Education reform Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Education reform is a broad variety of movements, programs, and recomendations that have been put forward in the interest of improving education.Often these reforms are motivated by a desire for better policy. In democratic societies, many authorities believe that the quality of governance depends on the ability of citizens to make informed, intelligent choices. For example, Thomas Jefferson advocated ambitious reforms for public schooling in Virginia. Politically-motivated educational reforms are recorded as far back as Plato, whose book The Republic dealt largely with the education of Greek youth.
Other reforms address socio-economic problems. Small improvements in education may have large social returns, in health, wealth and well-being. For example, in Kerala, India, women's health was substantially improved when female literacy rates improved in the 1950s. Literacy makes large amounts of health information available. In Iran, primary education in the countryside increased farming efficiencies and income. Farmers gained reliable access to national crop prices and scientific farming information.
Reforms come in all shapes, sizes, and orientations; there are conservative, liberal, and progressive reforms, reforms that push towards content and reforms that push towards process, etc.
Classical education has weaknesses that inspired reformers. In western civilization, classical education has an unbroken history from the early Roman Empire to date. It is among the oldest continuous educational traditions in existence. It is based on ancient western philosophies of education, as well as a continuous empirical tradition of teaching.
Classical education is most concerned with answering the "who, what, when, where" and "how" questions that concern a majority of students. Unless carefully taught, group instruction naturally neglects the theoretical "why" and "which" questions that strongly concern a minority of students.
Young children with short attention spans often enjoy repetition, but only if the subject is changed every few minutes. Skilled, compassionate primary classical teachers (always a rare breed, now nearly nonexistent) have always changed subjects continually and rapidly. Unskilled, or unkind classical teachers have drilled the joy of learning right out of young heads. (For more information, read "Marva Collins' Way" by Marva Collins, a gifted teacher using classical methods.)
Some people can regurgitate words and yet never understand what they mean in the real world. This was terribly common among classically-educated scholars.
Classical education can also be expensive, difficult and boring.
Reforms have taken three tracks.
One is to reduce the expense of a classical education. Ideally, classical education is undertaken with a highly-educated full-time (extremely expensive) personal tutor. Historically, a large number of princes and noblemen have been educated this way, starting with Alexander the Great, who was tutored by Aristotle.
Another track of reform attempts to develop the same results as a classical education with less effort, by concentrating on neglected "why" and "which" questions, which theoretically can compress large amounts of facts into relatively few principles.
Another track focuses on bringing educational topics into a concrete focus, so that the students develop skills that they can use in the real world. In these reforms, book-learning is de-emphasized in favor of real-world experience. A rather insulting sub-text of many such reformers is to imply that average persons cannot profit from theory, or information irrelevant to their every-day tasks.
A final track of reform has been to form and maintain a group's cultural and national identity. This was begun in the great waves of nationalism that began sweeping Europe in the 1800s, and many nations retain an awareness of this issue.
The low-cost reforms were pioneered by Protestant church schools in Europe and the New world in the 1800s. These compassionately tried to develop the most valuable education for the least cost. When these succeeded, governments and the Roman Catholic church rapidly developed similar programs and implemented them on a huge scale, world-wide.
The basic program was to develop "grammar" schools. These taught only the grammar phase of the trivium and bookkeeping. This program permits people to start businesses to make money, and gives them the skills to continue their education inexpensively from books. "Grammar" was the first third of the then-prevalent system of Classical education.
If a society plans to educate its populace to the highest standards using grammar schools, it needs a system of free lending libraries. Libraries allow adults to complete their educations. Free lending libraries are conspicuously absent in most countries other than the U.S.
Ideally such a system would be supplemented with debate societies, so people can learn critical thinking and logic.
The ultimate development of the grammar school was by Joseph Lancaster, who started as an impoverished Quaker in early 19th century London. Lancaster used slightly more-advanced students to teach less-advanced students, achieving student-teacher ratios as small as 2, while educating more than a thousand students per adult. Lancaster promoted his system in a piece called Improvements in Education that spread widely throughout the English-speaking world.
