French
enlightenment. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was also involved philosophically and wrote his first
major philosophical work in 1750. From this work he earned a prize from the Academy of Dijon.
The text, Discourse sur les sciences ET les arts, begins with a question, “The question before me
is: 'Whether the Restoration of the arts and sciences has had the effect of purifying or corrupting
morals.” This first discourse represents a radical critique of civilization. According to Rousseau,
civilization is to be seen as a history of decay instead of progress. He does not conceive of the
world as necessarily “good” per se, but rather argues for a sense of rationalism—one must attain
Rousseau is often referred to as the philosopher of freedom because he seemed to praise the
natural or primitive state of human beings over the civilized one and in nature, human beings like
animals free of the pressures and corruptions of the political state.Indeed, Rousseau’s views of
nature and the natural played a central role in his philosophy. He believed that “Man” was born
free and good and could remain that way in some ideal state of nature.
formal education. Conventional and formal education is man-made and hence, not desirable
“Everything is good as it comes from the hands of author of nature but everything degenerates in
the hand of man.”For Rousseau, education does not mean merely imparting information or
storing knowledge. Education from nature does not mean one of social life or institutions. It was
to prepare a natural man.”The natural man is not the savage man but man governed and directed
by the laws of his own nature rather than those of social institutions. Rousseau believed that the
education from man and things must be subordinates to that the natural powers, emotion ns and
reactions are more trustworthy as a basis for action than reflection or experience that comes from
philosophy. He lays stress on direct experience of things and on the principle of learning by
doing. He says, “Teach by doing whenever you can and only fall back on words when doing is
out of the question “He observes, too much reading serves only to make us presumptuous
blockheads conceited and sophisticated”. Besides these two principles, Rousseau advocates the
adoption of the heuristic attitude which places the child in the position to discover. (Emile)
For example, to learn science in a practical fashion, by means of rough experiments performed
with apparatus self-made and self–invented. Rousseau like a modern educators thinks less of the
teacher’s own exposition, much more of the learning experiences of the pupil. He is against the
telling method and the tendency to be didactic. The telling method cannot cause the child to
learn.
Rousseau’s cry is “freedom” and “absence of restraint” for Emile, It is only in an atmosphere of
freedom that Emile can develop his innate powers spontaneously. Impositions are of no use.
Punishments have no value as the child has no correct conception of wrong or why punishment is
given. The child’s reasoning power is not well developed. He wants children to have their own
conduct.”Children should never receive punishment as such it should always come as natural
consequences of their faults.”Rousseau advises the teacher not to intervene in matters of moral
guidance’s as a means of disciplining the child. He contends that the child’s nature is essentially
an imaginary woman called Sophy. While Emile’s education is unconventional and natural,
Sophy’s education is to be conventional and orthodox. Rousseau accounts for this difference: He
says that women is an appendage of man; her aim of life is to please her husband, to obey him,”
to bring him (man) up when he is a child, to tend him when he is a man, to counsel him, to
render his life agreeable and pleasant.” Hence a woman, according to Rousseau does not require
Rousseau’s naturalism rooted man in nature rather than society. So much did he regard man as a
child of nature, as over against society, that he proposed in his Emile to keep Emile away from
society until adolescence. In his social contract he reveals how the problem of social organization
is complicated by the importance of the freedom of the man. Individual man, he contented is not
a man unless he is free if he is in bondage, he is less than a man. Yet unbridled freedom is neither
in harmony with his own welfare not the welfare of the society. Evidently some social
organization is needed, but one which preserves for man his freedom. It would seem that for
naturalism social values are synthetic values which result from agreements in which individual
men bind themselves together. They are second good, not so much preferred as individual goods,
which result indirectly as a consequence of the desire to avoid the grater evils which accompany
anarchy. They are not organic values, which are determined in part by the way nature of society
and which would never be possessed by individual men separately, even if they did not need to
Conclusion:
Rousseau has exerted great influence on education in its manifold aspects. Although his main
aim in life was to destroy traditionalism, yet many of the important principles in modern
pedagogy can be traced back to him. He asserted that education is a natural process; its function
is not to remark the nature of the child by forcing on him the traditional or customary way of
thinking and doing. It is due to Rousseau that the need of sense training and physical activities in
the earlier development of the child has been recognized in modern systems of education.
