The Developmentalists

Developmentalism's historic foundations go well beyond the writings of Rousseau, Dewey, and Piaget. Pedagogical theorists such as Johann Bernard Basedow (1724-1790), Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852), Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), William James (1842-1910), and G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924) are the best known proponents of the past 200 years. In general, their views were premised on either the maturation-only or the maturation/environmental- interaction schemes of development. http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v4n8.html

Developmentalism assumes that the developmental directions issuing from the child's native tendencies and characteristics are optimal because they are a part of "nature." Although their concepts of development differed, Rousseau, Dewey, Piaget, and all other developmentalists share this premise. For Rousseau, nature was God's work untainted by human influence. In his view, the optimal developmental progression was simply the emergence of native tendencies and characteristics unfettered and unspoiled by society. By contrast, Dewey and Piaget considered the child's tendencies and characteristics to be the product of Darwinian evolution. Native tendencies and characteristics were desirable because they had survived the process of natural selection. Unlike Rousseau, Dewey and Piaget held that the optimal progression depended not only on successful maturation but on a natural process of interaction wherein the native characteristics selected-for by evolution were enhanced by the naturally occurring experiences to which they were fitted (Kohlberg & Mayer, 1972). Thus originated Dewey's emphasis on authentic educational experience. Evolution equipped humans to learn by solving problems, therefore learning in the context of problem solving was optimal. Although Rousseau's development was more exclusively a matter of maturation, he too treated social and educational influences as having the ability to either facilitate and nurture, or to corrupt and misdirect the optimal progression to which nature was postulated to tend. http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v4n8.html

The focus of Émile is upon the individual tuition of a boy/young man in line with the principles of 'natural education'. This focus tends to be what is taken up by later commentators, yet Rousseau's concern with the individual is balanced in some of his other writing with the need for public or national education. In A Discourse on Political Economy and Considerations for the Government of Poland we get a picture of public education undertaken in the interests of the community as a whole.

From the first moment of life, men ought to begin learning to deserve to live; and, as at the instant of birth we partake of the rights of citizenship, that instant ought to be the beginning of the exercise of our duty. If there are laws for the age of maturity, there ought to be laws for infancy, teaching obedience to others: and as the reason of each man is not left to be the sole arbiter of his duties, government ought the less indiscriminately to abandon to the intelligence and prejudices of fathers the education of their children, as that education is of still greater importance to the State than to the fathers: for, according to the course of nature, the death of the father often deprives him of the final fruits of education; but his country sooner or later perceives its effects. Families dissolve but the State remains. (Rousseau 1755: 148-9)

'Make the citizen good by training', Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes, 'and everything else will follow'.

In Émile Rousseau drew on thinkers that had preceded him - for example, John Locke on teaching - but he was able to pull together strands into a coherent and comprehensive system - and by using the medium of the novel he was able to dramatize his ideas and reach a very wide audience. He made, it can be argued, the first comprehensive attempt to describe a system of education according to what he saw as ‘nature’ (Stewart and McCann 1967:28). It certainly stresses wholeness and harmony, and a concern for the person of the learner. Central to this was the idea that it was possible to preserve the 'original perfect nature' of the child, 'by means of the careful control of his education and environment, based on an analysis of the different physical and psychological stages through which he passed from birth to maturity' (ibid.). This was a fundamental point. Rousseau argued that the momentum for learning was provided by the growth of the person (nature) - and that what the educator needed to do was to facilitate opportunities for learning.
Exhibit 1: Jean-Jacques Rousseau on education

Now each of these factors in education is wholly beyond our control, things are only partly in our power; the education of men is the only one controlled by us; and even here our power is largely illusory, for who can hope to direct every word and deed of all with whom the child has to do. Viewed as an art, the success of education is almost impossible since the essential conditions of success are beyond our control. Our efforts may bring us within sight of the goal, but fortune must favour us if we are to reach it.

What is this goal? As we have just shown, it is the goal of nature. Since all three modes of education must work together, the two that we can control must follow the lead of that which is beyond our control. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762) Émile (1911 edn.), London: Dent, pp.6. The focus on the environment, on the need to develop opportunities for new experiences and reflection, and on the dynamic provided by each person's development remain very powerful ideas.

a view of children as very different to adults - as innocent, vulnerable, slow to mature - and entitled to freedom and happiness (Darling 1994: 6). In other words, children are naturally good.
the idea that people develop through various stages - and that different forms of education may be appropriate to each.
a guiding principle that what is to be learned should be determined by an understanding of the person's nature at each stage of their development.
an appreciation that individuals vary within stages - and that education must as a result be individualized. 'Every mind has its own form'
each and every child has some fundamental impulse to activity. Restlessness in time being replaced by curiosity; mental activity being a direct development of bodily activity.
the power of the environment in determining the success of educational encounters. It was crucial - as Dewey also recognized - that educators attend to the environment. The more they were able to control it - the more effective would be the education.
the controlling function of the educator - The child, Rousseau argues, should remain in complete ignorance of those ideas which are beyond his/her grasp. (This he sees as a fundamental principle).
the importance of developing ideas for ourselves, to make sense of the world in our own way. People must be encouraged to reason their way through to their own conclusions - they should not rely on the authority of the teacher. Thus, instead of being taught other people's ideas, Émile is encouraged to draw his own conclusions from his own experience. What we know today as 'discovery learning' One example, Rousseau gives is of Émile breaking a window - only to find he gets cold because it is left unrepaired.
a concern for both public and individual education.

We could go on - all we want to do is to establish what a far reaching gift Rousseau gave. We may well disagree with various aspects of his scheme - but there can be no denying his impact then - and now. It may well be, as Darling (1994: 17) has argued, that the history of child-centred educational theory is a series of footnotes to Rousseau.

Rousseau believed it was possible to preserve the original nature of the child by careful control of his education and environment based on an analysis of the different physical and psychological stages through which he passed from birth to maturity (Stewart and McCann 1967). As we have seen he thought that momentum for learning was provided by growth of the person (nature).

In Émile, Rousseau divides development into five stages (a book is devoted to each). Education in the first two stages seeks to the senses: only when Émile is about 12 does the tutor begin to work to develop his mind. Later, in Book 5, Rousseau examines the education of Sophie (whom Émile is to marry). Here he sets out what he sees as the essential differences that flow from sex. 'The man should be strong and active; the woman should be weak and passive' (Everyman edn: 322). From this difference comes a contrasting education. They are not to be brought up in ignorance and kept to housework: Nature means them to think, to will, to love to cultivate their minds as well as their persons; she puts these weapons in their hands to make up for their lack of strength and to enable them to direct the strength of men. They should learn many things, but only such things as suitable' (Everyman edn.: 327). The stages below are those associated with males.

Stage 1: Infancy (birth to two years). The first stage is infancy, from birth to about two years. (Book I). Infancy finishes with the weaning of the child. He sets a number of maxims, the spirit of which is to give children 'more real liberty and less power, to let them do more for themselves and demand less of others; so that by teaching them from the first to confine their wishes within the limits of their powers they will scarcely feel the want of whatever is not in their power' (Everyman edn: 35).