Discipline and labour in a Lancaster school were provided by an economic system. Scrip, a form of money meaningless outside the school, was created at a fixed exchange rate from a student's tuition. Every job of the school was bid-for by students in scrip. The highest bid won. The jobs permitted students to collect scrip from other students for services rendered. However, any student tutor could auction positions in his or her classes. Besides tutoring, students could use script to buy food, school supplies, books, and childish luxuries in a school store. The adult supervisors were paid from the bids on jobs.
With fully-developed internal economies, Lancaster schools provided a frighteningly (this used advisedly) good grammar-school education for a cost per student near $40 per year in 1999 U.S. dollars. The students were very clever at reducing their costs, and once invented, improvements were widely adopted in a school. For example, Lancaster students, motivated to save scrip, ultimately rented individual pages of textbooks from the school library, and read them in groups around music stands to reduce textbook costs. Exchanges of tutoring, and using receipts from "down tutoring" to pay for "up tutoring" were commonplace.
Established educational elites found Lancaster schools so threatening that most English-speaking countries developed mandatory publicly-paid education explicitly to keep public education in "responsible" hands. These elites said that Lancaster schools might become dishonest, provide poor education and were not accountable to established authorities. Lancaster's supporters responded that any schoolchild could avoid cheats, given the opportunity, and that the government was not paying for the educations, and thus deserved no say in their composition.
Lancaster schools have obvious application to impoverished societies. Lancaster, though motivated by charity, claimed in his pamphlets to be surprised to find that he lived well on the income of his school, even while the low costs made it available to the poorest street-children.
Ironically, Lancaster lived on the charity of friends in his later life.
The next swing of reform attempted to teach things of fundamental physical importance first, so that students would be capable in the real world. Usually, this meant farming, literally from the ground up, combined with ethical education from first principles. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's book on this is "Emile." H. D. Thoreau's "Walden" and reform essays in the mid-19th century were influential also (see the anthology "Uncommon Learning: Henry David Thoreau on Education," Boston, 1999). For a look at Transcendentalist life, read Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women." Her father, Bronson Alcott, a close friend of Thoreau's, pioneered progressive education for young people as early as the 1830s. (See Laurie James, "Outrageous Questions: Legacy of Bronson Alcott and America's One-Room Schools," New York, 1994.)
The transcendental education movement failed, because only the most gifted students ever equaled the skills of their classically-educated teachers. These students would, of course, succeed in any educational regime. Accounts seem to indicate that the students were happy, but often pursued classical education later in life.
Maria Montessori, an Italian doctor educated in Rome, best realized the ideals of the transcendental movement. She tried to provide for the needs of children at each stage of their development, by carefully observing and meeting the needs of the actual children. In another view, she provided rewarding activities to lure children to practice skills on their own, as soon as they were able. Her books include "The Montessori Method" (1912) and "The Advanced Montessori Method" (1917). Unlike many successful educators, M. Montessori successfully taught others to emulate her methods, which are now widely available.
John Dewey, a philosopher and educator, influenced most modern education. An important member of the American "pragmatist" movement, he believed that a person's intellect would grow by acquiring experience. People would thereby analyze new situations and synthesize more inclusive and accurate understandings of the real world. These would let a person reconstruct a complete story about a situation from fragmentary information. In this way, educated people would respond more accurately to real-world situations and better achieve their goals.
Dewey criticized the rigidity and volume of classical education, and the emotional idealizations of transcendental education. He presented his educational theories as the science-based synthesis of the two views. His slogan was that schools should encourage children to "Learn by doing." He wanted people to realize that children are naturally active and curious. Dewey's understanding of logic is best presented in his "Logic, the Theory of Inquiry" (1938). His educational theories were presented in "My Pedagogic Creed," "The School and Society," "The Child and Curriculum," and (if you read just one, read this one) "Democracy and Education" (1916). It might be instructive to note that Dewey left the University of Chicago in 1904 over issues relating to the Dewey School. After this, he taught at Columbia's Teacher's College.
Jean Piaget, Isabel Myers, and Katherine Briggs seem to have collectively driven the nails into the coffin of Deweyism as it is usually practiced.
Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist who studied people's developmental stages. He showed by replicated experiments that most young children do not analyze or synthesize as Dewey expected. This means that Dewey's reforms are inapplicable to the primary education of young children.
Katherine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Myers developed a psychological test that reliably identifies sixteen distinct human temperaments, building on work by Jung. A wide class of temperaments (half by category, 60% of the general population) prefer sensory modalities to intuitive modalities.