Pragmatism in Education
Outline
Introduction
Pragmatism in education
How relevant is pragmatism to the education system today
Example of pragmatism
Strength and advantages
conclusion
Pragmatism in Education was created by John Dewey. This is American pragmatism and
represents form idealism. Dewey's pragmatists views state that thinking of a person’s mind is
conditioned by the group of people he or she. Pragmatism emerged from the writings of John
Dewey who believed that experimentation was the best approach for educating young minds. For
example, pragmatists feel that field trips, educational excursions etc are more effective in
teaching students about the world instead of audio-visual aids. Pragmatism includes such as
thoughts as futurism, and educational humanism. Pragmatic education philosophy doesn't assign
a traditional role to the teachers who are only seen as guides and not exactly more
knowledgeable beings. Pragmatism focuses on real life experiences as the main source of
knowledge and education.(George R. Knight) They gives the example of field trips as he says
that for a child to learn about dairy products, its better to take him to a barn and let him
experience the whole thing himself instead of showing him a movie on the subject. (p. 75)
Idealism is an important philosophy that gained greater influence over education in the 20th
century and was not so popular prior to that. It has been present in the educational field for a long
time emphasizing the reality of ideas, thoughts, and mind over material. American pragmatism
represents an activist development of Kant and Hegel’s idealism. As a theory of mutable truth,
pragmatism claims that ideas are true insofar as they are useful in a specific situation what works
today in one case may not work tomorrow in another case. The standard of moral truth is
expediency. Ethical ideas are accepted as long as they continue to work. According to John
Dewey’s social pragmatism, what is true is that which works for a society through the promotion
of the public good. Dewey advocates a relativistic, secularized form of altruism that calls for
sacrificing oneself to attain the ends of the People. In this view society, rather than the
individual, passes moral judgment. Social policies are measured by their consequences instead of
by abstract principles of what is right or just. There are no facts, no set rules of logic, no
objectivity, and no certainty. There are only policies and proposals for social actions that must be
treated as working hypotheses. The experience of consequences will indicate the need to keep or
alter the original hypotheses. For pragmatists knowledge of the world is impossible to separate
from actions upon it. There is no reality out there both facts and values are products of men
interacting with an environment and shaping it to their wills. Society, Men are free to choose
their own way of thinking and to create whatever reality they want to embrace. However, a man’s
mind is conditioned by the collective thinking of other people. The mind is thus a social
phenomenon truth is what works for the groups. It is participation in the common life of
democratic society that realizes the freedom of the individual and produces growth in him and in
society. They usually do not and need not reflect before acting. The goal of thought is merely to
reconstruct the situation in order to solve the problem. If the proposal, when implemented,
resolves the issue, then the idea is pragmatically true. Truth cannot be known in advance of
action. One must first act and then think. Only then can reality be determined. Value judgments
are to be made according to desires based on feelings. The test of one’s desire is its congruity
with the majority of other men’s wishes, feelings, and values at that time. These, of course, can
be examined and abandoned in a future context. Value judgments are instrumental, never
completed, and therefore are corrigible. In the end it is feeling, for the pragmatist that is
paramount. Dewey is primarily concerned with the democratic ideal and its realization in every
pragmatist vision of man. Child-centered, rather than subject-centered, education treats the
student as an acting being and therefore is focused on discrete, experiential projects. Dewey
dismisses as irrelevant the teaching of fundamental knowledge such as reading, writing, math,
and science. Both the educator and the students are to be flexible and tentative. The purpose of a
school is to foster social consciousness. The child is to be taught to transcend the assimilation of
truths and facts by learning to serve and adapt to others and to comply with the directives of their
representatives. A disdain for reason and knowledge is thus combined with the practice of
altruism and collectivism. Like Marx, Dewey comprehended and appreciated the conflictual
essence of the Hegelian dialectic. Dewey stressed the clash in the education process between the
child and the curriculum and between the potential and talent of the student and the structure of
an outmoded school system. The traditional curriculum, loaded down with formal subjects, was
unsuited to the child’s active and immediate experience. Dewey saw children as alienated from
their academic work because of a contradiction between the interests of the school and the real
interests of the students. There was an incongruity between the values, goals, and means
embodied in the experience of a mature adult and those of an undeveloped, immature being. The
teaching of abstract, general principles, and eternal and external truths was beyond a child’s
understanding and a barrier to the authentic growth and development of the child.
Dewey’s new school would become a vehicle for the de-alienation and socialization of the child.
The school would be an embryonic socialist community in which the progress of the student
could only be justified by his relation to the group. Dewey’s activity method and manual training
could produce a collective occupational spirit in the school. Dewey, like Marx, was convinced
that thought is a collective activity in which the individual simply acts as a cell in the social
body. For Dewey, cognition is an activity of the group or society as a whole and innovations are
the products of collective science and technology, rather than the creations of individual thinkers
and doers. John Dewey’s progressive model of active learning promoted a revolt against abstract
learning and attempted to make education an effective tool for integrating culture and vocation.
