Educational Theories: Reconstructionism, Pragmatism, and Critical Pedagogy, High school final essays of English

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Name: GREATH P. CADONDON Year & Sec.: BSE – MATHEMATICS ASSIGNMENT IN Ed TC 4 THE TEACHING PROFESSION

1. Research on different Philosophies of Education. Seven are given find out more.  Reconstructionism/Critical Theory Theodore Brameld (1904-1987) was the founder of social Reconstructionism, in reaction against the realities of World War II. Social Reconstructionism is a philosophy that emphasizes the addressing of social questions and a quest to create a better society and worldwide democracy. Reconstructionist educators focus on a curriculum that highlights social reform as the aim of education. In view of Paulo Freire (1921-1997) a Brazilian, whose experiences living in poverty led him to champion education and literacy as the vehicle for social change, humans must learn to resist oppression and not become its victims, nor oppress others. To do so requires dialog and critical consciousness, the development of awareness to overcome domination and oppression. Rather than "teaching as banking," in which the educator deposits information into students' heads, Freire saw teaching and learning as a process of inquiry in which the child must invent and reinvent the world. For social Reconstructionist and critical theorists, curriculum focuses on student experience and taking social action on real problems, such as violence, hunger, international terrorism, inflation, and inequality. Strategies for dealing with controversial issues (particularly in social studies and literature), inquiry, dialogue, and multiple perspectives are the focus.  Idealism Plato, father of Idealism, espoused this view about 400 years BC, in his famous book, The Republic. He believed that there are two worlds. The first is the spiritual or mental world, which is eternal, permanent, orderly, regular, and universal. There is also the world of appearance, the world experienced through sight, touch, smell, taste, and sound that is changing imperfect, and disorderly. This division is often referred to as the duality of mind and body. Idealism is a philosophical approach that has as its central tenet that ideas are the only true reality, the only thing worth knowing. In a search for truth, beauty, and justice that is enduring and everlasting; the focus is on conscious reasoning in the mind. In idealism, the aim of education is to discover and develop each individual's abilities and full moral excellence in order to better serve society. The curricular emphasis is subject matter of mind: literature, history, philosophy, and religion. Teaching methods focus on handling ideas through lecture, discussion,

and Socratic dialogue (a method of teaching that uses questioning to help students discover and clarify knowledge). Character is developed through imitating examples and heroes.  Realism Aristotle, a student of Plato who broke with his mentor's idealist philosophy, is called the father of both Realism and the scientific method. In this metaphysical view, the aim is to understand objective reality through "the diligent and unsparing scrutiny of all observable data. He believed that to understand an object, its ultimate form had to be understood, which does not change. For example, a rose exists whether or not a person is aware of it. A rose can exist in the mind without being physically present, but ultimately, the rose shares properties with all other roses and flowers (its form), although one rose may be red and another peach colored. Realists believe that reality exists independent of the human mind. The ultimate reality is the world of physical objects. The focus is on the body/objects. Truth is objective-what can be observed. The Realist curriculum emphasizes the subject matter of the physical world, particularly science and mathematics. The teacher organizes and presents content systematically within a discipline, demonstrating use of criteria in making decisions. Teaching methods focus on mastery of facts and basic skills through demonstration and recitation. Students must also demonstrate the ability to think critically and scientifically, using observation and experimentation. Curriculum should be scientifically approached, standardized, and distinct-discipline based. Character is developed through training in the rules of conduct.  Pragmatism (Experientialism) John Dewey (1859-1952) applied pragmatist philosophy in his progressive approaches. He believed that learners must adapt to each other and to their environment. Schools should emphasize the subject matter of social experience. All learning is dependent on the context of place, time, and circumstance. Different cultural and ethnic groups learn to work cooperatively and contribute to a democratic society. The ultimate purpose is the creation of a new social order. Character development is based on making group decisions in light of consequences. Pragmatism is derived from the teaching of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839- 1914), who believed that thought must produce action, rather than linger in the mind and lead to indecisiveness. In this late 19th century American philosophy, the focus is on the reality of experience. Unlike the Realists and Rationalists, Pragmatists believe that reality is constantly changing and that we learn best through applying our experiences and thoughts to problems, as they arise. For pragmatists, only those things that are experienced or observed are real. There is no absolute and unchanging truth, but rather, truth is what works.

children are naturally curious and therefore schools should give students opportunities in their curriculum for critical inquiry, problem solving and build a worldview based on the scientific method. Dewey believed that children learn best through interaction with their environment and are capable, with adult guidance, to piece together their worldview based solely on critical interaction with the physical evidence all around them. But Dewey emphatically rejected a Theistic worldview. In fact, Dewey was one of the major writers that contributed to the Humanist Manifesto which he signed in 1933. Within this first edition of the Humanist Manifesto was language that referred to Humanism as a “religion.” The 5th of 15 Articles of Belief in the Humanist Manifesto I states, “Humanism asserts that the nature of the universe depicted by modern science makes unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values.” Dewey was a humanist and also a major contributor to the public education model still practiced widely today. But in drafting his view of how children learn best he laid his axe at the roots of theism and rejected any thought of a divine purpose for our existence. b) John Watson and Behaviourism John B. Watson is an American Psychologist who is best known for establishing the psychological school of Behaviorism. His theories, research, and work were influential to the field of psychology, and through that, he left his marks on the larger world. John B. Watson considered himself to be a behaviorist and his greatest contribution to psychology was behaviorism. He published his views on this psychological theory in 1913. The article was entitled "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It." But it is commonly considered "The Behaviorist Manifest." It outlined behaviorism as an objective branch of science that would base its theories and findings on experimental research. It also outlines a goal to predict and control animal and human behavior. With behaviorism, Watson was not particularly concerned with thought, cognition, introspection, or other forms of internal consciousness. He thought it was foolish to interpret the inner workings of the mind and believed instead psychologists should concern themselves with only what they could see. In sum, John B. Watson believed psychology should be the science of behavior rather than the mind. Watson applied his views to all parts of human behavior including language and memory. He believed language is a "manipulative habit." This term was meant to describe the human ability to manipulate the sounds made with the larynx (or "voice box"). He believed that language is conditioned (taught) just like any other behaviour, in this case through imitation. Further, certain sounds become associated with certain objects or printed shapes (words).

Simultaneously, as people learn to associate sounds with objects or symbols, they are also forming and displaying memories. Those memories are learned associations that can also be unlearned when they are no longer needed or used very frequently. When someone needs to relearn a memory, they can do so by experiencing the same pairings or similar pairings to what they initially did. Some of Watson's most influential and well-known work is his study of emotions. He was particularly interested in studying the way that emotions could be learned. He believed that emotions were merely physical responses. He also believed that rage, fear, and love were all unlearned at birth. Watson said that rage is a natural response to being constrained or forced to do something they would prefer not to. He believed love was an automatic response to pleasant sensations, whereas love towards people is conditioned because of frequent associations with those pleasant associations. c) William Bagley and Essentialism William Chandler Bagley (March 15, 1874 – July 1, 1946) was an American educator and editor. A critic of pragmatism and progressive education, he advocated educational "essentialism." Bagley published chiefly on the topics of teacher education, curriculum, philosophy of education, and educational psychology. His experience as teacher and administrator of public schools laid a strong practical foundation for his theoretical formulations regarding improvement in public education. Bagley promoted a core of traditional subjects as essential to a good education, the goal of which is the development of good citizens who will be useful to society. He believed this education should be available to all, and opposed the use of standardized tests that were biased against minority groups. At a time when schools were moving toward progressive education, Bagley's views of the importance of maintaining the authority of the teacher and principal of the school, emphasizing the importance of obedience by students to such authority, provided a strong contrast to the egalitarian views of the progressives. He regarded education as the method of passing on the knowledge of a society to the next generation. However, his view was limited to academic knowledge, rather ignoring the complex of cultural beliefs and behaviors that are commonly accepted by all members of a society, and the important role of parents in transmitting this to their children. d) Jean Paul Sartre and Existentialism The philosophical career of Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980) focuses, in its first phase, upon the construction of a philosophy of existence known as existentialism. Sartre's early works are characterized by a development of classic phenomenology, but his reflection diverges from Husserl’s on methodology, the conception of the self, and an interest in ethics. These points of divergence are the cornerstones of Sartre’s existential phenomenology, whose purpose is to understand human existence rather than the world as such. Adopting and adapting the methods of phenomenology, Sartre sets out to develop an ontological account

