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Changing Role of Teacher Education developed from the human struggle for survival and enlightenment. It may be formal or informal. Informal education refers to the general social process by which human beings acquire the knowledge and skills needed to function in their culture. Formal education refers to the process by which teachers instruct students in courses of study within institutions. Before the invention of reading and writing, people lived in an environment in which they struggled to survive against natural forces, animals, and other humans. To survive, preliterate people developed skills that grew into cultural and educational patterns.
For a particular groups culture to continue into the future, people had to transmit it, or pass it on, from adults to children. The earliest educational processes involved sharing information about gathering food and providing shelter; making weapons and other tools; learning language; and acquiring the values, behavior, and religious rites or practices of a given culture. Through direct, informal education, parents, elders, and priests taught children the skills and roles they would need as adults. These lessons eventually formed the moral codes that governed behavior. Since they lived before the invention of writing, preliterate people used an oral tradition, or story telling, to pass on their culture and history from one generation to the next. By using language, people learned to create and use symbols, words, or signs to express their ideas.
When these symbols grew into pictographs and letters, human beings created a written language and made the great cultural leap to literacy. The invention of the printing press in the mid- 15 th century made books more widely available and increased literacy rates. But school attendance did not increase greatly during the Renaissance. Elementary schools educated middle-class children while lower-class children received little, if any, formal schooling. Children of the nobility and upper classes attended humanist secondary schools. Educational opportunities for women improved slightly during the Renaissance, especially for the upper classes.
Some girls from wealthy families attended schools of the royal court or received private lessons at home. The curriculum studied by young women was still based on the belief that only certain subjects, such as art, music, needlework, dancing, and poetry, were suited for females. For working-class girls, especially rural peasants, education was still limited to training in household duties such as cooking and sewing. The religious Reformation of the 16 th century marked a decline in the authority of the Catholic Church and contributed to the emergence of the middle classes in Europe. Protestant religious reformers, such as John Calvin, Martin Luther, and Huldreich Zwingli, rejected the authority of the Catholic pope and created reformed Christian, or Protestant, churches.
In their ardent determination to instruct followers to read the Bible in their native language, reformers extended literacy to the masses. They established vernacular primary schools that offered a basic curriculum of reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion for children in their own language. Vernacular schools in England, for example, used English to teach their pupils. As they argued with each other and with the Roman Catholics on religious matters, Protestant educators wrote catechisms primary books that summarized their religious doctrine in a question and answer format. While the vernacular schools educated both boys and girls at the primary level, upper-class boys attended preparatory and secondary schools that continued to emphasize Latin and Greek. The gymnasium in Germany, the Latin grammar school in England, and the locke in France were preparatory schools that taught young men the classical languages of Latin and Greek required to enter universities.
Martin Luther believed the state, family, and school, along with the church, were leaders of the Reformation. Since the family shaped childrens character, Luther encouraged parents to teach their children reading and religion. Each family should pray together, read the Bible, study the catechism, and practice a useful trade. Luther believed that government should assist schools in educating literate, productive, and religious citizens. One of Luthers colleagues, German religious reformer Melanchthon, wrote the school code for the German region of Wurttemberg, which became a model for other regions of Germany and influenced education throughout Europe. According to this code, the government was responsible for supervising schools and licensing teachers.
The Protestant reformers retained the dual-class school system that had developed in the Renaissance. Vernacular schools provided primary instruction for the lower classes, and the various classical humanist and Latin grammar schools prepared upper-class males for higher education. The work of English philosopher John Locke influenced education in Britain and North America. Locke examined how people acquire ideas in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). He asserted that at birth the human mind is a blank slate, or tabula rasa, and empty of ideas. We acquire knowledge, he argued, from the information about the objects in the world that our senses bring to us.
We begin with simple ideas and then combine them into more complex ones. Locke believed that individuals acquire knowledge most easily when they first consider simple ideas and then gradually combine them into more complex ones. In Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1697), Locke recommended practical learning to prepare people to manage their social, economic, and political affairs efficiently. He believed that a sound education began in early childhood and insisted that the teaching of reading, writing, and arithmetic be gradual and cumulative.
Locke's curriculum included conversational learning of foreign languages, especially French, mathematics, history, physical education, and games. The Age of Enlightenment in the 18 th century produced important changes in education and educational theory. During the Enlightenment, also called the Age of Reason, educators believed people could improve their lives and society by using their reason, their powers of critical thinking. The Enlightenment's ideas had a significant impact on the American Revolution (1775 - 1783) and early educational policy in the United States. In particular, American philosopher and scientist Benjamin Franklin emphasized the value of utilitarian and scientific education in American schools. Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, stressed the importance of civic education to the citizens of a democratic nation.
The Enlightenment principles that considered education as an instrument of social reform and improvement remain fundamental characteristics of American education policy. The foundations of modern education were established in the 19 th century. Swiss educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, inspired by the work of French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, developed an educational method based on the natural world and the senses. Pestalozzi established schools in Switzerland and Germany to educate children and train teachers. He affirmed that schools should resemble secure and loving homes. German educator Friedrich Froebel created the earliest kindergarten, a form of preschool education that literally means childs garden in German.
Froebel, who had an unhappy childhood, urged teachers to think back to their own childhoods to find insights they could use in their teaching. Froebel studied at Pestalozzi's institute in Y verdon, Switzerland, from 1808 to 1810. While agreeing with Pestalozzi's emphasis on the natural world, a kindly school atmosphere, and the object lesson, Froebel felt that Pestalozzi's method was not philosophical enough. Froebel believed that every childs inner self contained a spiritual essence spark of divine energy that enabled a child to learn independently.