In terms of education, this means that most people prefer to learn answers to concrete "Who, what, when, where," and "how" questions, rather than theoretical "which" and "why" questions.
Preference in this case means that most people do not use non-concrete information. This means that 60% of the target population only use, and therefore want to learn, facts, not principles.
This information was confirmed (on another research track) by Jean Piaget, who discovered that nearly 60% of adults never habitually use what he called "formal operational reasoning," a term for the development and use of theories and explicit logic.
That is, Dewey schools, or -any- schools that teach -principles- will fail to educate 60% of the general population.
Dewyism has failed in primary education in the U.S.
The ability to learn a new language seems connected in some way with the age of the learner.
Since most modern schools copy the Prussian models, children start school at an age when their language skills remain plastic, and they find it easy to learn the national language. This was an intentional design on the part of the Prussians. The primary purpose of Kindergarten was to have the children spend time in supervised activities in the national language, when the children were very well able to learn new language skills.
In the U.S. over the last twenty years, more than 70% of non-English-speaking school-age immigrants have arrived in the U.S. before they were 6 years old. At this age, they could have been taught English in school, and achieved a proficiency indistinguishable from a native speaker. In other countries, this approach has dramatically improved reading and math test scores.
Some of the methods and reforms seem to work, and certain weaknesses can be identified.
First, anything that more precisely meets the needs of the child will work better. This is the great lesson from M. Montessori.
The teaching method must be teachable! This is a lesson from both Montessori and Dewey. The transcendentalists failed here.
New programs based on modern learning theories should be quantitatively investigated for effectiveness. A notable reform of the education system of Massachusetts occurred in 1997.
It might be wise to base conservative programs on classical education, which reliably teaches valuable skills to the majority of Myers-Briggs temperaments, by teaching facts.
Programs that test individual learning, and teach to mastery of a subject have been proven by the state of Kentucky to be far more effective than group instruction with compromise schedules, or even class-size reduction.
Schools with limited resources can use a grammar-school-only approach, using students as teachers. If the culture supports it, perhaps the economic discipline of the Lancaster school can reduce costs even further. However, much of the success of Lancaster's "school economy" was that the children were natives of an intensely mercantile culture.
In order to be effective, classroom instruction needs to change subjects at times near a typical student's attention span, which can be as frequently as every two minutes for young children. This is one of the tricks that seems to help Marva Collins teach. The other is a genuine love of students-- which cannot be trained, and therefore must be selected-for.
The Myers-Briggs temperaments fall into four broad categories, each sufficiently different to justify completely different educational theories. It might be socially profitable to test and target these temperaments with special curricula.
Some of the Myers-Briggs temperaments are known to despise educational material that lacks theory. Therefore, effective curricula need to raise and answer "which" and "why" questions, to teach students with "intuitive" (Myers-Briggs) modalities.
Philosophers identify independent, logical reasoning as a precondition to most western science, engineering, economic and political theory. Therefore, every educational program that desires to improve students' outcomes in political, health and economic behavior should include a Socratically-taught set of classes to teach logic and critical thinking.
Another valuable reform is to permit students to test out of classes. This saves resources, increases motivation, directs individual study, and reduces boredom and disciplinary problems.
To support inexpensive continuing adult education a community needs a free public library. It can start modestly as shelves in an attended shop or government building, with donated books. Attendants are essential to protect the books from vandalism. Adult education repays itself many times over by providing direct opportunity to adults. Free libraries are also powerful resources for schools and businesses.
See also educational philosophies.
In other parts of the world, educational reform has had a number of different meanings. In Taiwan in the 1990s and 2000s a movement tried to prioritize reasoning over mere facts, reduce the emphasis on central control and standardized testing. There was consensus on the problems. Efforts were limited because there was little consensus on the goals of educational reforms, and therefore on how to fix the problems. By 2003, the push for education reform had declined.
This is an Article on Education reform. Page Contains Information, Facts Details or Explanation Guide About Education reform Reforms of classical education
Cost reduction
Teaching by experience: Progressivism
National Identity
Notable reforms
Education reformers
Ivan Illich, John GattoEducation reform in specific nations
Educational Reform in Taiwan
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