Q1-Please re-write the following passage into 1/3rd of the size and also give it a title. Philosophy of Education is a label applied to the study of the purpose, process, nature and ideals of education 1
can be considered a branch of both philosophy and education. Education can be defined as the teaching and
learning of specific skills, and the imparting of knowledge, judgment and wisdom, and is something broader than
the societal institution of education we often speak of.
Many educationalists consider it a weak and woolly field, too far removed from the practical applications of the
real world to be useful. But philosophers dating back to Plato and the Ancient Greeks have given the area much
thought and emphasis, and there is little doubt that their work has helped shape the practice of education over the
millennia
Plato is the earliest important educational thinker, and education is an essential element in The Republic (his
most important work on philosophy and political theory, written around 360 B. C.). In it, he advocates some rathe
extreme methods: removing children from their mothers' care and raising them as wards of the state, and
differentiating children suitable to the various castes, the highest receiving the most education, so that they could
act as guardians of the city and care for the less able. He believed that education should be bolistic, including
facts, skills, physical discipline, music and art. Plato believed that talent and intelligence is not distributed
genetically and thus is be found in children born to all classes, although his proposed system of selecuve puble
education for an educated minority of the population does not really follow a democratic model
Aristote considered human nature, habit and reason to be equally important forces to be culovated in education
the ultimate aim of which should be to produce good and vinuous citizens. He proposed that teachers lead the
students systematically, and that repetition be used as a key tool to develop good habits, unlike Socrates emphasis
on questioning his listeners to bring out their own ideas. He emphasized the balancing of the theoretical and
practical aspects of subjects taught, among which he explicitly mentions reading, writing, mathematics, music
physical education, literature, history, and a wide range of sciences as well as play, which he also considered
important
During the Medieval period the idea of Perennialism was first formulated by St Thomas Aquinas in lus work
"De Magistro". Perennialism holds that one should teach those things deemed to be of everlasting importance to
all people everywhere, namely principles and reasoning, not just facts (which are apt to change over time), and
that one sbould teach first about people, not machines or techniques. It was originally religious in nature, and
was only much later that a theory of secular perennialism developed
During the Renaissance, the French skeptic Michel de Montaigne (1533 - 1592) was one of the first to cnucally
look at education Unusually for his time, Montaigne was willing to question the conventional wisdom of the
period, calling into question the whole cdifce of the educational system, and the implicit assumption the
university educated philosophers were necessarily wiser than uneducated farm workers, for example