HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION: AN OVERVIEW

By Felipe de Ortego y Gasca

Scholar in Residence, Western New Mexico University

1. Introduction

W hy is the history and philosophy of education important to us in the 21 st cen-

tury? Perhaps because those who do not learn the lessons of history are con-
demned to repeat it as the philosopher Santayana put it. There is much about
the history and philosophy of education that informs contemporary pedagogy. A popular
expression explains that we all stand on the shoulders of those who went before us. Or
that each generation transmits its beliefs and values to succeeding generations. This is not
to think of generational history as static. Far from it, for each generation reworks re-
ceived knowledge to fit the historical moment—that’s progress.
Many of our ideas about education have historical roots. Evolutionary concepts of
education had their start in ancient Greece, particularly Plato’s Republic. From Greece we
got out academies; from Rome, our Latin Grammar Schools. Despite the dark side of the
Middle Ages, that period helped us understand the importance of preserving knowledge.
The emergence of the Western Renaissance turned our focus on the significance of the
individual in the human drama. Admittedly that significance took some fine-tuning over
the centuries until early modern times to make us aware of the centrality of education in
the formation and maintenance of the modern state.

At the dawn of the 3rd Millennium education everywhere is scrutinized for its relevance to
national productivity and the economic well-being of the individual. These are concepts
long in the making. Heretofore, education was a perquisite of power elites. In Greece,
only the most elite or the “chosen” were eligible for education. This was also the case in
Rome. While we extol the democratic vistas of Greece and Rome, those vistas were cir-
cumscribed by class and social rank.
In the Middle Ages, these vistas evolved into “the great chain of being”—a social
concept that determined everyone’s place in society. A cobbler’s son, for example was
expected to continue the trade of his father as a cobbler. It was understood that aspirations
beyond one’s station would rend the great chain of being and produce chaos. This
concept reigned for more than a millennium. In this paradigm, education served only the
interests of the state. The individual was mere fodder for the paradigm.

In the marketplace of ideas, the concept of “humanism” took root slowly aided by emin-
ent scholars like Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778),
both of whom contributed to the social theory of the modern state and its responsibilities
to its citizens, including education. For the better part of 2,000 years education for the
masses was but an ignis fatuus, always flitting just beyond the ken of the masses.
In the Western World, France led the advance for universal education, creating insti-
tutions of learning that are still with us. Other countries followed suit. Influenced by the
progressive ideas of humanism, in the 18th and 19th centuries the United States experi-
mented with concepts of universal education engendered by its heterogeneous population,
growing exponentially with the territorial growth of the country.

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The history and philosophy of education informs every level of a nation’s history. In the
United States, education is the back-drop of the nation’s progress. Much maligned and
convoluted for political purposes, American education’s malleability—once its strength—
has become the soft under-belly of the nation’s character. Quo vadis? Whatever its direc-
tion, American education must keep its eye upon the donut, and not upon the hole.

2. On the Nature of Education: Form and purpose in the History and Philo-
sophy of Education

W e owe Pythagoras, the 6th century BC Greek philosopher and teacher for the
term “philosophy”—love of knowledge. John A. Stoops links philosophy
and education as “transdisciplinary,” working “among and between them to
illuminate the whole” system of knowledge (2). Therefore, the history and philosophy of
education should help to link us with the major advances in the evolution of knowledge
and its import on education.
There is no one tradition of education. In all countries education has evolved accord-
ing to the language and culture of the people and their ethos. In some countries that evol-
ution has been more rapid than in others, depending on the goals of the nations. The his-
tory and philosophy of education helps us understand ontology (reality) and epistemology
(knowledge). Both are significant in the evolution of the philosophy of education.
While education was important to the ancients, the medieval mainstream which was
mainly Christian tended to reject the classical philosophy of education advanced by
Greece and Rome on grounds that it was inimical to the Christian view of the future since
classical learning focused mostly on the past. Despite this caveat, the medieval Christian
world pegged its philosophy of education on the study of Greek and Latin; especially
Latin which had become the language of the church, a language which would be part of
the Catholic Church until the 20th century.

In form, the history and philosophy of education is essentially a collection of ideas on

how best to educate the youth of a nation. In contemporary terms, the formula boils down
to information storage and retrieval, information transfer, and information preservation.
“What” information is to be stored and retrieved? “How” will the information be trans-
ferred? And “Which” information is to be preserved?
The purpose of education depended on the ruling elite. What most served and protec-
ted the interests of that elite would dictate the purpose of education. According to Henry
Ehlers, “In any social group, different individuals will cherish different values” (2). The
values most cherished by the ruling class become the values of purpose in education. The
clusters of values brought to the Americas by the early English settlers became the basis
of American education. “Each generation of immigrants who settled on American shores
brought with them bodies of knowledge” (Rippa, 3) which added to the growing philo-
sophy of American education.
In essence, the English colonial views on education were extensions of renaissance
culture which is why there was a strong scientific methodology to early English colonial
education in America. The European philosophers who most influenced English educa-
tion in America were Bacon, Locke, Rousseau and Pestalozzi, all proffering an en-
lightened form of education, focusing on the child. This is not to say the functions of rote
learning were cast aside. On the contrary, rote learning simply made room for the enlight-
enment.

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 Most perplexing for us in the 21st century, however, is the silence of the U. S. Consti-
tution on education, leaving the matter to the individual states. In the early federal period
that silence was not as grave as it is in the 21st century with a nation of 50 states all fis-
sured by matrices of special interests. The rise of public education espoused by Benjamin
Rush (A Plan for the Establishment of Public Schools, 1786) and Margaret Bayard
Smith’s “new foundation for public education” (1829), ushered into 19th century Americ-
an consciousness an urgency for an educated population, departing from plutocratic ideas
of an educated elite.