The only habit the child should be allowed to acquire is to contract none... Prepare in good time form the reign of freedom and the exercise of his powers, by allowing his body its natural habits and accustoming him always to be his own master and follow the dictates of his will as soon as he has a will of his own. (Émile, Book 1 - translation by Boyd 1956: 23; Everyman edn: 30)

Stage 2: 'The age of Nature' (two to 12). The second stage, from two to ten or twelve, is 'the age of Nature'. During this time, the child receives only a 'negative education': no moral instruction, no verbal learning. He sets out the most important rule of education: 'Do not save time, but lose it... The mind should be left undisturbed till its faculties have developed' (Everyman edn.: 57; Boyd: 41). The purpose of education at this stage is to develop physical qualities and particularly senses, but not minds. In the latter part of Book II, Rousseau describes the cultivation of each of Émile's five senses in turn.

Stage 3: Pre-adolescence (12-15). Émile in Stage 3 is like the 'noble savage' Rousseau describes in The Social Contract. 'About twelve or thirteen the child's strength increases far more rapidly than his needs' (Everyman edn.: 128). The urge for activity now takes a mental form; there is greater capacity for sustained attention (Boyd 1956: 69). The educator has to respond accordingly.

Our real teachers are experience and emotion, and man will never learn what befits a man except under its own conditions. A child knows he must become a man; all the ideas he may have as to man's estate are so many opportunities for his instruction, but he should remain in complete ignorance of those ideas which are beyond his grasp. My whole book is one continued argument in support of this fundamental principle of education. (Everyman edn: 141; Boyd: 81)

The only book Émile is allowed is Robinson Crusoe - an expression of the solitary, self-sufficient man that Rousseau seeks to form (Boyd 1956: 69).

Stage 4: Puberty (15-20). Rousseau believes that by the time Émile is fifteen, his reason will be well developed, and he will then be able to deal with he sees as the dangerous emotions of adolescence, and with moral issues and religion. The second paragraph of the book contains the famous lines: 'We are born, so to speak, twice over; born into existence, and born into life; born a human being, and born a man' (Everyman edn: 172). As before, he is still wanting to hold back societal pressures and influences so that the 'natural inclinations' of the person may emerge without undue corruption. There is to be a gradual entry into community life (Boyd 1956: 95). Most of Book IV deals with Émile's moral development. (It also contains the the statement of Rousseau's' his own religious principles, written as 'The creed of a Savoyard priest', which caused him so much trouble with the religious authorities of the day).

Stage 5: Adulthood (20-25). In Book V, the adult Émile is introduced to his ideal partner, Sophie. He learns about love, and is ready to return to society, proof, Rousseau hopes, after such a lengthy preparation, against its corrupting influences. The final task of the tutor is to 'instruct the the young couple in their marital rights and duties' (Boyd 1956: 130).

Sophie. This last book includes a substantial section concerning the education of woman. Rousseau subscribes to a view that sex differences go deep (and are complementary) - and that education must take account of this. 'The man should be strong and active; the woman should be weak and passive; he one must have both the power and the will; it is enough that the other should offer little resistance' (Everyman edn: 322). Sophie's training for womanhood upto the age of ten involves physical training for grace; the dressing of dolls leading to drawing, writing, counting and reading; and the prevention of idleness and indocility. After the age of ten there is a concern with adornment and the arts of pleasing; religion; and the training of reason. 'She has been trained careful rather than strictly, and her taste has been followed rather than thwarted' (Everyman edn: 356). Rousseau then goes on to sum her qualities as a result of this schooling (356-362).

Johann Bernard Basedow
Influence of the Emile in German lands. The Emile was widely read, not only in France, but throughout the continent of Europe as well. In German lands its publication coincided with the rising tide of nationalism — the "Period of Enlightenment" — and the book was warmly welcomed by such (then young) men as Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Richter, Fichte, and Kant. It presented a new ideal of education and a new ideal for humanity, and its ideas harmonized well with those of the newly created aristocracy of worth which the young German enthusiasts were busily engaged in proclaiming for their native land. Perhaps the most important practical influence exerted by the Emile in German lands came in the work of Johann Bernard Basedow and his followers. Deeply imbued with the new scientific spirit, in thorough revolt against the dominance of the Church in human lives, and incited to new efforts by his reading of the Emile, Basedow thought out a plan for a reform school which should put many of Rousseau's ideas into practice. In 1768 he issued his Address to Philanthropists and Men of Property on Schools and Studies and their Influence on the Public Weal, in which he appealed for funds to enable him to open a school to try out his ideas, and to enable him to prepare a new type of textbooks for the use of schools. He proposed in this appeal to organize a school which should be non-sectarian, and also advocated the creation of a National Council of Education to have charge of all public instruction. These were essentially the ideas of the French political reformers of the time. The appeal was widely scattered, awakened much enthusiasm, and subscriptions to assist him poured in from many sources. In 1774 Basedow published two works of more than ordinary importance.

The first, a Book of Method for Fathers and Mothers vf Families and of Nations, was a book for adults, and outlined a plan of education for both boys and girls. The keynotes were " following nature," "impartial religious instruction," children to be dealt with as children, learning through the senses, language instruction by a natural method, and much study of natural objects. The ideas were a combination of those of Bacon, Comenius, and Rousseau. The second book, in four volumes, and containing one hundred copper-plate illustrations, was the famous Elementary Work (Elementarwerk mil Kupferri) (R. 266), the first illustrated school textbook since the Orbis Pictus (1654) of Comenius. This work of Basedow's became, in German lands, the Orbis Pictus of the eighteenth century. By means of its " natural methods" (R. 265) children were to be taught to read, both the vernacular and Latin, more easily and in less tune than had been done before, and in addition were to be given a knowledge of morals, commerce, scientific subjects, and social usages by " an incomparable method," founded on experience in teaching children. The book enjoyed a wide circulation among the middle and upper classes in German lands. Basedow's philanthropinum.

In 1774 Prince Leopold, of Dessau, a town in the duchy of Anhalt, in northern Germany, gave Basedow the use of two buildings and a garden, and twelve thousand thalers in money, with which to establish his long-heralded Philanthropinum, which was to be an educational institution of a new type. Great expectations were aroused, and a widespread interest in the new school awakened. Education according to nature, with a reformed, time-saving, natural method for the teaching of languages, were to be its central ideas. Children were to be treated as children, and not as adults. Powdered hair, gilded coats, swords, rouge, and hoops were to be discarded for short hair, clean faces, sailor jackets, and caps, while the natural plays of children and directed physical training were to be made a feature of the instruction. The languages were to be taught by conversational methods. Each child was to be taught a handicraft — turning, planing, and carpentering were provided — for both social and educational reasons. Instruction in real things — science, nature — was to take the place of instruction in words, and the vernacular was to be the language of instruction.

