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CHAPTER 6: Philosophical Roots of Education
6-7c Application to Schools and Classrooms
FOCUS What elements of essentialism appeal to you as a teacher? Which appeal least? Why? Are there elements of essentialism you plan to incorporate into your philosophy of education?
For essentialists, the purpose of education is to transmit and maintain the necessary fundamentals of human culture. Schools have the specific mission of transmitting essential human skills and subjects to the young to preserve and pass them on to future generations.41 As effective professional educators, teachers should (1) adhere to a carefully structured curriculum of basic skills and subjects; (2) inculcate traditional Western and American values of patriotism, hard work, effort, punctuality, respect for authority, and civility; (3) manage classrooms efficiently, effectively, and fairly as spaces of discipline and order; and (4) promote students on the basis of academic achievement, not social considerations. Essentialist teachers would use deductive logic to organize instruction. They first teach basic concepts and factual information, and then they lead students to make generalizations based upon that knowledge. Consider a high school American history class studying the controversy between the two African American leaders, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. First, the teacher assigns primary sources such as Washington’s Up from Slavery and Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. (Washington and Du Bois are discussed in Chapter 5, Historical Development of American Education.) Then she leads a discussion in which the students, based on their reading and research, carefully identify Washington’s and Du Bois’s differences in background, education, and policy. After such teacher-guided research and discussion, the students develop generalizations about why Washington and Du Bois acted as they did and assess their influence in African American and US history.
6-8 Perennialism perennialism An educational theory that emphasizes rationality as the major purpose of education, asserting that the essential truths are recurring and universally true. Proponents generally favor a curriculum consisting of the language arts, literature, and mathematics at the elementary level, followed by the classics, especially the “great books,” at the secondary and higher levels.
Perennialism shares many features with essentialism, such as using subject matter to transmit the cultural heritage across generations. It differs, however, in that perennialism is derived from the realist philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas, while essentialism is based more on what has worked as a survival skill throughout history. (For more on Aristotle and Aquinas, see Chapter 3, The World Origins of American Education.) Perennialism asserts that education, like the truth it conveys, needs to be universal and authentic during every period of history and in every place and culture. Neither truth, nor education, is relative to time, place, or circumstances. Education’s primary purpose is to bring each new generation in contact with truth by exercising and cultivating the rationality each person possesses as a human being. Perennialist epistemology contends that due to their common human nature, people possess a potentiality to know and a desire to find the truth. This potentiality is activated when students come in contact with humankind’s highest achievements, especially the great books and the classics in art, music, and literature. Truth exists in and is portrayed in the classic, or enduring, works of art, literature, philosophy, science, and history created by earlier generations and passed on to succeeding generations as a cultural inheritance. Perennialism, derived heavily from realism, is also congenial to idealism. However, leading perennialists such as Jacques Maritain, Robert Hutchins, and Mortimer Adler based their educational theories on Aristotle’s and Thomas Aquinas’s realism. For them, the school’s primary role is to develop students’ rationality. They oppose turning schools into multipurpose agencies, especially economic ones that emphasize vocational training. Although perennialists understand the need for vocational skills and competencies, they believe that business and industry can provide up-to-date job
Diane Ravitch, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), pp. 465–467.
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