3. Education and the State: The Social Contract in the Quest for the Develop-
ment of the Human Community

H ow communities first came into being is still dimly apprehended, however as

more and more of the earth’s story is excavated, findings provide us with more
plausible conjecture about their origins. Suffice to say that aggregations of hu-
man beings are reputed to have constructed “civilizations” from the dawn of recorded
history, starting with the societies of Sumeria and Akkadia in the gulf region of what is
today Iraq.
We have “evidence” of human societies elsewhere, to be sure, for the rise of civiliza-
tions seems to have been a polygenetic process. That is, there is no firm data on any one
place on earth for the rise of humans and their aggregations, though Africa seems to be a
most likely place. In the development of these aggregations, these human communities,
there surfaced an awareness of continuity and legacy coupled to a mnemonic need for a
record, a history, of community accomplishments. In other words, a community memory
of the past.
While much of that community memory was passed on from generation to generation
via paters familias, the insufficiency of such a process was evident. Community memory
and knowledge had to be organized more coherently for effective transmission of com-
munity history. It seems to me that the aim here was not the aggrandizement of the indi-
vidual but genuine concern for the preservation of collective memory.
It turned out, however, that collective memory gave way to the preservation of in-
formation about the lives of leaders (like the King-lists of the Egyptian dynasties). This is
why today so much of history focuses on the leaders of nations and their interactions with
each other; or their foibles and failures. What little we know about how these leaders and
their minions were educated comes to us from archaeological shards found here and
there. We know, for example, from these kinds of shards that Socrates taught peripa-
tetically barefoot in Athens the progeny of elite Athenians. And that Aristotle was a teach-
er of Alexander the Great. While education was prized and valued, it was an intellectual
process for the preparation of dominion.
The “great unwashed” of life got by as best they could. This is not to say that “family
education” was not successful. On the contrary, family education flourished until the
emergence of “public consciousness” that an educated public like a rising tide lifted all
boats. But public education did not begin as a “bottoms up” concept but as a “top down”
design. An educated elite was needed to maintain the social order. In the wake of the
Western Renaissance, from the end of the “dark age” of western history to the age of
Aquinas (1225-1274), the idea of a university (as a school of coherent knowledge)
emerged, establishing the template of today’s university in the scheme of higher educa-
tion.

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 Since the 13th century, universities have flourished, not a few of them establishing
global reputations like Oxford, the University of Paris, Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford, and
the University of Chicago. Until the mid-20th century, the roles of universities were to
educate the progeny of the well-to-do. There were exceptions along the way, but in the
main a university education was considered essential for the preparation of the children
of the wealthy to carry on their civic responsibilities as leaders of their nations.
There were democratic stirrings in the “body social” prior to the 18th century, but in
1762, Jean Jacques Rousseau advanced in The Social Contract a startling concept of so-
cial order that paired the state and its people in a symbiotic partnership of mutual devel-
opment–the state bore a particular responsibility to its people just as the people bore a
particular responsibility to the state.
Observed more in the breech than in the letter, the social contract is still pummeling
its way through a maze if ideologies and political nostrums about the relationship
between the state and its people. The question still looms large about education and the
state in this morass of philosophies that like a black hole draws us ineluctably toward the
dark side of our better natures.

4. Education During the Medieval Dark Age

T he splendor of Greece and the glory of Rome, stretching as they did for a millen-
nium from about 400 BC to 400 AD, were almost lost to the Western world dur-
ing eight centuries of intellectual darkness and poverty. The idea of a university
(where all learning would be unified) was still in the future, emerging out of the impulses
generated by the Western Renaissance and its bent on knowledge. The seeds of our mod-
ern university sprouted out of this raging cauldron of inquiry.
What could pass for the semblance of a university in the classical age of Greece and
Rome were the private academies of philosopher-teachers like Protagoras, Plato, and Ar-
istotle. Public education was offered in the form of gymnasiums (physical training
grounds) or palaestras (spas) for the advanced training of ephebos (apprentice citizens)
in civic responsibilities. For the most part, the education of Greek and Roman youth
(males) was principally to support the state. Greek and Roman academicians sold their
knowledge to those who could afford their fees. But these teachers taught at their own
peril. If their ideas were judged to be erroneous (that is, contrary to accepted beliefs),
they were run out of town as Protagoras was many times or else forced to suicide as So-
crates was.
Roman patricians ruled heavy-handedly and like the peripatetic education of Greeks,
Romans acquired their education at home, in the ludus (a sort of elementary school), and
in the public forum. While the Greeks were theorists, the Romans were pragmatists.
Greeks pondered; Romans acted. Like the Greeks, Romans too were wary of philosoph-
ers and rhetoricians (teachers). Out of this pragmatism the Roman orator Quintilian ar-
gued for education that prepared students for life, not the classroom.

When the veil of darkness fell on the Western world after the fall of Rome in the 5th cen-
tury AD, monasteries became the repositories of knowledge (see, e.g., Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco), isolated and insular. Monks became the guardians of intellection, not
its creation but its preservation. To this end they laboriously made copies of books they
had “rescued” for dissemination to other centers of preservation (monasteries). The
largest of these preservation monasteries in the Middle Ages was in Fulda, Germany,
boasting a collection of some “700 volumes in its stacks” (Meyer, 73). Monastic schools

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sprang up to teach monastic aspirants. The guardian mentality of these monasteries en-
gendered rote learning (in Latin) which took root and prevailed well into modern times as
the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic). Coupled to the quadrivium (arithmetic, geo-
metry, music, and astronomy) these became the Seven Liberal Arts.
Neither Alfred (English) nor Charlemagne (French), the two most notable rulers of
the Middle Ages, advocated nor advanced education during their reigns. Intellectual en-
lightenment crept into the Western world via Islamic influences in Spain during its 800
year presence there (700-1492). As a consequence of this influence, the notable forerun-
ners of the modern age and its universities were Thomas Aquinas, John Duns, Albertus
Magnus, and Peter Abelard, all noble born and bred. But it was Thomas Aquinas who be-
came the great synthesizer of classical knowledge fusing it with the emerging intellectual
vistas of humanism and the modern age.

