In this psychology assignment we will answer questions on basic theories of education, all based in four distinct philosophies of education. Q1: What would classrooms adopting each of these philosophies look like?

Theories of education

Paper details: Please answer each of the questions in paragraph form, single spaced. The answers can be found in the book How Children Learn (link below, just need to find the PDF through the list). Below is assignment description. Consider four basic theories of education, all based in four distinct philosophies of education. It is now time to make this explicit and take it a step further. So far we have: Idealism: knowledge comes from within (intuitive/Plato/God) Empiricism: knowledge is the passive absorbing of information (Locke) Constructivism (Piagetian):  Knowledge is active construction and problem solving Social Constructivism (Vygotsky): Knowledge is the active internalization of cultural tools.

Theories of education

How do these apply to education? Q1: What would classrooms adopting each of these philosophies look like? If we looked around schools today we would probably see one variant dominate the others and that would be empiricism. We see it in testing, textbooks, lecturing, etc. Q2: Why do you suppose empiricism is the most widespread? Is this a good or bad thing?  Q3: He writes, if we taught children to speak they’d never learn. What does this mean? Q4: Do children “learn” to speak (or walk or joke) or do they create speaking? What is the difference?

He cites Bruner making the point that much of school is about making children feel like things they thought they knew perfectly well, they never really did.

Theories of education

Q5: Give an example of this. In school we believe that first one must learn the boring stuff (we call that the basics) and then one is ready for the interesting stuff (usually in Graduate School!). But oddly, that would never work for us in the world. If I am passionate about baseball but you forced me to memorize players statistics before I could actually watch the game, my passion would likely never endure. Q6: Give an example of something you learned recently where you felt passion. In what order did you engage it? On page 179 he talks about our naïve delusion around explanations. We teachers love to explain but it mostly doesn’t work!

Theories of education

Q7: what does mean? Give an example. Q8: Later he talks about “gaps” in our knowledge as motivators. What does he mean? In her article, Donaldson also argues that schools confuse children. Q9: What is the thrust of her argument? In the seven lesson school teacher Gatto argues that there is a hidden curriculum in education. Q10: What does he mean? Do you agree. Finally, we once again encounter Neil Postman. This time he will offer us an alternative to the four models of education we already encountered. We can create an education about language. https://youtu.be/TZdIvroEKPA

Theories of education

Who gets to define the words we use? Where do those definitions come from? Who benefits from those definitions? How do metaphors shape our understanding of reality? And finally, by what means was this knowledge delivered to us and how did this change the nature of that knowledge. Discussion: Let’s practice a critical education. Pick a topic that interests you, a real topic, not the boring topics we cover in our classroom. Something you are passionate that your students should know about. What are the words that this area depends on? Where do the definitions of these words come from?

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