The institution was to have the atmosphere of religion, but was not to be Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, or Jewish, and was to be free from "theologizing distinctions." Latin, German, French, mathematics, a knowledge of nature (geography, physics, natural history), music, dancing, drawing, and physical training were the principal subjects of instruction. The children were divided into four classes, and the instruction for each, with the textbooks to be used, was outlined (R. 265). As a promising experiment the school awakened widespread interest, and Basedow was supported by such thinkers of the time as Goethe and Kant. Basedow's influence, and followers. Basedow, though, was an impractical theorist, boastful and quarrelsome, vulgar and coarse, given to drunkenness and intemperate speech, and fond of making claims for his work which the results did not justify. In a few years he had been displaced as director, and in 1793 the Philan thropinum closed its doors. The school, nevertheless, was a very important educational experiment, and Basedow's work for a time exerted a profound influence on German pedagogical thought. He may be said to have raised instruction in the Realign in German lands to a place of distinct importance, and to have given a turn to such instruction which it has ever since retained. The methods of instruction, too, worked out in arithmetic, geography, geometry, natural history, physics, and history were in many ways as revolutionary as those evolved by Pestalozzi later on in Switzerland. In his emphasis on scientific subject-matter Basedow surpassed Pestalozzi, but Pestalozzi possessed a clearer, intuitive insight into the nature and purpose of the educational process.

The work of the two men furnishes an interesting basis for comparison (R. 271), and the work of each gave added importance to that of the other. From Dessau an interest in pedagogical ideas and experiments spread over Europe, and particularly over German lands. Other institutions, modeled after the Philanthropinum, were founded in many places, and some of Basedow's followers did as important work along certain lines as did Basedow himself. His followers were numerous, and of all degrees of worth. They urged acceptance of the new ideas of Rousseau as worked out and promulgated by Basedow; vigorously attacked the old schools, making converts here and there; and in a way helped to prepare northern German lands for the incoming, later, of the better-organized ideas of the German-Swiss reformer Pestalozzi, to whose work we next turn.

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi
His commitment to social justice, interest in everyday forms and the innovations he made in schooling practice make Pestalozzi a fascinating focus for study. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746 - 1827). Born in Zurich, Pestalozzi took up Rousseau's ideas and explored how they might be developed and implemented. His early experiments in education (at Neuhof) ran into difficulties but he persisted and what became known as the 'Pestalozzi Method' came to fruition in his school at Yverdon (established in 1805). Instead of dealing with words, he argued, children should learn through activity and through things. They should be free to pursue their own interests and draw their own conclusions (Darling 1994: 18).

I wish to wrest education from the outworn order of doddering old teaching hacks as well as from the new-fangled order of cheap, artificial teaching tricks, and entrust it to the eternal powers of nature herself, to the light which God has kindled and kept alive in the hearts of fathers and mothers, to the interests of parents who desire their children grow up in favour with God and with men. (Pestalozzi quoted in Silber 1965: 134)

Pestalozzi goes beyond Rousseau in that he sets out some concrete ways forward - based on research. He tried to reconcile the tension, recognized by Rousseau, between the education of the individual (for freedom) and that of the citizen (for responsibility and use). He looks to 'the achievement of freedom in autonomy for one and all' Soëtard 1994: 308).

His initial influence on the development of thinking about pedagogy owes much a book he published in 1801: How Gertrude Teaches Her Children - and the fact that he had carried his proposals through into practice. He wanted to establish a 'psychological method of instruction' that was in line with the 'laws of human nature. As a result he placed a special emphasis on spontaneity and self-activity. Children should not be given ready-made answers but should arrive at answers themselves. To do this their own powers of seeing, judging and reasoning should be cultivated, their self-activity encouraged (Silber 1965: 140). The aim is to educate the whole child - intellectual education is only part of a wider plan. He looked to balance, or keep in equilibrium, three elements - hands, heart and head.

Exhibit 1: William H. Kilpatrick summarization of the six principles that run through Pestalozzi's efforts around schooling

Personality is sacred. This constitutes the 'inner dignity of each individual for the young as truly as for the adult.
As 'a little seed... contains the design of the tree', so in each child is the promise of his potentiality. 'The educator only takes care that no untoward influence shall disturb nature's march of developments'.
Love of those we would educate is 'the sole and everlasting foundation' in which to work. 'Without love, neither the physical not the intellectual powers will develop naturally'. So kindness ruled in Pestalozzi's schools: he abolished flogging - much to the amazement of outsiders.
To get rid of the 'verbosity' of meaningless words Pestalozzi developed his doctrine of Anschauung - direct concrete observation, often inadequately called 'sense perception' or 'object lessons'. No word was to be used for any purpose until adequate Anschauung had preceded. The thing or distinction must be felt or observed in the concrete. Pestalozzi's followers developed various sayings from this: from the known to the unknown, from the simple to the complex, from the concrete to the abstract.
To perfect the perception got by the Anschauung the thing that must be named, an appropriate action must follow. 'A man learns by action... have done with [mere] words!' 'Life shapes us and the life that shapes us is not a matter of words but action'.
Out of this demand for action came an emphasis on repetition - not blind repetition, but repetition of action following the Anschauung.
William H. Kilpatrick in his introduction to Heinrich Pestalozzi (1951) The Education of Man - Aphorisms, New York: Philosophical Library.
And what is his significance to informal educators today? First, there is his concern with social justice and his commitment to work with those who have suffered within society. He saw education as central to the improvement of social conditions

Second, he used his sympathy for peasant life and his remembrance of his mother's care as paradigms - as ways of thinking about the form education should take. In a famous phrase he declared: ' There can be no doubt that within the living room of every household are united the basic elements of all true human education in its whole range'. This underlines the potential of everyday life for educators. That said though, Pestalozzi made a significant contribution to the establishment of the school as a central educational force (in contrast to Rousseau's emphasis on the tutor).

Third, there is Pestalozzi's concern with equilibrium between elements - head, hands and heart - and the dangers of attending to just one.

Fourth, Pestalozzi is a classic example of the 'reflective practitioner'. He is concerned with action, with experimentation and yet, at the same time, he is committed to observation and reflection, and to trying to make sense of experiences and situations.

Fifth, in his failed experiment at Neuhof he attempted to a form of schooling that has subsequently appealed to Gandhi and others concerned with combating colonialism and its legacy. He wanted the school to combine education with work. The school was to be a production unit so that children could finance their own learning - and in so doing they would be under no obligation to anyone. Furthermore, the school could be free from state interference.

Last, and not least, he strove to combat the tyranny of method and 'correctness'. It is ironical that his approach should become known as a method; and that observers attempted to systematize his thought. It was his commitment to people and their well-being that animated his life's work - and in Aristotle's terms he would put that which is 'right' or good before that which is 'correct'.

Education is not only a prominent but also a fundamental theme in Hegel's philosophy. But perhaps surprisingly in view of his career, Hegel does not usually deal with this theme primarily in terms of a theory of pedagogical practice or method. He does occasionally discuss the education of children (EL · 140A, PR ·· 173-175); he also criticizes Rousseau's theory of education in ?mile, along with some of the projects and practices that derived from it, such as those of J. B. Basedow and J. H. Campe (Werke 11: 283, VA 1:384, TJ 26, VPR 1:306; EG · 396A, PR · 175). And while director of the ?gidien-Gymnasium in Nuremberg, Hegel did give annual year-end addresses which dealt with pedagogical theory -- defending various aspects of the curriculum, such as religious, natural scientific or military instruction, and defending Niethammer's view that the secondary school curriculum should be grounded on a classical education in Greek and Latin language and literature (Werke 4:305-402). During the same period Hegel also wrote short treatises to Niethammer and Friedrich Raumer on the teaching of philosophy in secondary schools (Werke 4:403-425). But nowhere does Hegel develop a pedagogical theory comparable to that advanced by Rousseau or in Locke's treatise on education, or even in Kant's university lectures on pedagogy.