The first universities that bear any resemblance to our own emerged in the 12th and 13th
centuries as endeavors of peripatetic (wandering) scholars who came together as a faculty
to offer “courses” in what can be regarded as a curriculum. The most notable of these
schools was the University of Paris in the 12th century. Competing with these “uni-
versities” were universities organized by students who “hired” teachers for a curriculum
of their own design. In the public arena Guild Schools (apprentice schools) were organ-
ized to maintain the fundamentals of Guild crafts. From these earliest times the main con-
cern of these institutions was “academic freedom,” the right of the professor to teach the
verities of life as he saw them. The only requirement for admission was that the student
be able to handle Latin. The material would be “masticated by the teeth of disputation”
(Meyer, 134)

5. Information Transfer: Effects of the Renaissance

B etween ancient classical times and the 20th century, the most significant events
that influenced Western education were the fall of Rome, the Western Renais-
sance, and the Reformation. Adolph Meyer posits that the dark ages were
“purged with Christian purpose” (An Educational History of the Western World, 143). In-
deed, what passed for education during the purge was little more than rote memory of ac-
cepted knowledge. Intellection was shackled to notions of knowledge that had little or no
relation to the real world.
Until the 13th century, that is, when there burst an efflorescence of creativity whose
“manifestations increased in potency and proportion” (Ibid.). Which is why the 13th cen-
tury is considered the “greatest of Christian centuries” (Ibid.). The century peaks with the
works of Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica) and Dante Allighieri (Divine Comedy).
By the time of Petrarch (1304), the dark of the Middle Ages was illuminated by the liber-
al and secular enlightenment of the Renaissance.
To be sure, aspects of Medieval education remained in the bedrock of the new illu-
mination, to be eroded in the wake of “modern science.” The Renaissance radiated out-
wardly from Italy to the rest of Europe bringing its full force to bear on the Protestant Re-
volt of 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of the Church
in Wittenberg. Despite Luther’s reliance of the infallibility of the bible, the Reformation
fueled the reach of the Renaissance.
Luther saw free schools for every child, rich or poor, as the best antidote for Popism,
free state schools with compulsory attendance. But not for women beyond elementary

5
learning. Allied to Luther, though emphasizing church schools rather than state schools,
was John Calvin (1509-1564) in Geneva and his Institutes on Religion, stressing theocrat-
ically strong ties between church and state. Out of the maelstrom of the Reformation
emerged the Jesuits who created a structure of education which is still regarded as the
non plus ultra of learning. A Jesuit education produced polished virtuosos of the rhetoric-
al arts (Meyers, 173). Jesuits parsed ancient intellectual legacies with humanism.

This information transfer garbed in the raiments of liberalism, secularism, and humanism
was the legacy of the Renaissance and the Reformation to education and, ultimately, the
modern world. The Renaissance and the Reformation gave rise to orphanages, boarding
schools, and industrial schools, focusing on the potential of the human being and produ-
cing “men of learning”–not automatons.
In 1685, the Jesuit de la Salle founded a seminary for teachers at Rheims, “the first
school of its kind, and therefore . . . the faraway ancestor of the teachers college now in
full florescence everywhere” (Meyers, 183). While the Jesuits focused on higher learning,
the lay society of Christian Brothers (French) took up the instruction of children. Like the
Jesuit colleges, Christian Brother schools flourished well into the 20th century. Despite
charges of neglecting independent inquiry, Jesuit and Christian Brother’s schools influ-
enced modern thought with alumni like Descartes, Corneille, Tasso, Calderon, Moliere,
Diderot, and Voltaire.
Graduates of these schools were sought everywhere as teachers, mentors, and practi-
tioners of erudition. Important to bear in mind is that at the heart of Jesuit and Christian
Brothers education lay discipline, a much bruited consummation difficult to plumb and to
instill. Contemporary educators are still grappling with the concept of discipline.
A key consideration in the mechanism of Jesuit and Christian Brothers education was
parental involvement. Parents had to be committed to the education of their children as
their teachers. Like Rousseau’s Social Contract, Jesuits and Christian Bothers emphas-
ized a “family contract” in the education of their charges.

6. Perspectives on Education from Early Modern Times to the 20th Century

W hile there was much ado about the function of education from early modern
times (circa 1800), the form of education continued to reflect the epistemolo-
gical patterns of rote learning, principally because of traditional reliance on
received knowledge and the intellectual comfort that reliance offered. In other words, if
the ancient knowledge was good enough for their antecedents it was good enough for
them. This is why the renaissance at the end of the dark ages met with such resounding
approval.
The ancient lore of Greece and Rome (principally) became the bedrock of the renais-
sance mind. Never mind that much of that lore reflected perspectives and world views
drawn from limited experience with the world, such as Ptolemy’s geocentric notions of
the earth and the planets. A thousand years would pass before those notions were finally
challenged by thinkers like Copernicus and Kepler. Not that the established intellectual
order was not challenged, institutional hegemonies protected their intellectual turfs. That
protection could be likened to the expression “don’t confuse me with the facts, my minds
made up.”
Though any number of historical figures expressed dissenting intellectual perspect-
ives over the centuries on public knowledge, political and religious authorities maintained