the study of the arts. While serving as president of the University of Chicago, Hutchins claimed, at the age of thirty two, my education began in earnest. The fore mentioned statement was in reference to a remark made by Hutchins colleague and mentor, Mortimer J. Alder. Alder suggested that a university presidents reading spans the scope of the telephone book. Alder proposed that unless Hutchins preferred being an uneducated man, he had better to something drastic. Therefore, he moved to progress his education and came to find, The liberal arts are the arts of freedom. To be free a man must understand the tradition in which he lives. A great book is one which yields up through the liberal arts a clear and important understanding of our tradition. An education which consisted of the liberal arts as understood through great books and of great books understood through the liberal arts...It must follow that if we want to educate our students for freedom, we must educate them in the liberal arts and in the great books. It was there at the University of Chicago where something drastic began. Robert Hutchins has been credited with some of the 20th century’s boldest and most influential educational reform. Hutchins believed in order to educate students for freedom, that they must be educated in the liberal arts. This belief gave way to the Chicago College Plan which consisted of a strict liberal arts curriculum at the University of Chicago. He viewed the liberal arts as indispensable for preparing for life. To Hutchins, teaching everyone to think, and to think well, was the ultimate in democratic education. Robert Hutchins played a great role in philosophy of education. His educational reform helped to define perennialism. For it was Hutchins, the ultimate perennialist and idealist, who said, Education implies teaching. Teaching implies knowledge as truth. The truth is everywhere the same. Hence, education should be everywhere the same. f) Jurgen Habermas, Hans Georg Gadamer and Linguistic Philosophy Hans-Georg Gadamer (February 11, 1900 – March 13, 2002) was a German philosopher best known for his 1960 magnum opus, Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode). In this work, Gadamer developed his theory of philosophical hermeneutics, which argued that all human understanding involves interpretation and that such interpretation is itself historically conditioned by particular cultures and languages. For this reason, dialogue and openness to others are essential to any living philosophy. Gadamer put this theory into practice in his public debates with Jürgen Habermas (1929- ) and Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics emphasized the humanities over science and so he was critical of a modern scientific view of the human being that reduced one’s knowledge of the world and human beings to an objective or methodical knowledge. Influenced by Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Gadamer came to view truth as not an objective statement about facts but rather as an event or disclosure that happens in language, which itself is historically conditioned;

thus, is all human truth likewise conditioned. This meant that all truth is finite and can never attain some objectively absolute view. Critics, therefore, accused Gadamer of falling into relativism]. Nevertheless, he remained optimistic regarding the capacity to experience truth and so be transformed by this experience. Truth, for Gadamer, was a kind of process of self-understanding and transformation as well as ongoing discovery of the world which happens in dialogue with others, or a “fusion of horizons.” The hermeneutics of Gadamer laid out a profound situation in which one's recognition of the finitude of one's perspective in dialogue paradoxically makes one capable of experiencing the truth of "a higher universality."[1] Although it deliberately avoided referring to God objectively, it actually echoes a similar dialogical approach of the "I-Thou" relation by Jewish existentialist Martin Buber (1878-1965), which brought in an experiential grasp of God. Gadamer's philosophical project was to develop the "philosophical hermeneutics," which had been inspired and initiated by Heidegger. Traditionally, hermeneutics was focused on the interpretation of written texts, particularly sacred texts such as the Bible. In the nineteenth century, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) and Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) applied a hermeneutic method to the study of the humanities. Later, Heidegger and his followers, who had also been influenced by the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), expanded hermeneutic theory so that it involved the entire human understanding of the world. Or, to put it simply, all human understandings involve some degree of interpretation. In his major work Truth and Method Gadamer further explored and developed this notion of the nature of human understanding. Truth and Method was not meant to be a programmatic statement about a new "hermeneutic" method of interpreting texts. Instead he intended the work to be a description of what people always do when they understand and interpret things (even if they are not aware of it). In particular, Gadamer emphasized the relation of human understanding and interpretation to history and language. Gadamer argued that "truth" and "method" were fundamentally at odds with each other. For human understanding in being, a form of play is more of an art than a science. Following Heidegger, Gadamer claimed that truth in its essence is not a correct proposition that adequately represents a certain factual state of affairs (for example, the statement “the dog is brown” adequately representing the real dog as being really brown). Rather truth is better understood as an event. The event is a disclosure which happens both in a concrete historical context and through the medium of language. One saying “the dog is brown” is the disclosure of an experience of the brownness of the dog. Even if people do not say the words out loud, they must, in some sense, "speak to ourselves" in the revelation of this truth. Given this view of truth, Gadamer was critical of much of modern philosophy, which tried to employ the rigorous methods of the natural sciences to