In 1837 Froebel opened a kindergarten in Blankenburg with a curriculum that featured songs, stories, games, gifts, and occupations. The songs and stories stimulated the imaginations of children and introduced them to folk heroes and cultural values. Games developed childrens social and physical skills. By playing with each other, children learned to participate in a group. Froebel's gifts, including such objects as spheres, cubes, and cylinders, were designed to enable the child to understand the concept that the object represented.
Occupations consisted of materials children could use in building activities. For example, clay, sand, cardboard, and sticks could be used to build castles, cities, and mountains. Immigrants from Germany brought the kindergarten concept to the United States, where it became part of the American school system. Margaret Meyer Schurz opened a German-language kindergarten in Watertown, Wisconsin, in 1855. Elizabeth Peabody established an English-language kindergarten and a training school for kindergarten teachers in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1860. William Torrey Harris, superintendent of schools in St.
Louis, Missouri, and later a U. S. commissioner of education, made the kindergarten part of the American public school system. In the 19 th century, governments in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, and other European countries organized national systems of public education. The United States, Canada, Argentina, Uruguay, and other countries in North and South America also established national education systems based largely on European models. The Church of England and other churches often operated primary schools in the United Kingdom, where students paid a small fee to study the Bible, catechism, reading, writing, and arithmetic.
In 1833 the British Parliament passed a law that gave some government funds to these schools. In 1862 the United Kingdom established a school grant system, called payment by results, in which schools received funds based on their students performance on reading, writing, and arithmetic tests. The Education Act of 1870, called the Forster Act, authorized local government boards to establish public board schools. The United Kingdom then had two schools systems: board schools operated by the government and voluntary schools conducted by the churches and other private organizations. In 1878 the United Kingdom passed laws that limited child labor in factories and made it possible for more children to attend school.
To make schooling available to working-class children, many schools with limited public and private funds used monitorial methods of instruction. Monitorial education, developed by British educators Joseph Lancaster and Andrew Bell, used student monitors to conduct lessons. It offered the fledgling public education system the advantage of allowing schools to hire fewer teachers to instruct the large number of new students. Schools featuring monitorial education used older boys, called monitors, who were more advanced in their studies, to teach younger children. Monitorial education concentrated on basic skills reading, writing, and arithmetic that were broken down into small parts or units. After a monitor had learned a unit such as spelling words of two or three letters that began with the letter And would, under the master teachers supervision, teach this unit to a group of students.
By the end of the 19 th century, the monitorial system was abandoned in British schools because it provided a very limited education. Russian tsar Alexander II initiated education reforms leading to the Education Statute of 1864. This law created zemstvos, local government units, which operated primary schools. In addition to zemstvo schools, the Russian Orthodox Church conducted parish schools. While the number of children attending school slowly increased, most of Russias population remained illiterate. Peasants often refused to send their children to school so that they could work on the farms.
More boys attended school than girls since many peasant parents considered female education unnecessary. Fearing that too much education would make people discontented with their lives, the tsars government provided only limited schooling to instill political loyalty and religious piety. Before the 19 th century elementary and secondary education in the United States was organized on a local or regional level. Nearly all schools operated on private funds exclusively. However, beginning in the 1830 s and 1840 s, American educators such as Henry Barnard and Horace Mann argued for the creation of a school system operated by individual states that would provide an equal education for all American children. In 1852 Massachusetts passed the first laws calling for free public education, and by 1918 all U.
S. states had passed compulsory school attendance laws. See Public Education in the United States. At the beginning of the 20 th century, the writings of Swedish feminist and educator Ellen Key influenced education around the world. Keys book Barnet's arhundrade (1900; The Century of the Child, 1909) was translated into many languages and inspired so-called progressive educators in various countries. Progressive education was a system of teaching that emphasized the needs and potentials of the child, rather than the needs of society or the principles of religion.
Among the influential progressive educators were Hermann List and Georg Michael Kerschensteiner of Germany, Bertrand Russell of England, and Maria Montessori of Italy. Political leadership has affected the education systems of many countries in the 20 th century. In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) under Communism and in Germany under the leadership of National Socialism, totalitarian systems of government imposed strict guidelines on the organization of national education systems. Many other countries during the 20 th century including the United States have sought to balance control of their education systems between the federal government and local governments or private organizations. Most countries in the 20 th century have also taken steps to increase access to education.
Local and state governments have retained most of the responsibility for operating public education in the United States during the 20 th century. Because individual communities often have different educational priorities and different abilities to finance public education systems, school systems vary from one region to another. State governments and occasionally the federal government attempt to reduce disparity between regions by establishing various requirements for school financing, academic standards, and curriculum. In the early 20 th century access to education in the United States was largely divided along racial lines.
State laws segregated most schools in the American South by race. No such laws existed in northern states, but school districts there often established district boundaries to ensure separate facilities for black and white students. In both northern and southern states, school facilities for African American students were usually inadequate, public transportation to such schools was insufficient or nonexistent, and public expenditures per student fell well below that provided per student in white schools. In 1954 the Supreme Court of the United States decided in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that separate facilities for black and white students resulted in unequal educational opportunities, and that such segregation was unconstitutional. Since then, public school systems throughout the United States have attempted to desegregate schools and to provide equal educational opportunity for all students.
Integration efforts and affirmative action programs in American schools have helped enable African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and other minorities to increase high school and college attendance rates and to make impressive gains on standardized test scores. Word Count: 2367 Bibliography: Cohen, Arthur M. : The Shaping of American Higher Education: Emergence and Growth of the Contemporary System, Jossey-Bass 1999. Urban, Wayne J. , Jennings L. Wagoner: History of Education, 2 nd ed. McGraw-Hill 1999. Kimball, Bruce A. : Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education, Teachers College 1986.
Greek, Gerald Lee: Historical and philosophical foundations of education: a biographical introduction, Merrill 1997
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