6
their grip on intellectual content, giving rise to the apothegm: “Ours is not to reason why;
ours is but to do and die.”
In the 19th century, the early modern mind, in concert with the revolutionary spirit of
democracy, came to regard man as the “measure of all things,” placing the individual in
the foreground of intellectual inquiry. In the United States, Emerson believed that “the. .
. object of education should be commensurate with the object of life” (Chartock, 88).
That is, inquiry, recalling Socrates’ dictum that the unexamined life is not worth the liv-
ing. The function of education was, therefore, not rote learning but to encourage inquiry.
Secular forces challenged hegemonic control of education, proposing that schools were
not state institutions but public institutions in service to the common good. As state insti-
tutions, schools fulfilled the function of helping the state to maintain the status quo. As
public institutions in service to the common good, schools prepared the populace in the
exercise of free expression and free inquiry.
In Animal Farm, George Orwell understood that oftentimes one tyranny is simply re-
placed by another tyranny. The new education with its emphasis on the individual became
the new status quo. Despite its secular emphasis, the new education excluded all but the
elites, it continued to be the training ground for the children of the chosen who would
guide and rule their nations.
Despite being the most educational visionary of American presidents, Jefferson saw
little need to education women. And despite the growth of free public schools in the Unit-
ed States of the 19th century, those schools were exclusively for the education of white
males. Not even Horace Mann’s compulsory education law of 1852 could change public
education policy, not even John Dewey’s educational pragmatism, nor Maria Mon-
tessori’s “guided and spontaneous” principles of education
This is not to say that these educational theories were null. On the contrary, they pro-
duced significant advances in pedagogy. The cognitive sciences are products of these the-
ories. We know more today about how children learn, but this knowledge is hamstrung by
a plethora of considerations that have little if anything to do with cognitive advances in
education. The problem of education in the 20th century was determining just what educa-
tion is supposed to be. Like the Zen of Buddha everyone knows what it is but cannot de-
scribe it nor explain it.
In the 21st century educators across the globe are grappling with the question of what
education is supposed to be. In authoritarian societies, education serves the interests of
the state. In “democratic” societies, education ostensibly serves the interest of the indi-
vidual and the common good. But everywhere, to paraphrase Karl Marx, individuals are
in chains of their own making which William Blake called “mind-forged manacles.”

7. Education in America: The Columbian Exchange

E ducation in America did not begin with the arrival of the Spaniards at the end of
the 15th century. Indigenous cultures in pre-conquest Mexico developed and
maintained schools for children, young adult males, and martial arts. Addition-
ally, there were specialty schools for arts and crafts and intellectual pursuits. Information
in surviving indigenous codices reveal a high level of interest and participation in flor y
canto, festivals that highlighted the artistic and creative activities of songs (including po-
etry) and revels using flowers to brighten and heighten the visual stimulation of observers
and participants.
Alas, as conquerors and rulers, the Spaniards imposed their social and aesthetic val-
ues on their entire domain, including their values of education. The objective was to

7
make Christians and “Spaniards” of the indigenous peoples. While Spanish administra-
tion in the Americas established early on schools for their own people, they nevertheless
established a number of schools for the education of indigenous children, particularly the
children of elite indigenous families who aided the Spanish occupation. Needless to say,
Spanish education stressed a Spanish world view.
This was not unlike the later ingress of other European powers in the Americas, par-
ticularly the English in New England and the Atlantic frontier. While the English did not
attempt the kind of indigenous education of the Spaniards in New Spain, they did estab-
lish schools for their own people that mirrored the prevailing perspectives and attitudes of
the ruling class in England. The Columbian Exchange thus simply overlaid the prevailing
cultural norms of European powers on their domains in the Americas. This is not to say
there was no reciprocal flow of influence from indigenous America to Europe. But the
power of conquest was firmer.

In the British colonies of America, British colonists established schools along the same
designs as schools in England. At the time England was experimenting with a common
curriculum. Ergo British colonial schools were modeled on the common curriculum. In
form, American education is still structured around the concept of the “common curricu-
lum,” a concept which in its incipiency assumed the existence of homogeneity among its
people. In brief, the common curriculum fostered the “come-and-get-it” philosophy of
education. That is, education was ready and waiting, available to one and all who wanted
it.
That expectation was not altogether amiss, for the common denominator in early
American society was the European heritage of tis individual members. Anomalous
clusters of peoples of non-European stock were considered insignificant, and their assim-
ilation into the Anglo-European cultural mainstream was quickly achieved despite their
“outcast” heritage. However, the degree of assimilation of “outcast” groups depended
upon their color and linguistic acceptability. Thus, non-whites in America early experi-
enced cultural exclusion.
Important to bear in mind is that “the form of education assumed by the first genera-
tion of non-Hispanic settlers in America was a direct inheritance from the medieval past,”
as Bernard Bailyn (15) points out, as well as a direct legacy from an England having only
recently evolved a distinct national identity in the wake of Norman cultural ingress. The
history of early American education was simply an extension of English education. Ame-
rican education mirrored the goals and objectives of education in the homeland.
Education is not just a formal pedagogy but the vital process “by which a culture
transmits itself across the generations” (Bailyn, 14). After the advent of democracy, pub-
lic education was regarded as “an instrument for diminishing the degree of social strati-
fication” in American society” (Conant, 2). Before Brown v. Board of Education (1954),
schools and textbooks were instruments for national aggrandizement. Textbooks were fic-
titious models of life, models which fostered the misconceptions and stereotypes of a by-
gone age. At the heart of American education the teacher was regarded as the guardian of
educational tradition–never mind that the tradition was a panorama of fantasy.