The concept of Bildung. What is a fundamental theme of Hegel's philosophy is Bildung. This term might be translated as 'education', but it could also be rendered, more appropriately in many contexts, as 'formation', 'development' or 'culture'. For Hegel, the term refers to the formative self-development of mind or spirit (Geist), regarded as a social and historical process. Bildung is part of the life process of a spiritual entity: a human being, a society, a historical tradition. It occurs not primarily through the imparting of information by a teacher, but instead through what Hegel calls 'experience': a conflict-ridden process in the course of which a spiritual being discovers its own identity or selfhood while striving to actualize the selfhood it is in the process of discovering.

Bildung is to be distinguished from the 'upbringing' (Erziehung) of a child by its parents or pedagogues. But for Hegel the essential end of both processes is the same. For the principal achievement of upbringing is to overcome immediacy, simplicity or natural crudity (Rohheit), to deepen spirit through thought, of the universal. Hegel emphasizes that the early stages of this process require some kind of external constraint or discipline, the frustration of immediate desires and the growth of a capacity, consequent only on this experience of conflict and frustration, to direct one's own agency through a self-conception and rational principles. The aim of education as upbringing, Hegel says, is therefore to enable the child to be consciously or for itself, what it already is in itself or for adults: namely, a rational or spiritual being (EL · 140A). But since the child is already essentially or in itself a rational being, the entire process of Bildung is fundamentally an inner or self-directed activity, never merely a process of conditioning through environmental stimuli, or the accumulation of information presented by experience.

What is merely learned (gelernt) is made the possession of everyone through their becoming acquainted with it as something already familiar (bekannt) (PhG · 13). But for this very reason, Hegel says, what is familiar is not rationally cognized (erkannt) (PhG · 31). For rational cognition, it is required first that the object lose its familiarity, become separated or estranged from the rest of what is given, which happens through the operation of the analytical understanding (PhG · 32). This, however, is only one aspect of Bildung; the more decisive step is when the thinking mind is reunited with the object in a new or rational form, that of the concept (PhG · 33). In true cognition, the otherness of the object is overcome through a struggle with it, and the mind is reconciled to the given through acquiring a rational understanding of it. What was given immediately as familiar at the start of the process is now an otherness overcome; the object is no longer present in its immediate form, but is now grasped by means of a universal concept produced by the mind, which therefore recognizes itself in the object.

This new relation to the object is what Hegel also calls "being with oneself in another," which is his definition of spirit's actualized freedom: "Only in this freedom is the will completely with itself, because it has reference to nothing but itself, so that every relationship of dependence on something other than itself is thereby eliminated" (PhG · 23). Bildung is therefore also a process of liberation, in which the freedom of spirit is vindicated over the mere positivity of what is given in nature.

Further, because in cognition what was merely accepted as given is now seen as the product of a process of thought, the mind's relation to it is free because it is self-supporting or justified through its own thinking. Education (Bildung) is therefore the "laborious emergence from the immediacy of substantial life," the acquisition of the "universal principles" or the "thought of the thing" (Gedanke der Sache ?berhaupt). When this occurs, one is able "to support and refute the universal thought with reasons" (PhG · 4). Bildung is simultaneously a process of self-transformation and an acquisition of the power to grasp and articulate the reasons for what one believes or knows. Acquiring a genuinely rational comprehension of things goes hand in hand with a process of liberating maturation through a struggle involving selfhood and the overcoming of self-conflict.

Education is information. The general object of education is to get knowledge. (B270) Education is development. We make a new start on the inside (from the Ego) to (the true Self) from the outside which asserts its right and takes the initiative. (B271) Education is institutional. Education must now realize itself in an Institution whose chief object is to train to an institutional life. (B272)

Knowledge involves the real distinction of object and subject. (B142) Truth does not lie in the immediate data furnished by perception, but that universally the truth of any object involves mediation. An object is before me, and for the certainty of this I have the vouching of the senses.(B86) I simply possess the assurance: the object is. I, this particular consciousness, become sensible of this individual object. (B87)

Belief: not the factors (subject and object) of knowledge or consciousness are known, but only their contact should assume the form of consciousness, and known to itself or to us. (B143)

Mistake: Metaphysical thinking is an attempt to deduce the true nature of things from our concepts of them. (B367) The errors of evolutionism in its confessedly metaphysical forms are more glaring, it true, than those of materialistic evolutionism. (B368)

The system of all science must germinate in the absolutely thought and existence are ultimately based. (B95) Hegel evolves all things from pure Being. (B368) Pure being is identical to pure naught. (B95) Origination is the unity of being and naught. Existence contains both being and naught. Taking being and naught according to their difference, each exists as a unity with the other. Something is; it, moreover, exists and includes the process of origination. (B96) The quality of every existing thing which constitutes its limit determines the thing and makes it finite. The nature of finite things is to contain the germ of destruction as their inmost being; "the hour of their birth is the hour of their death." (B98)

Children and students of all kinds needed most of all to learn to conform to institutional order and the laws of reason, since only through such means could they be truly free. Only in response to order could they relate to others significantly and hence define themselves. Only through order and orderly institutions could they become part of the community which extended out from the local scene to the world scene. (B268)

The School of the World, then, we have before us; but who is the teacher? Ultimately the World-Spirit, the absolute Ego who is at the center of civilization and is unfolding it into a colossal image of himself. Undoubtedly there are many other teachers, every grade in fact; but the World-Spirit is the chief pedagogue in the World-School. (B274) Still interpretation is needed, the World-Spirit uttering at first in the events of the time must have a new utterance in Art, Literature, Science. Hence the new teacher appears, the interpreter of the World-Spirit as artist, poet, thinker. ( B275 )

The community is the primordial unit or cell out of which Society is evolved. The public school is often called the Common School, being common to all as an Educative Institution, teaching the common branches, common to the community and necessary for social intercommunication. It takes the undeveloped self of the child and unfolds it out of the Family into the community, the school being itself a community. (B269)

Education is made actual in its Institution, is organized, endowed with a body as it were, otherwise is simply an idea and subjective, belonging to the few or even to the one, is imparted to all. Hence it is often said that Education, or rather its embodiment in the Public School, is the saving principle of popular government which depends upon the intelligence of the people. (B270)

If then the world, as an intelligible world of distinction, differentiation, individuality, it is equally true that in it, as an intelligible world, there are no absolute separations or oppositions, no antagonisms which cannot be reconciled. All difference presupposes a unity, and is itself is an expression of that unity; and we let it expand and develop itself to the utmost, yet ultimately it must exhaust itself, and return into the unity. (A136) http://www.newfoundations.com/GALLERY/Hegel.html

Throughout educational history, world philosophers have wrestled with understanding the myriad of questions and problems surrounding the education of society’s children. Historically, many early childhood educators supported the idea that children should be trained as soon as possible to become productive members of the larger society so that the cultural heritage of the society could be preserved from generation to generation; this cultural imposition theory has been prevalent throughout the educational history of the world (Staff, 1998). Several educational reformers opposed the cultural imposition theory through their beliefs that childhood is an important period of human growth and development, and that adults should not impose their views and ways upon young children; instead, these reformers defined educational appropriateness as what is necessary to each child's level of development and readiness, not what is expected by society (Staff, 1998). The German educator, Friedrich Froebel, was one of these pioneers of early childhood educational reform. As an idealist, he believed that every child possessed, at birth, his full educational potential, and that an appropriate educational environment was necessary to encourage the child to grow and develop in an optimal manner (Staff, 1998). According to Watson (1997b), Froebel's vision was to stimulate an appreciation and love for children and to provide a new but small world--a world that became known as the Kindergarten--where children could play with others of their own age group and experience their first gentle taste of independence. Watson further adds that this early educational vision laid the foundation for the framework of Froebel's philosophy of education which is encompassed by the four basic components of (a) free self-activity, (b) creativity, (c) social participation, and (d) motor expression.

