Influence on Educational Practices Today

FOCUS How did Spencer borrow ideas from Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution? Do you think his emphasis on competition and applied knowledge, such as engineering and technology is appropriate today? In your educational experience, were there teachers who used Spencer’s principles? Do you plan to include Spencer’s ideas in your teaching? as applied technology and engineering. Today, he would probably include computer literacy, genetics, and bioengineering in his list of useful subjects.

Developing a rationale used in modern curriculum making, Spencer ranked activities according to the degree that they promoted health, positive social relationships, and economic productivity. He gave science a high priority because individuals could apply it to all of their activities.28 For example, sciences such as anatomy and physiology explain human growth, especially physical development. Scientific information about nutrition can be applied to a healthy diet. Spencer identified five types of activities to be used in constructing the curriculum: (1) self-preservation activities needed to perform all other activities; (2) occupational or professional activities that enable a person to earn a living; (3) child-rearing activities; (4) social and political participation activities; and (5) leisure and recreation activities.

4-6c influence on educational Practices Today

American educators were highly receptive to Spencer’s ideas. In 1918, a National Education Association committee, in its landmark Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, reiterated Spencer’s list of basic life activities. Contemporary curriculum designers continue to use Spencer’s rationale when they organize the curriculum on human needs and activities.

Although social Darwinism dominated American social science and education in the late nineteenth century, John Dewey’s experimentalism and progressive reform, which is discussed in the next section, eclipsed it in the early twentieth century. Key social Darwinist ideas reemerged in the 1980s and still continue in the contemporary neoliberal conservative educational agenda, which favors providing vouchers to attend private schools, reducing government’s regulatory powers, and an emphasis on teaching market-driven basic skills to increase economic productivity. The standardized testing required in the NCLB (in the Bush administration) and The Race to the Top (RTTT) program (in the Obama administration) uses competition between schools to identify achieving and failing schools and teachers.

Spencer would raise entry standards for students seeking admission to preservice teacher-education programs to make them more competitive. Only the brightest applicants were accepted. The programs would stress science and technology. Ending tenure, teaching would be competitive, with competent teachers replacing incompetent ones, and merit pay would be used in teacher compensation.

28Michael Taylor, Philosophy of Herbert Spencer (New York: Continuum, 2007).

1896 Publishes Synthetic Philosophy

1903 Death