Educational Philosophies

Paper Summary:

This paper explores how the modern ideas of experiential education, constructivist teaching and inquiry-based teaching, all have their roots in the educational philosophies of Rousseau and Dewey. It explains that experiential education simply refers to the idea that children learn by doing and that knowing a fact without knowing how to apply it, is essentially useless. It then shows how constructivist teaching is basically the idea that the teacher helps the students to build knowledge, integrating one idea into the other, like how chemistry and biology and physics really build upon each other rather than being separate sciences. Finally, it explains that self-explanatory is where the child seeks the answer to a problem rather than being told a dry fact.

From the Paper:

"These ideas combined can make for a powerful teaching method, a method that teaches children to think about problems and how to solve them and not simply telling them to memorize this or that fact. It is a method that recognizes the interconnectedness of the disciplines, realizing that the greatest poets are often scientists and vice versa. It also allows children to realize that there is a method, that they can investigate, that there is a set of skills that goes along with the knowledge, that Watson and Crick did not just think really hard about the structure of DNA, but that they performed experiments and deduced what the language of life was and how it was shaped and why it was shaped that way and, perhaps more importantly, what that means for people, the planet, and the future of both."

More papers on Educational Philosophies:

• Comparison Essay # 118080 : "Educational Philosophies"
• Analytical Essay # 126279 : "Educational Philosophies"
• Essay # 50807 : "Paulo Freire's Educational Philosophy"

APA Citation:

MLA Citation: