Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Education A Biographical Introduction

Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Education: A Biographical Introductiondeveloped from my more than three decades of teaching the history and philosophy of education at Loyola University Chicago and as a visiting professor at Northern Michigan University, Otterbein College, and the University of Glasgow in Scotland. Over time, the identification of the biographies and development of the chapters were stimulated by discussions with my students. The book reflects my belief that educational biography is a valuable, powerful, but too-often neglected medium for preparing teachers, administrators, and other professionals in education. I hope the book's fourth edition will continue to focus more attention on the use of educational biography in professional education programs. Organization and Coverage As the book's title indicates, I have organized its contents around three broad themes: major movements in world history, the biographies of leading educators, and the philosophies and ideologies that came from their ideas. As a historian, I have been intrigued by the interaction of individuals in their historical contexts and how they create meaning from their transaction with the cultural situation of living at a given time and place. As a teacher of the history and philosophy of education, I decided to organize the book around the major movements in world and western history: the age of Confucius in ancient China, the classical periods of ancient Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, the age of revolution, the foundations of the United States, the Industrial Revolution, the rise of ideologies, the progressive movement, the end of imperialism in the postcolonial world, the rise of African American consciousness, and the development of liberation pedagogy. This kind of periodization around broad historical currents helped me to construct a cognitive map on which I could locate people and events and give myself a perspective on the past. However, I also determined that this kind of periodization should not simply be chronological but should be enlivened by lives that represented the efforts, the trials and errors, and achievements of those who shaped the history and philosophy of education. My interest in biography--the stories of lives--provided a means to give the great movements of educational history a personal face. Biography enables us to see ourselves through the lives of others. For each of the great movements in history, I identified an important contributor to educational philosophy and method. For ancient China, there was Confucius, an educator whose philosophy exerted a powerful force on Asian culture; for ancient Greece and Rome, there were Plato, the founder of idealism; Aristotle, the founder of realism; and Quintilian, an exemplary teacher of rhetoric. Medieval Christianity was epitomized by the great theologian Thomas Aquinas. Erasmus was the ideal representative of Renaissance humanism. John Calvin and Johann Amos Comenius represented two different ways of interpreting the educational changes produced by the Protestant Reformation. For the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment eras, the figures of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi stood out in bold relief. For the age of revolution and republicanism three persons--Thomas Jefferson, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Horace Mann--were leading characters. Jefferson made the intellectual connection between the Enlightenment's rationalism and the republican impulse in North America. Mary Wollstonecraft undertook a revolution for women's rights. Horace Mann was a strong voice for creating public education for the new American republic. Educational responses to the Industrial and Darwinian revolutions came from such theorists as Robert Owen, a utopian socialist; John Stuart Mill, a liberal; and Herbert Spencer, a social Darwinist.Gutek, Gerald Lee is the author of 'Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Education A Biographical Introduction', published 2004 under ISBN 9780131138094 and ISBN 013113809X.