Philosophical Thoughts
on Education
Chapter 1
Learning Objectives:
• Identify the significant educational
philosophies each philosopher
contributed.
• Relate the philosophical thoughts to
the application of teaching and
learning.
Philosophical Thoughts on Education
Helps you realize:
• Building interpersonal relationship and
• Engaging in reflection and meaningful
discourse during the teaching –
learning process.
Isolated Facts and Banking Method
Banking Method
• Traditional approach in teaching
• Store and remember information by
teachers
• Empty receptacles of learning
• World is seen as static and unchangeable
and students should fit in it as it is.
Isolated Facts
• Facts are important
• Mile wide inch deep kind of learning
• However, with this banking system in
education there is too much teaching, not
enough learning.
John Locke: The empiricist Education
EMPIRICISM
- The knowledge of the world is based on sense-experience.
• Acquire knowledge about the world through the senses – learning
by doing and by interacting with the environment.
• He believed that child was born as Tabula rasa “Blank Slate”
• INDUCTIVE METHOD
• Education is not acquisition of knowledge contained in the great
books.
• Learners learn from experiences and they are agents of their own
learning.
Herbert Spencer: Utilitarian Education
UTILITARIANISM:
- This Philosophy aims to educate students to be
useful individuals in the society.
• SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
• He did not believe in the public school system, his
major criticism of the school system was that it did
not prepare children to live in society.
• School must be related to life and to the activities
needed to earn a living.
• Science and other subjects that sustained human life
and prosperity should have curricular priority since it
aids in the performance of life activities.
• Individual competition leads to social progress. He
who is fittest survives. (Ornstein, 1984)
• He believed that people in an industrialized society
needed a utilitarian education in order to learn
useful scientific skills and subjects.
John Dewey: Learning through experience
• Education is a social process and schools are related
to the society that it serves.
• Since a school is a social agency – its main function is
to shape human character and behavior.
• Schools are for the people and by the people.
• Students learn best when they are the center of the
education process.
• Dewey did not disregard the wisdom of the past.
Presentation Title
George Counts: Building a new social order
• Schools and teachers should be agents of change of social
improvement.
• Reiterated that everyone should aim for change for the
better not just for the sake of change.
• Schools should provide quality education and equal
learning opportunities to all students.
• The best teaching method is problem solving.
• “Material progress is very evident but moral and ethical
development seemed to have lagged behind”
• Building a new social order is indeed necessary.
Theodore Bameld: Social Reconstructionism
• Social Reconstructionist – “the only goal of a truly human
education is to create a world order in which people are in
control their own destiny.
• School, then, should enlighten students as regards social
problem, exposed them and engage them actively in
problem solving.
• Everyone must be given equal access to education and any
form of discrimination should be eliminated.
• Emphasized the right of all citizens to free education.
Presentation Title
Paulo Friere: Critical Pedagogy
• Believed that systems must be changed to overcome
oppression and improved human condition.
• Education and literacy are the vehicles for social
change.
• Teaching and learning as a process of inquiry in
which the child must invent and reinvent the world.
• Teachers must not see themselves a sole possessors
of knowledge and their students as empty
receptacles.
• Friere’s critical pedagogy is problem – posing education
wherein the central element is dialogue.
• Dialogue is the basis for critical and problem – posing
pedagogy, as opposed to banking education, where there is
no discussion, only the imposition of the teacher’s idea on
the students.