8. Education and Ideology: Language, Culture, and Behavior

E ducation is not value free. Despite rhetoric to the contrary, education almost al-
ways serves the interests of the state. We have seen this in the education of the
ancient Greeks, Romans, and Persians; also in the Middle Ages when education

8
served the interests of the Christian Church. Education and ideology are inextricably
bound together, both handmaidens of the power elite. Even when education became the
centerpiece of democracy in the United States, particularly, it could not loosen the grip of
the power elite and its ideology.
Unfortunately, ideology paid little heed to language, culture, and behavior. Ideologic-
ally, the power elite’s agenda stressed conformity to the doctrines of the state. In the
Middle Ages, Christian doctrine demanded unquestionable adherence to the faith regard-
less of one’s language or culture. Christian doctrine in both colonial British America and
colonial Spanish America, laid down strictures of behavior that took little note of popula-
tion diversity.
Until the middle years of the 18th century, religious fundamentalism in the British
colonies held sway in the development of education. Toward the latter half of the 18th
century, Calvinism and Anglicanism lost their ecclesiastical monopolies in the colonies
with the rise of such concepts as “separation of church and state.”
Expanding secularity took root in the urban and urbane centers of the country. Out of
the vanishing theocracy emerged reading and writing schools that shaped the concept of
the three R’s, becoming “the basic intellectual stock of the American elementary school”
(Meyer, 381). Though Latin Grammar Schools continued apace, their efficacy was wan-
ing. Academies sprang up ostensibly modeled on Plato’s academy offering curricula in
commerce, natural, and social sciences.
One of the most influential proponents of the scientific approach to education was Jo-
hann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827), who like his mentor Rousseau, believed “children
should be educated in harmony with nature, unrestricted by the shackles of society”
(Chartock, 120). In the same naturalistic vein, Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1927) “be-
lieved that education should connect with the students’ experience in some way so they
can make new ideas their own and apply them to their lives” (Chartock, 169) per a pro-
cess of “constructivism” employing a Rhythm of Education.

In the 21st century we are more aware of how inextricable language and culture are and
their influence on learning and behavior. Emiliano Zapata is quoted as saying: “Language
and culture are brothers in education.” Intuitively, educators like Pestalozzi and White-
head were steering education towards a locus of pedagogy that considered the “whole
child.” that locus thrived in the climate of the Civil Rights era when American education
was mandated to focus on the diversity of the American population.
In Animal Farm, George Orwell made it abundantly clear that one tyranny is often re-
placed by another tyranny. The old ideological hold on American education was replaced
by another ideological hold–empiricism where “everything was subject to impartial ob-
servation and verification” (Meyer, 383). While the empirical curriculum manifested
many strengths, it has become the target of fundamentalists of every stripe, renewing the
conflict of church and state.
Roiling American language and culture impacted American education and its ideolo-
gical hold on American intellection. Leading the charge in the 19th century was Noah
Webster and his American Dictionary of the English Language. In the 20th century, scores
of bilingual educators sounded clarion calls about the roles of language, culture, and be-
havior in early childhood education.
Surprisingly few Anglo officials at the federal or state level seemed concerned with
issues related to language, culture, and behavior. Instead their focus was on “Immersion
English “ for speakers of other languages in the beginning grades.

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9. The Teaching Profession: Historical Perspectives and Reflections

F rom antiquity the teaching profession has been fraught with peril. In classical
Greece, Sophists made extravagant promises about their teaching methodology
and its teach-for-pay benefit to the city-state. However a story has come down to
us about the skeptic Protagoras and his expulsion from teaching because his ideas were
antithetical to those of the city-state. Toward the end of the Hellenistic period (3 rd century
BC), educational philosophy gained prominence in Greece and the teaching profession
gained respect.
For Romans, “education was a lifelong process with comprehensive human formation
as its goal” (Power, 200). For Greeks, the purpose of education was “cultural rather than
civic” (Ibid.). Consequently teaching practices were shaped by the national perspective
on education.
In the midst of these classical vistas on the purpose of education was the question of
distinguishing between schooling and education. In the classical world, schooling pre-
pared students for the practical obligations of life; whereas education was about erudition
and the acquisition of knowledge.
In the end, Cicero’s contention that “only those of us are men who have been civil-
ized by the studies proper to culture” gained the greatest foothold in Europe linked to
Quintillian’s Education of an Orator, considered “the greatest book ever written on edu-
cation” (Power, 24), a landmark book in the history of education.
As a consequence of Cicero and Quintillian, the teaching profession prospered since
its job was to simulate mental activity and to sharpen intelligence while accommodating
the intellectual acumen and interest of students. Here the role of teachers was emphasized
as vital to the success of education.

We have already noted the historical perspective on education during the Middle Ages
and how the ideas of the Western Renaissance “oozed” into the modern age. In the United
States, unlike elsewhere in the world, education evolved in forking paths: one path a pre-
paration for civic responsibilities and the other path favored erudition and the acquisition
of knowledge. The wisdom of each is still being debated.
Despite this polarity, American education has revolved around pertinence and prag-
matism—What knowledge is important? and With which education can I earn a living?
However, embedded in these ostensible polarities of secularism were the seeds of sectari-
anism.
Antagonism has been ever present in the deliberations of American education, each
group believing its modus operandi superior to others. As each group’s efforts struggled
in the academic arena, teachers became scapegoats for their failures. But teachers respon-
ded that education is “not a preparation for life; it is life itself” (Meyer, 472). Antagonism
now rears hostile as federal and state school officials press for compliance on tests pur-
porting to assess educational progress.
In “Small Victories,” Samuel G. Freedman poses the question: Are teachers born or
are they made? (Chartock, 23). My sense is that they are made. Teaching is a function of
experience. In “Small Victories” we become acquainted with the forces that assail teach-
ers in the schools, forces tangential to academic goals but unfortunately now the focus of
federal and state compliance.
In “The Happy Golden Years” we get a portrait of Laura Ingalls Wilder as a frontier
teacher in the 19th century (Ibid., 79). In “The Water is Wide” Pat Conroy seems to ex-

10
emplify Cicero and Quintillian’s focus of accommodating the intellectual acumen and in-
terests of the students (Ibid., 214).