As an educator, Froebel believed that stimulating voluntary self-activity in the young child was the necessary form of pre-school education (Watson, 1997a). Self-activity is defined as the development of qualities and skills that make it possible to take an invisible idea and make it a reality; self-activity involves formulating a purpose, planning out that purpose, and then acting on that plan until the purpose is realized (Corbett, 1998a). Corbett suggests that one of Froebel's significant contributions to early childhood education was his theory of introducing play as a means of engaging children in self-activity for the purpose of externalizing their inner natures. As described by Dewey (1990), Froebel's interpretation of play is characterized by free play which enlists all of the child's imaginative powers, thoughts, and physical movements by embodying in a satisfying form his own images and educational interests. Dewey continued his description by indicating that play designates a child's mental attitude and should not be identified with anything performed externally; therefore, the child should be given complete emancipation from the necessity of following any given or prescribed system of activities while he is engaged in playful self-activity. In summarizing Froebel's beliefs regarding play, Dewey concluded that through stimulating play that produces self-activity, the supreme goal of the child is the fullness of growth which brings about the realization of his budding powers and continually carries him from one plane of educational growth to another.

To assist children in their development of moving from one plane of educational growth to another, Froebel provided the children with many stimulating activities to enhance their creative powers and abilities. Froebel designed a series of instructional materials that he called "gifts and occupations", which demonstrated certain relationships and led children in comparison, testing, and creative exploration activities (Watson, 1997b). A gift was an object provided for a child to play with--such as a sphere, cube, or cylinder--which helped the child to understand and internalize the concepts of shape, dimension, size, and their relationships (Staff, 1998). The occupations were items such as paints and clay which the children could use to make what they wished; through the occupations, children externalized the concepts existing within their creative minds (Staff, 1998). Therefore, through the child’s own self-activity and creative imaginative play, the child would begin to understand both the inner and outer properties of things as he moves through the developmental stages of the educational process.

A third component of Froebel’s educational plan involved working closely with the family unit. Froebel believed that parents provided the first as well as the most consistent educational influence in a child’s life. Since a child’s first educational experiences occur within the family unit, he is already familiar with the home environment as well as with the occupations carried on within this setting. Naturally, through creative self-activity, a child will imitate those things that are in a direct and real relationship to him-things learned through observations of daily family life (Dewey, 1990). Froebel believed that providing a family setting within the school environment would provide children with opportunities for interacting socially within familiar territory in a non-threatening manner. Focusing on the home environment occupations as the foundation for beginning subject-matter content allowed the child to develop social interaction skills that would prepare him for higher level subject-matter contnt in later educational developmental stages (Dewey, 1990).

Over one hundred and fifty years ago, Froebel (1907) urged educators to respect the sanctity of child development through this statement:

We grant space and time to young plants and animals because we know that, in accordance with the laws that live in them, they will develop properly and grow well. Young animals and plants are given rest, and arbitrary interference with their growth is avoided,/because it is known that the opposite practice would disturb their pure unfolding and sound development; but, the young human being is looked upon as a piece of wax or a lump of clay which man can mold into what he pleases (p. 8).

Motor expression, which refers to learning by doing as opposed to following rote instructions, is a very important aspect of Froebel’s educational principles. Froebel did not believe that the child should be placed into society’s mold, but should be allowed to shape his own mold and grow at his own pace through the developmental stages of the educational process. Corbett (1998b) upholds Froebel’s tenets that a child should never be rushed or hurried in his development; he needs to be involved in all of the experiences each stage requires and helped to see the relationships of things and ideas to each other and to himself so that he can make sense out of both his subjective and objective world. Corbett further agrees that development is continuous, with one stage building upon another, so that nothing should be missed through haste or for any other reason as the child moves through the educational process. Responsible educators should strive to recognize each child's individual level of development so that essential materials and activities to stimulate appropriate educational growth can be provided. Froebel believed that imitation and suggestion would inevitably occur, but should only be utilized by the teacher as instruments for assisting students in formulating their own instructional concepts (Dewey, 1990).

The Kindergarten idea was first introduced into the United States in the late 1840’s (Watson, 1997b), and Froebel’s basic philosophic principles of free self activity, creativity, social participation, and motor expression are valuable components which exist functionally, with some modifications, in most current early childhood education programs. The education of society’s children is still a difficult and fascinating issue studied by world philosophers. Educators of the future will continue to look to philosophers of the past for assistance in striving to attain the common goal of being jointly responsible for nurturing, educating, and cultivating each child toward his or her maximum potential through the educational process. http://www.froebelweb.org/web2002.html

1. Theory of Value: What knowledge and skills are worthwhile learning? What are the goals of education?

... importance of study of nature and fundamentals of science (Eiseman, p. 153); development of independent thought; importance of presenting the "natural history of society" (Eiseman, p. 153); sociology; goals of education-promote competition, individualism, "survival of the fittest"; learning as an individual effort; education should be directed to self-preservation, care of offspring, preparing adults to enjoy nature, literature, fine arts, prepare to be good citizens; knowledge of science worth more than any other knowledge (Spencer, p. ix); train the memory, cultivate judgment, impart an admirable moral and religious discipline; advocacy of instruction in public and private hygiene

2. Theory of Knowledge: What is knowledge? How is it different from belief.? What is a mistake? A lie?

... knowledge as the scientific study of education, psychology, sociology, and ethics from an evolutionary point of view (Eiseman, p. 153); two fundamental beliefs -- importance of science, sanctity of political and economic laissez-faire; philosophy is knowledge of highest generality; knowledge of lowest kind is reunified knowledge, science is partially unified knowledge; philosophy is completely unified knowledge; universal truths v. particular truths (used for proof); man can only know from experiences; all thought founded on relations -- humans think in terms of differences and likenesses; ideas are expressions of relationships between things (Frost, p. 260)

3. Theory of Human Nature: What is a human being? How does it differ from other species? What are the limits of human potential?