according to Gadamer, not by trying to transcend or rise above one’s historical context, culture, and tradition but by becoming more self-aware of one’s context, culture, and tradition. Gadamer's position would be able to be better appreciated, if we could see a profound paradox in it: That if one is humbly aware of how finite and limited one's own horizon is, one can find it to continually grow in the fusion of horizons, thus being able to grasp the truth better, even "rising to a higher universality that overcomes not only our own particularity but also that of the other."[4] This, in spite of its no explicit reference to God, seems to be akin to what Martin Buber calls the "I-Thou" relation, where partners of dialogue can have a glimpse into God. Truth and Method was published twice in English, and the revised edition is now considered authoritative. The German-language edition of Gadamer's Collected Works includes a volume in which Gadamer elaborates his argument and discusses the critical response to the book. Finally, Gadamer's essay on Paul Celan (entitled "Who Am I and Who Are You?") is considered by many— including Heidegger and Gadamer himself—as a "second volume" or continuation of the argument in Truth and Method. Jürgen Habermas currently ranks as one of the most influential philosophers in the world. Bridging continental and Anglo-American traditions of thought, he has engaged in debates with thinkers as diverse as Gadamer and Putnam, Foucault and Rawls, Derrida and Brandom. His extensive written work addresses topics stretching from social-political theory to aesthetics, epistemology and language to philosophy of religion, and his ideas have significantly influenced not only philosophy but also political-legal thought, sociology, communication studies, argumentation theory and rhetoric, developmental psychology and theology. Moreover, he has figured prominently in Germany as a public intellectual, commenting on controversial issues of the day in German newspapers such as Die Zeit. However, if one looks back over his corpus of work, one can discern two broad lines of enduring interest, one having to do with the political domain, the other with issues of rationality, communication, and knowledge. Habermas took a linguistic-communicative turn in Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (1981; The Theory of Communicative Action). Drawing on the work of analytic (Anglo-American) philosophers (e.g., Ludwig Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin), Continental philosophers (Horkheimer, Adorno, Edmund Husserl, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Alfred Schutz, and György Lukács), pragmatists (Peirce and G.H. Mead), and sociologists (Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Talcott Parsons, and Niklas Luhmann), he argued that human interaction in one of its fundamental forms is “communicative” rather than “strategic” in nature, insofar as it is aimed at mutual understanding and agreement rather than at the achievement of the self-interested goals of individuals. Such understanding and agreement, however, are possible only to the extent that the

communicative interaction in which individuals take part resists all forms of nonrational coercion. The notion of an “ideal communication community” functions as a guide that can be formally applied both to regulate and to critique concrete speech situations. Using this regulative and critical ideal, individuals would be able to raise, accept, or reject each other’s claims to truth, rightness, and sincerity solely on the basis of the “unforced force” of the better argument—i.e., on the basis of reason and evidence—and all participants would be motivated solely by the desire to obtain mutual understanding. Although the ideal communication community is never perfectly realized (which is why Habermas appeals to it as a regulative or critical ideal rather than as a concrete historical community), the projected horizon of unconstrained communicative action within it can serve as a model of free and open public discussion within liberal- democratic societies. Likewise, this type of regulative and critical ideal can serve as a justification of deliberative liberal-democratic political institutions, because it is only within such institutions that unconstrained communicative action is possible. Liberal democracy is not a guarantee that communicative rationality will flourish, however. Indeed, in modern capitalist societies, social institutions that ideally should be communicative in character—e.g., family, politics, and education—have come to embody a merely “strategic” rationality, according to Habermas. Such institutions are increasingly overrun by economic and bureaucratic forces that are guided not by an ideal of mutual understanding but rather by principles of administrative power and economic efficiency. Habermas’s findings carried wide-ranging normative implications. In Moralbewusstsein und kommunikatives Handeln (1983; Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action), he elaborated a general theory of “discourse ethics,” or “communicative ethics,” which concerns the ethical presuppositions of ideal communication that would have to be invoked in an ideal communication community. In a series of lectures published as Philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (1985; The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity), Habermas defended from postmodern criticism the Enlightenment ideal of normative rationality and specifically the ideal that unconstrained communication is guided by reasons that can be rejected or redeemed by speakers and hearers as true, right, or sincere. Habermas was criticized by both the postmodern left and the neoconservative right for his trust in the power of rational discussion to resolve major domestic and international conflicts. While some critics found his normative critical theory—as applied to areas such as education, morality, and law—to be dangerously Eurocentric, others decried its utopian, radically democratic, or left-liberal character. He was criticized by Marxists and by feminist and race theorists for abandoning socialism or for allegedly giving up on vigorous criticism of social injustice and oppression. For some representatives of antiglobalization social movements, even Habermas’s left-leaning political liberalism and deliberative democratic reformism were inadequate to address the