10. The Teacher: Behavior, Roles, Ethics, and Expectations

I n the educational schema, teachers have gone full circle on the wheel of fortune, giv-
ing credence to the bromide that “what goes around, comes around.” From pedestals
to pederasts seems to be the chain of events characterizing teachers at the moment.
Of course, not all teachers have forged this chain of events, but they are, unfortunately,
all victimized by this chain of events.
Among numerous teacher groups, the National Education Association is working des-
perately at damage control. The media, especially the comics of late night shows, exacer-
bate the situation. But rational heads understand that while a few bad apples can contam-
inate the entire barrel, by and large schools are staffed not only with competent teachers
but teachers of high morale principles.
Perhaps pedestals are a bit lofty for teachers. Not that they don’t deserve a pantheon
of pedestals, but their activities in the teaching profession span a range not evident in oth-
er professions. In this range, the behavior of teachers becomes microscopically vulner-
able, particularly when they are expected to assume a variety of roles, many of which are
essentially outside the pale of their profession.
Like Mr. Chips (Chartock, 10), however, role modeling is often thrust on teachers in
the transformative process of life and its volte-face effect on their teaching. Oftentimes,
we are hard put to know when we become “teachers” transformed from merely transmit-
ters of information, departing from tradition into the realm of innovation. In the Chips
story, Kathie seems to have been the real teacher.
In “Good Morning, Miss Dove” (Chartock, 15), Frances Gray Patton argues for con-
sistency in teachers, even in the face of change and spontaneity, raising anew the efficacy
of the tried and true and the debate between the familiar and the formal in teaching.
Chuck Salter, on the other hand, contends that “a good leader must first be a good
teacher” (Chartock, 54). However debatable some of the points, Salter’s “menu” is a
“kind of handbook” for success as a teacher.

In the realm of ethics, teachers face a balancing act of propriety and propinquity—that is,
between decorum and how close a teacher can or should get to students. In the face of
growing scandals and threats of lawsuits for a variety of reasons, tighter reins on teacher
behavior and school administrations have been enforced, creating a climate of distrust
and suspicion between schools and communities.
What this all augurs for education is still problematic. Despite these situations, teach-
ers are still expected to display Herculean efforts in educating the youth of the nation. In
the main, there seems to be a lessening of public faith in teachers not because they are in-
competent but because they are perceived unable to deal with the temper of the times and
its expectations.
How this will all play out is anybody’s guess. What is all too evident is that education
has become the scapegoat of politicians who seek not the common good but outcomes of
personal agendas.

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11. Politics and Education: Standards, Funding, Governance, Legal Issues

P Politics and education have been fraternal throughout the history of both en-
deavors. We note how politics affected Socrates and his efforts to educate the
youth of Athens. Athenian politicians condemned Socrates to death because they
considered his educational philosophy radical, subversive, and inimical to the bet in-
terests of the state. In the long sweep of history, education has been forced into a venturi
tube of politics favoring those in power and their views on education.
Unlike countries where education is a function of the national government, in the
United States education is a function of the individual states (and territories) per the 10th
amendment to the U.S. Constitution. What this establishes, in effect, is a balkanized sys-
tem of education with more than 50 jurisdictions each of which is further Balkanized into
school districts, vesting “local control” over education in the hands of school board mem-
bers elected by the voters in those jurisdictions.
There are some 36,000 school districts in the United State; and each state governs
schools of higher education (both public and private) with State Superintendents of Pub-
lic Education and “commissions” of higher education, overseen by legislatures of each
state (or territory). Despite, this fissurization, the American educational system has func-
tioned tolerably well. In more recent times, however, education seems to have become as
hot a potato as it was in the Athens of Socrates.

Professional standards for teachers have changed from the colonial and federal days of
the nation though, in the main, they still articulate the professional responsibilities of
teachers (Chartock, 40). While certification standards have been refined, teacher short-
ages throughout the country have led to alternative standards for teacher certification. Re-
porting laws on child abuse have added another layer of professional responsibilities on
teachers (“What Lisa Knew,” Chartock, 19-22).
No greater consideration impinges on education as funding. In times of diminishing
resources, teachers have been asked to do more with less (Ortego, 2006) While many
states have kept up with teacher salaries, many more find themselves beset with teacher
vacancies because of diminished funding for teacher salaries.
Added to this constraint are legal considerations engendered by the constitutional
separation of church and state, placing teachers in vulnerable positions as was the case
with John Scopes, the Tennessee teacher who was charged with breaking the law prohib-
iting the teaching of evolution (Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, “Inherit the Wind,”
Chartock, 110-115). Censorship issues have also taxed the responsibilities of teachers
(Ortego, 1995).
The Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, best summed up politics and education with the
following: “It is not education that molds society to certain standards, but society that
forms itself by its own standards and molds education to conform with those values that
sustain it” (Chartock, 240).

12. SCHOOL ENVIRONMENTS: MATRICES AND CHOICES

12
W ithout question, school environments are the dynamic arenas for translating
educational theory into practice. They are the circus maximus for educational
gladiators. Today school environments are fixed places of brick and mortar
unlike the classical environments Socrates and Protagoras who as peripatetic teachers
taught “on the run,” so to speak.
This raises a critical question: How important are school environments in the process
of education? When did place, situ, become important in the scheme of education? Do
school environments enhance the goals of education? What do school environments do to
John Dewey’s principle that “the child is the starting point, the center, and the end” of
education? (McDermott, 471).
But school environments are more than brick and mortar; they are the spaces inside
the brick and mortar, the classrooms that exude the excitement of learning. In the public
schools, the classrooms reflect the zeitgeist of the institution. In higher education,
classrooms brim with expectancies of enlightenment. Given these expectancies and en-
lightenment why is there so much turmoil today in American education?