... notion of intelligence as mental capacity (Borgatta, p. 941); individual organisms, species, political systems, and entire societies are alike in that all tend to evolve from relatively simple and homogeneous entities into complex and heterogeneous ones; only the fittest survive and perpetuate their kind; concept of organic evolution--all nature moves from the simple to the complex -fundamental law seen in the evolution of human society as it is seen in the geological transformation of the earth and in the origin and development of plant and animal species, natural selection; "If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die." (Eiseman, p. 154); man if of the universe -- result of evolutionary processes; man is result of adaptation to the environment; man is what he is because his universe, his environment, makes certain consistent and definite demands upon him (Frost, p. 77); man as a part, a stage of evolution

...learning as an individual effort; learning as synthesis of all thought; learning should be collaborative; good training of the senses to observe accurately; "rational explanation of phenomena" (Spencer, ix); pupil sees and records for self-, children habitually experience the normal consequences of their conduct; importance of motivation and interest of students; variety of instruction

5. Theory of Transmission: Who is to teach? By what methods? What will the curriculum be?

... science as the most important subject matter; curriculum to be a synthesis of thought based on science (especially evolution), and including philosophies of education, biology, psychology, sociology, ethics, and politics (Magill); sciences are superior in all respects to languages as educational material; history -- nature and action of government, intellectual condition of the nation, description of people's food, shelters, and amusements, importance of drawing in education (Spencer, p. xiv); individual to teach self, aided by teachers, books, observation, laboratory work

6. Theory of Society: What is society? What instruments are involved in the educational process?

Society evolves from relatively simple and homogeneous entities into complex and heterogeneous ones; should include unbridled competition; progress of all kinds should be maximized by societies and governments that allow free competition to reign in all spheres of activity; unregulated free enterprise; survival of the fittest; right of the individual and non-interference; society as an individual organism (Eiseman, p. 153); competition in harmony with nature and in interest of general welfare and progress, Social Darwinism (Spencerism): total view of life which justified opposition to social reform on the basis that reform interfered with the operation of natural law of survival of the fittest; narrow view of role of state; society as an organism (Magill); objection to constant exercise of authority and compulsion in schools, families, and the state; survival of the fittest dependent upon group life, society is essential -- each individual restricted by rights of others; danger of complete state control-- suppression of individual (Frost, p. 204); natural selection process guiding force of social development; in society consciousness exists only in each member (Osborne, p. 137)

All young people should be taught; education open to competent children or adults without fee; survival of the fittest

8. Theory of Consensus: Why do people disagree? How is consensus achieved? Whose opinion takes precedence?

No beliefs are wholly false; they are true to the point to which they all agree; eliminate the discordant elements and observe what remains after; this is truth and should take precedence.

The Montessori Method facilitates learning by discovery rather than by mere instruction. With instruction, a child must react by listening to something that is spoken or by reading something that is written by someone other than himself. The result of instruction is information - the facts of what is being taught. Discovery promotes a deeper level of learning from the very beginning of the process. In discovery a child responds to what is natural, or of the world. Learning is processed through the senses and the imagination. the senses perceive "concrete" concepts through material that can be observed directly. The imagination helps the child to progress to levels of "abstraction" where concepts that cannot be observed directly must be constructed. The result of discovery is a self-directed process that leads to a new and deeper understanding of the concepts. More simply put, discovery is the process of learning something without being taught.

Maria Montessori believed that education, rather than being a rote transfer of information, must seek to serve the "whole child" and to nurture the human potential of each individual. A child naturally learns to walk and talk, and Montessori found that within the child is the same type of ability to naturally acquire skills for reading, writing and mathematics. In the Montessori environment the material are designed to be self-correcting, which allows the child to learn in an atmosphere of success and positive reinforcement. The child corrects his own errors as he works towards mastery of concepts, through repetition of manipulations with the material. His motivation is not for external reward but for internal fulfillment.

The educational philosophy and methodology of Montessori is not just another educational theory. It is the "scientific method" of education. Montessori employed the scientific method in her observations of the child and applied her knowledge of medicine to create a new model of the human stages of development. She found a progression of four Planes of Development in which there are Sensitive Periods where development occurs most naturally and quickly.

"To follow the child" and to meet his needs, is the basic philosophy of Montessori. This is achieved through the pyramid of Montessori principles: Individualized Liberty of the Child, Observation of the Directress, Preparation of the Environment.

To take one or two of her principles - as many persons have done - and attempt to put them into practice without regarding their relationship to the whole, is bound to result in something bizarre and lopsided. Such fragmentary applications of Montessori's ideas exemplify the old motto: 'Corruptio optimi pessima.' (the corruption of the best is the worst of all).

To remain on the level of practice, without a grasp of her principles, is to be in constant danger of floundering from one error to another.

As E. M. Standing expressed further, it is difficult to know where to begin when giving an account of the Montessori system of education. The principles of Montessori need to be understood as interrelated parts of a whole, each as essential organs to the living system. It takes about a year of studying Montessori principles before one can reach a level of fundamental understanding.

Maria Montessori, based on her scientific observations of children, developed Four Planes of developmental growth for the child. She concluded that a child's growth is more like that of a butterfly, with a number of critical transformations in the first six years, followed by a period of uniform growth while the mind is "being organized" in the intermediate stage of childhood, ages 6-12, and followed by another period of transformation during the ages of 12-18.

Age of Prudence: (0-6yo)
Construction of the Physical
Concrete Plane
Learns with Absorbent Mind (0-3yo unconscious learning, 3-6yo conscious learning)
Sensitive periods where learning is easier/faster
Fundamental for the formation and character of the individual
Basis for other virtues helps us to accomplish good in the practical order

Age of Temperance: (6-12yo)
Construction of the Intelligence
Cosmic Plane
Learns through reasoning, with imagination and logic
"The Bridge" to Abstraction - intellectual mind is organized
Want to learn about the Universe and its Creation/start Great Lessons/unit studies
This virtue develops a sense of moderation and appreciation of the world s gifts

Age of Justice: (12-18yo)
Construction of the Social/Moral
Cultural Plane
Social find place in society typical 12 year old will have a High School education
Creation of the adult
Erdkinder: Children of the Land - board at farm/own community work the farm/store/hotel - compare to apprenticeship/family business
Virtue that forms the consciousness of fairness and honesty to do right

Age of Fortitude: (18-24yo)
Construction of the Spiritual
Conscience & Discernment Plane
Spiritual emergence to adulthood - to find one s place and function in the world
Virtue that enables one to stand up for and do what s good and true

Maria Montessori discovered that the unrealized potential of the child's mind is one of the greatest secrets of childhood. When the proper materials are made available in a prepared environment, children spontaneously acquire knowledge beyond what is generally thought to be possible for their age.

She also found that all children, around the world, experience Sensitive Periods in certain areas of their development during the first six years of their life. It is during a Sensitive Period that a child will exhibit a concentrated attraction to certain elements in the environment. During these appropriate stages of development a child will learn more quickly and with less effort than at any other time in his life.

For example, if you look at the Sensitive Period for Reading you might note that most children do not start 1st Grade until they are 6 years old. By that time the Sensitive Period for Reading is already past.

William James is widely regarded as the father of modern psychology. His The Principles of Psychology (1890) set the tone for future inquiry into the mind, establishing psychology as a separate discipline; the scientific study of the mind. Grounded in his philosophical theory of pragmatism, James's theories emphasised the consequences of one's actions, rather than pure theoretical speculation. Consequentialism is still alive as a philosophical theory through modern philosophers such as Hondelich.