“experimentalism” which saw education as the basis for democracy. His goal was to turn public
schools into indoctrination centers to develop a socialized population that could adapt to an
egalitarian state operated by intellectual elite. Disavowing the role of the individual mind in
achieving technological and social progress, Dewey promoted the group, rather than the teacher,
as the main source of social control in the schools. Denying the ideas of universal principles,
natural law, and natural rights, Dewey emphasized social values and taught that life adjustment is
more important than academic skills. Dewey explained that the subject matter and moral lessons
in the traditional curricula were meant to teach and inspire, but were irrelevant to the students’
immediate action experiences. The contradiction between the students’ real interests and those of
the traditional school alienated students from their schoolwork. School-age children were caught
between the opposing forces of immature, undeveloped beings and the values, meanings, and
aims of subject matter constructed by a mature adult. Dewey believed that students’ energy,
talent, and potential could not be realized within the structure of an archaic school system.
A good example of pragmatism would be technical or career education. If you know somebody
isn't going to make it through college, there's no point in teaching them things that won't directly
apply to a job he or she may have. In order to prepare them for the workforce, some of their
school day is used to prepare them for a specific trade. E.g. why teach somebody who is going to
be an auto mechanic the elements of plot since they're never going to have a practical application
When students learn how to follow procedures they more secure about their environment and
what is expected of them. This security allows the student to feel relaxed in his environment
because he has mastered the environment. He is not insecure about what to do next. This helps
students get back on task after something such as a fire drill. It also allows for seamless teaching
with a substitute teacher because procedures will stay the same. This reduces behavior problems
Conclusion
Nature and comprehend knowledge as the product of the interaction between human being and
environment, and knowledge as having practical instrumentality in the guidance and control of
that interaction. This means that knowledge is not a static given but a process and that any
proposition accepted as an item of knowledge has this status only provisionally, in other worlds
Realism in Education:
For the realist, the world is as it is, and the job of schools would be to teach students about the
world. Goodness, for the realist, would be found in the laws of nature and the order of the
physical world. Truth would be the simple correspondences of observation. The Realist believes
in a world of Things or Beings (metaphysics) and in truth as an Observable Fact. Furthermore,
ethics is the law of nature or Natural Law and aesthetics is the reflection of Nature.
AIMS OF EDUCATION:
Realists do not believe in general and common aims of education. According to them aims are
specific to each individual and his perspectives. And each one has different perspectives. The
aim of education should be to teach truth rather than beauty, to understand the present practical
life. The purpose of education, according to social realists, is to prepare the practical man of the
world.
Realism in education recognizes the importance of the child. The child is a real unit which has
real existence. He has some feelings, some desires and some powers. All these cannot be
overlooked. These powers of the child shall have to be given due regarding at the time of
planning education. Child can reach near reality through learning by reason. Child has to be
given as much freedom as possible. The child is to be enabled to proceed on the basis of facts;
the child can learn only when he follows the laws of learning.”
According to humanistic realism, classical literature should be studied but not for studying its
form and style but for its content and ideas it contained.
Sense-realism- attached more importance to the study of natural sciences and contemporary
social life. Study of languages is not so significant as the study of natural sciences and
contemporary life.
Neo-realism- gives stress on the subject physics and on humanistic feelings, physics and
psychology, sociology, economics, Ethics, Politics, history, Geography, agriculture varied arts,
languages and so on, are the main subjects to be studied according to the Neo-realists.
References
Breed, F. (1942). Education and the Realistic Outlook Philosophies of Education; national
society for the study of education, forty-first yearbook, Part 1. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Butler, J., Donald, Four Philosophies and Their… Education and Religion. New York: Harper &
Row.
Herbart, J.F., The Science of Education. Boston: D.C.Heath & Company, 1902.
Locke, John. Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902. The
basic statement of Locke’s epistemological position.
Singh,Y.K.,(2007). Philosophy Foundation Of Education: Ansari road: S.B.Nangia.
Weber, Christian O., Basic Philosophies of Education. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
Inc. 1960.
- March 19, 2014
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About Me
Khalid Rawat
I am a Faculty Member at Iqra University in Karachi. I also teach at Notre dame Institute
of Education, Karachi, affiliated with Australian Catholic University, and located in St.
Patrick's School Karachi.
I have been a visiting Scholar at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale , Illinois, USA.
I have been affiliated with teaching and research since, last 14 to 15 years.
I have written and publish many articles, most of them are available on my web pages.
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