That turmoil may be engendered in part by the aspirations we have of education. Each of
us expects some particular outcome from education, outcomes based oftentimes on vel-
leities rather than realities. The current matrix of educational alternatives offers an array
of choices, ranging from home-schooling to tightly disciplined private religious schools.
Estimates suggest that a staggering 700,000 to 2.5 million children are home-schooled in
the United States by parents who have no confidence in the American educational system.
In her piece on “Unschooling,” Nancy Friedland offers her approach to home-school-
ing, principally its relevance to daily life and its lack of structure (Chartock, 275, 276).
Critics of home-schooling abound, pointing out that home-schooling deprives students of
the socialization process that schools provide.
The choice of chartered private academies or private high schools as detailed in
Dorothy Canfield’s “Seasoned Timber” offer us a glimpse of “hybrids” attempting to
overcome the “rigor mortis” of traditional high schools “without the usual strings at-
tached” (Ibid., 293). How do these environments enhance learning? The most provocative
choice is in the area of vouchers, giving parents the option of placing their children in
more productive schools (Enlow and Ealy, 2006)..
The same question can be asked of public colleges and universities. Are private col-
leges and universities doing a better job of educating students than public universities?
This brings up the question Adolphe Meyer asked in An Educational History of the West-
ern World: Is the educational ladder the magic equalizer? (487). For us the question is:
How much do we want our children to be “schooled” and how much do we want them to
be “educated”? The two concepts are not synonymous though they are held out to be con-
gruent.

13. Sociology of Education: E Pluribus Unum

N o force in the sociology of education today is more troubling than the trend to-
ward sectarianism—“a public school devoid of religious teaching” (Rippa, 3), a
trend threatening the constitutional principle of separation of church and state
and, perhaps, the proposition that education is the great equalizer bringing us all together
—e pluribus unum: one out of many.

13
 Pitted against each other, at the heart of this trend are those who contend that the
United States was founded as a Christian country and is therefore manifestly empowered
to sustain the Christian tradition in its public domain, including public schools. In opposi-
tion to this point of view are those Americans who point out how demographically di-
verse the country has become, including an enlarging non-Christian population.
While the U.S. Supreme Court has sustained the constitutional separation of church
and state, it has sanctioned minor breaches in that constitutional wall, positing that that
separation is not absolute or inviolable. Indeed, the demography of the country augurs
significant change from the racial and religious status quo historically operational in the
country for the first 150 years of its existence. Today more than a third of the American
population are minorities.
In the latter half of the 20th century American schools, both lower and higher educa-
tion, have been impacted by racial desegregation, feminine, gender, and language issues,
as well as economic and philosophical considerations. Education has become the bete-
noire of national administrations in their push for a better educated public. In 1958, John
W. Gardner posed the challenge: Can a Democracy be Equal and Excellent, Too? (Ibid.,
471).

The United States is a country in transition, coping with social and demographic forces
changing the face and character of the nation. Educational practices and strategies of the
past are challenged by these forces. Mobility, power, and electronic intelligence are
crowding out the status quo (Norman Cousins, Op. cit., 593). In the sociology of educa-
tion, schools are losing their eminence as the bulwarks for social stability. The blind seem
to be leading the blind in the national effort to stop the hemorrhaging of the schools. Is
governmental action their salvation? Is “local control” heading for the scrapheap of
paradigms? How justifiable are state-run schools?
In 1982, Milton Friedman cautioned that “dramatic shifts in public policy are not
generally precipitated by scholarly dissertations” (Coulson, 119). That is, studying the
problem (talking the talk) is not the same as solving the problem (walking the walk).
Indeed, the educational problems of the United States are daunting. We see how
daunting in “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas” (Chartock, 97), in Jonathon
Kozol‘s “Death at an Early Age” (Chartock, 225), and in Maya Angelou’s “I know why
the Caged Bird Sings” (Chartock, 334). However daunting the challenge, hope springs
eternal, no matter how brutal it was to be young, according to Maya Angelou (Chartock,
337).
In America is in the Heart, (1944) Carlos Bulosan, the Philippine American writer,
made us more aware of Alfred Korzybski’s reminder that “the map is not the territory”
(General Semantics, 1929), that ideals are worthy goals despite the price they reap. For
Bulosan the price was steep. For us the question is: Can education make us one out of
many? Or is education simply an ignis fatuus?

14. Schools and the Curriculum: Approaches and Development

W hatever their forms of government, nations must grapple with the question
not only of how to educate their citizenries but what should be taught—the
curriculum. How does a country develop a national curriculum? In the
United States, per the 10th amendment, there is ostensibly no national curriculum for pub-
lic education, but there are common elements nevertheless that are part of the curricula of

14
all public schools. While not bound stringently to a mandated curriculum, schools of
higher education are regulated, nevertheless, by accrediting agencies and by special state
agencies. Core curricula are usually the purview of state agencies.
Stemming out of the philosophy of “local control”, most states mandate graduation
requirements for public schools and a state history course for colleges and universities as
well as guidelines for a core curriculum. Additional courses are contingent on the schema
of majors and minors. At the moment, the efficacy of American public education is prob-
lematic owing, perhaps, to the philosophical polarities about the aim of public education
enmeshed in a skein of sociopolitical and demographic considerations.
Invariably the debate over public schools and the curriculum spills into the arena of
graduation rates, creating alarm over the disparity of graduation rates between particular
groups of ethnic students compared to white graduation rates. This part of the debate
opens up a Pandora’s Box of contentious issues. For example, in 2004 the black-white
gap in graduation rates “was as wide as it had been in 1990, and 9 points greater than it
had been in 1998” (Thernstrom, 38).
More often than not, this disjuncture is blamed on the “victims”—“abusive disruptive
African American students” who are “less ready to conform to behavioral demands”
(Ibid., 42). But herein we find the nexus of the “problem”. How relevant is the public
school curriculum to the needs of ethnic American students, in this case African Americ-
an students?