Like Locke, he wrote a practical book Talks to Teachers (1899), originally a series of lectures, giving practical advice to teachers. The difference is that psychology had now become, through his efforts, a science, and its principles could be used in educational theory.

It was here that he put forward his now famous theory on learning by doing. This was to heavily influence John Dewey, and the future of educational theory through to Kolb and others. The book doesn't pretend to have all the answers, as psychology is a science; teaching an art. But some psychological principles are clear.

Education is, above all, the organisation of acquired habits of conduct and tendencies to behaviour. Children should not be expected to learn by rote. Their experiences must be turned into useful and habitual behaviour through action. The learner must listen, but then take notes, experiment, write essays, measure, consult and apply. He recommends learning through work and the creation of real things or dealings with real people in a shop, to give you educational experiences beyond mere theory. He was in fact a firm advocate of vocationally oriented schools and work-based learning (relevant today or not?).

The supervision of the acquisition of habit is another of his principles. Habit is the enormous flywheel of society, and should be exercised until securely rooted. The result of almost all learning is this habitual behaviour. Association, interest, attention, will and motivation; these are James's driving forces in education. In addition there's memory, curiosity, emulation, constructiveness, pride, fear and love - all impulses that must be turned to good use.

This is not to say that he favoured a lazy, or what he called 'soft pedagogics'. He recognized that learning was sometimes hard, even arduous.

William James proved to be a turning point in the history of both psychology and educational theory. He set both off in a more orderly fashion, introducing the scientific study of the mind as applied to learning. This has since proved to be by far the most fruitful approach to education and learning theory. In particular, his emphasis on learning by doing still reverberates through Dewey, Kolb and others.

Thus far we have considered the mind and body with respect to their nature and contents. It is quite as important to understand them in what may be called their dynamic aspects, with reference to their development, both in the individual and the race, and to the relation of the two series, the ontogenetic and the phylogenetic, to one another. The discovery of the laws of development is one of the chief aims of genetic science, and in our practical science of man, we are most of all concerned with such principles. The most general formulation of all the facts of development that we yet possess is contained in the law of recapitulation. This law declares that the individual, in his development, passes through stages similar to those through which the race has passed, and in the same order; that the human individual of the higher races, for example, in the brief period from the earliest moment of life to maturity, passes through or represents all the stages of life, through which the race has passed from that of the single-celled animal to that of present adult civilised man. The recapitulatory process is sometimes obscured; stages overlap, or become dissociated; the individual must sometimes recount thousands of years of his racial history in a day or year; environment complicates and modifies the process in ways still quite unknown; but in a general way the individual may be said to recapitulate the race. Functions and organs, both physical and mental — interests, habits, physical traits and forms — develop, flourish for a time, and then disappear, or are taken up into higher stages and are transformed, the lower seeming to serve as a stimulus for the next higher stage. The recapitulatory stages are best marked in the earliest periods of the embryonic life, when stages as wholes may be said to correspond with some fidelity to racial steps. In the later periods, they are more likely to appear as fragments, or as , indications, in this or that function, of racial periods. In the embryonic stage, organs unquestionably connected with primitive life in the sea develop for a time, and are then transformed. The gill-slits may be mentioned as an example. Without this stage many of the higher organs would not appear, for out of the gill-slits important organs grow. From them rises the thymus gland ; the mouth is probably formed by a union of one pair of them, the olfactory organs from another pair ; the middle and outer parts of the ear from other parts. In early infancy there are traces of a stage of arboreal life, overlaid by later traits. The grasping movements of the infant, habits of climbing, and many physical traits, indicate that the infant is then passing through a stage of life, not unlike that still lived by our nearest relatives among the simians, and which exists in the child because our ancestors passed through such a stage. Later, the interests and habits of the child are distinctly akin to to those of primitive and savage man. Both in the life of feeling and of the intellect the child and the savage have much in common. Play shows the marks of racial steps ; for the child, quite of his own initiative, reproduces, in his free activities, many of the habits and traits of earlier stages of life than that into which he is born. The theory that play is practice for future occupation is, therefore, but a partial view. Play
exploits the stages through which man has passed, and, in the play life of the child, instincts ripen and decay, and are superseded by others, in an order quite unintelligible, unless the law of recapitulation be invoked
to explain it. Even in the later periods of childhood the racial steps are by no means entirely broken up nor obliterated. The period from eight to twelve clearly suggests a well-defined concomitant stage in racial development.
This period in the life of the child is, as it were, a culmination of one stage of development. The child is then relatively well established in a habit of life which serves his needs admirably, and in which he appears well adjusted to his environment in every way. He suggests now a period in which the race was for a long time stable, living in a warm climate, having simple habits; when life was so simple and easy that the young matured early, and were able to leave the parental care and to shift for themselves. Following the period of stability, both in the individual and in the race, is a very different stage. A new layer has been added, represented in the individual by adolescence, and in the race by all the higher stages of civilisation. In the individual, adolescence is marked by profound upheaval of all the elements of the mental life, by the sudden influx of new interests,
deepened feelings, and a wider outlook upon life. New relations among the mental elements are established, and the mind seems to find a new centre. No one can maintain, however, that the parallel between the individual and the race is as precise and definite as the law of recapitulation would of itself demand. Other laws must be at work according to which the mode of development of the individual is modified. The period of growth has gradually lengthened in the human species, so that, in succeeding generations, the child tends to pass through longer and longer periods during which he is plastic to the influence of his environment, and to his own nascent
powers. His progress in one direction and another is now accelerated, now retarded. Many functions which, in the race, have followed physical maturity, now appear before the onset of puberty. At the time of adolescence, the child becomes especially susceptible to the effects of his environment, and now, while all the forces of civilisation are brought to bear upon him, he is carried for a time beyond the point of the present stage of civilisation, and becomes the promise of what the race may be in the future, when it shall be able to hold and organise the advance that adolescence points out. Growth, from this plastic period of adolescence on to maturity, is thus in a sense a fall from a higher state, for of many promises of the individual but few at the best can be fulfilled. Habit becomes hardened, interests are specialised and narrowed. This is the critical point, both for the individual
and the race. If our species ever degenerate it will not be through lack of knowledge and culture, nor from relaxation of industries, but because of the progessive failure of youth to develop normally to maximal maturity.
From this point of view the development of the child becomes one of the greatest scientific problems. We can say that childhood, left to itself, tends to recapitulate the race. It is largely the traditions of the adult, and the influence of environment, and the ideals of the society into which the child is born which suppress, modify and obliterate his inheritance, and obscure the recapitulatory steps.