The big question then is: What is the function of a school curriculum? Is it to turn out
“cookie-cutter” Americans? Or independent-thinking citizens? How does the content of
the curriculum affect these aspirations? Many minority Americans argue that the school
curriculum indoctrinates students into a Euro-centric view of life.
In the “Saber-Tooth Curriculum” (Chartock, 149), we get a snapshot, albeit sarcastic-
ally, of curriculum development and the difficulties that development encounters with
succeeding generations. The point being: that change can be the most difficult of human
encounters. In “Teacher’s Lesson on Intolerance Fails” by Nancy Roberts Trott we are in-
formed that “curriculum is political” (Chartock, 253). The piece raises the question of
“conscience”—when is it appropriate to disobey the rules that govern curriculum? Does
one have a moral responsibility, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, to disobey unjust laws?
The Barzun excerpt on “Tongues and Areas” (Chartock, 330) makes us aware of how im-
portant “inventiveness” is in teaching, taking risks in the delivery of education, even at
the expense of looking foolish.
At this point we are drawn back to the comment on schools and the common cur-
riculum in the early days of American education. Despite technical advances in the deliv-
ery of education, how far have we departed from the notion of the common curriculum?

15. Summing Up: The History and Philosophy of Education

T he trajectory of “the history and philosophy of education” from earliest times to

the present has not been smoothly parabolic; nor has it been cumulatively pro-
gressive. Plotted it would be a pattern of highs and lows inching upward glacially
toward a Platonic goal of enlightenment. Comparatively, educators know more today
about the art and the science of education than the educators of antiquity, although it is
difficult to know exactly what the ancient Sumerians, Acadians, Chinese, Hebrews,
Hindus, and Egyptians knew about teaching and learning. However, according to Con-

15
fucius (551-479 BC) we learn by reflection, imitation, and experience. We see these ven-
ues of learning clearly in the trajectory of the history and philosophy of education.
This is not to say that the historical knowledge of teaching makes us more successful
as teachers. To repeat: “There is much about the history and philosophy of education that
informs contemporary pedagogy” (see Introduction). Like democracy, education is a pro-
cess not a product. For example, we know today that not all students learn in the same
way or at the same pace. In other words, each of us has a style of learning unique to our
experiential matrix. In like fashion we also know that teachers are influenced in their
craft by “idiogogic” (logically personal) teaching styles unique to their experiential
matrices.
This knowledge in no way invalidates teaching and learning. This knowledge does
inform us however of how cognizant we need to be as teachers about individual learning
styles and about our own teaching style in order to deliver instruction consistent with the
way students learn. “At the nexus between teaching and learning, synaptic sparks don’t
always bridge that gap” (Ortego, 2004:1)
The history and philosophy of education are replete with theories about teaching and
learning. From beginnings that focused on inquiry and the acquisition of knowledge, not
only for the sake of knowledge but to understand and explain (describe) the world and its
origins, education has run a gamut of perspectives seeking to define itself and to establish
a foundation for its continued existence. In some quarters, the aim of education was
maintenance of the status quo while in other quarters its aim was to rent asunder the
status quo with change that ranged from anarchism to fascism.

What we can say about the history and philosophy of education with any certainty is that
the two strands are interwoven like the fabled double helix of DNA, each feeding off the
other, each contesting the manifestations of the other, each in complicit collaboration
with the other. In any given moment, history reflects the philosophy that dominates edu-
cation. In like manner, philosophy reflects the history of the time, grappling with the hu-
man condition, seeking equilibrium between the past, the present, and the future.
At times education has been considered a curse and a cure, engendering questions
like: Is education really a tool for solving the world’s problems? Isn’t education just in-
doctrination in a world pattern of hegemony? Contemporaneously, “there are times . . .
when educational philosophy extends its range to embrace what are called policy studies .
. . extending beyond the schoolhouse” (Power, 169-170). In other words, education en-
ables us to explore solutions for ills anywhere. This seems to bring us full circle to the be-
ginnings of the history and philosophy of education as beacons of inquiry in the quest for
knowledge. In the end we must ask ourselves if education helps to define national iden-
tity? As Americans, the question is: How does education advance or hinder democracy?

16
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Chartock, Roselle K. Educational Foundations: An Anthology 2nd Ed., 2004.

Conant, James Bryant, Shaping Educational Policy, 1964.

Coulson, Andrew, “A Critique of Pure Friedman: An Empirical Reassessment of “The

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Ehlers, Henry. Crucial Issues in Education 6th Ed, 1977.

Enlow, Robert C. and Ealy, Lenore T. eds. Liberty & Learning: Milton Friedman’s
Voucher Idea at Fifty Cato Institute, 2006

McDermott, John. The Philosophy of John Dewey: Volume II: The Lived Experience,
1973.

Meyer, Adolphe, An Educational History of the Western World, 1965.

Ortego y Gasca, Felipe de, “On Censorship,” REFORMA Newsletter, March 1995

Ortego y Gasca, Felipe de, “Prolegomenon to Student Engagement: Teaching and Learn-
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Teaching Effectiveness, Texas A&M University—Kingsville, 2004.

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Rippa, S. Alexander, ed., Educational Ideas in America: A Documentary History, 1969.

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