G. Stanley Hall is a good example of assimilation with minimal accommodation. Darwin's idea of development through a sequence of forms of increasing complexity was transferred intact from the species to the individual, but his insistence on the gradualness of change (a feature incompatible with stages) was dropped without notice. (The currently-debated concept of "punctuated equilibrium" in natural selection, which better matches stage theories and derives from similar principles, was a much later refinement.) Such omissions need not proceed from ignorance: Hall's belief in qualitative shifts in human behavior during maturation was well-based
in instructional experience, even if it got little direct support from his recapitulation theory. The utility for Hall of the phylogenic analogy was in its implication of an innate biological program for development, which could be disrupted but not accelerated or extended. In his book Adolescence (Hall, 1904, vol. 2), he makes (with respect to knowledge of nature) a classic statement of the developmentalist position: "... revelation, although slow, is sure, because it comes by growth and does not depend upon the solutions of specific problems". (p. 145). The concept that the child relives the history of the species has this pedagogical advantage (despite its flaws as a literal fact): childhood is seen as analogous in complexity and capability to a state that, while less developed than "modern man", has capabilities far beyond that of other animals. The respect for children's minds implied by this is especially strong if "childlike" abilities are seen as being redirected during maturation (e.g., into adult imagination) rather than discarded. Hall's biggest contribution is his insistence that the fundamental differences in
children's thinking from that of adults must be used as the basis for education, not ignored or seen as failings to be suppressed. Hall's racism and sexism, while consistent with his theory, are not necessary consequences of it, being based on separate additional assumptions about genetic racial isolation and the mental correlates of sexual dimorphism that have been found to be incorrect. I find Hall's educational prescription generally attractive. Compared to the mental/physical sadism of Dr. Squeer's academy (Dickens' genius only embellished a too-common reality) or the futile chaos of some contemporary schools, a regimen of playschool followed by scouting/sports/ crafts/theater/folktales/naturestudy/art/history seems quite humane (and not far from the methods I used with my own children). Hall's vigorous criticism of the educational orthodoxy of his contemporaries [of which I can mention only a small fraction here] includes a variety of points that seem not only well-taken but modern, such as concern that exclusive reliance on concrete words and apparatus by a school cripples its students in imagination, abstract thinking, and intellectual or poetic expression. The sophistication of his position has been overlooked by current reviews (cf. White in Parke et al, 1994). Even so suspect a thesis as Hall's aversion to "precocious" reading (and, even more, composition) seems insightful rather than naive when considered in the context of his championship of the need for mastery of authentic and expressive language based on actual experience. His statement (Hall, 1904, p. 461) that "the printed page must not be too suddenly or too early thrust between the child and life" points out a real danger, as does his devastating criticism (p. 462) that "in some schools teachers seem to be conducting correspondence classes with their own pupils". Hall doesn't oppose youthful reading or writing instruction per se, just the practice of insisting on it too early and in excess. In a footnote on the same page he goes on to say: "Of course the pupils must write, and write well, just as they must read, and read much; ... [However,] the young do not learn to write by writing, but by reading and hearing. To become a good writer one must read, feel, think, experience, until he has something to say that others want to hear." So there is much more to Hall's educational system than just letting children "ripen" developmentally. A good example of his demanding view of educator responsibility is his analysis of the implications of teenage slang: "Slang commonly expresses a moral judgement and falls into ethical categories. It usually concerns ideas, sentiment, and will, has a psychic content, and is never, like the language of school, a mere picture of objects of sense or a description of acts. To restate it in correct English would be a course in ethics, courtesy, taste, logical predication and opposition, honesty, self-possession, modesty, and just the ideal and non-presentation [i.e., abstract] mental content youth most needs, and that the sensuous [i.e., concrete] presentation methods of teaching have neglected. Youth has been left to meet these high needs alone, and the prevalence of these crude forms is an indictment of the delinquency of pedagogues in not teaching their pupils to develop and use their intellect properly." (Hall, 1904, p. 469) Hall's prescription of adult reading aloud of the classics of history, fiction, and poetry to elementary-age students as the foundation of language study (rather than Dick-and-Jane reading or daily-essay "busy work" by the students themselves) absolves him from any suspicions of wanting to "dumb down" the elementary curriculum. It even shows some kinship to Vygotsky in its use of advanced societal cultural products to familiarize students with examples of the history, behavioral archetypes, modes of expression, and major conclusions of the society they are to enter. But for Hall this program is intended to provide an expanded sphere of experience which will later provide material for high-level thinking, not to direct immediate attention to concepts as such, even such traditional ones as grammar, which he scorns: "... it always was more or less of a school-made artifact and an alien yoke and has become increasingly so as English has grown great and free". (Hall, 1904, p. 459)
The program for science teaching (Hall, 1904, p. 181) is the same: "We must have an introduction to science that touches rather lightly on nearly all the great hypotheses, frontier questions, and larger syntheses over the whole field ..." Note that the method used is a guided tour of the high points of science, not do-it-yourself knowledge construction. Hall also encourages the telling of stories of great scientists, as well as clear descriptions of the applications of science, to engage the interests of young people and provide a context which will make later work on precise description welcome. He suggests a list of nature topics and ways to approach them educationally, showing in each case careful insight into the typical psychological condition of students at various ages and why they will be interested. As with his concerns about early writing, Hall's objection to early use of mathematics is rooted in how heavy-handed externally-imposed abstractions "violate the basal law of psychic growth, ignore the deep springs of natural interest, and attempt to force a precocity against which the instincts of youth, so much wiser and truer and older than their consciousness, happily revolt". (Hall, 1904, p. 150) In a telling insight, Hall (1904, p. 149) compares the effects of premature instruction in mathematics to the damage done to some sciences [e.g., psychology!] by blind use of mathematical methods in areas for which the structural knowledge had not yet been developed enough to make such precision meaningful. Granting Hall's larger, concept-providing context shown above for both language and science, a description of his instructional philosophy would be incomplete without acknowledging the predominate component of non-conceptual activity he prescribes. While he would have the teacher keep an eye on later relevance, he would have most student time spent doing, seeing, hearing, interacting -- not in conscious conceptual thinking. As Hall (1904, pp. 451-452) says: "The hand is never so near the brain." and "the chief mental training from about eight to twelve is arbitrary memorization, drill, habituation, with only limited appeal to understanding". It is unfortunate that posterity seems to have picked up only this side of his prescription, while ignoring the tell-them-the-big-picture approach that brings such activities to life and prepares them for incorporation into adult activity structures. The basically-irrelevant factual error in Hall's "ontogeny recapitulates philogeny" slogan should not be used to obscure the accuracy of his insights into how and why to match the instructional process to the capabilities and interests of children. This was a failure to correctly (or at least fully) explain ontogeny, not a failure to accurately observe it. That the pattern of development differs between the phylogenic and ontogenic time scales does not disprove the existence of qualitative stages in individual mental development or undermine the value of Hall's educational advice, which was derived from close observation of actual student development patterns; Hall's mistake was as an evolutionist rather than as an educator, although the failure of an exact evolution analogy supports a more hopeful position than he held on possible acceleration and flexibility in mental development. We would benefit more by recapturing the part we have thrown away as "too grown-up" and by figuring out how to accelerate development where possible so most people are able to cover more ground.

John Dewey: I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race. This process begins unconsciously almost at birth, and is continually shaping the individual's powers, saturating his consciousness, forming his habits, training his ideas, and arousing his feelings and emotions. Through this unconscious education the individual gradually comes to share in the intellectual and moral resources which humanity has succeeded in getting together. He becomes an inheritor of the funded capital of civilization. The most formal and technical education in the world cannot safely depart from this general process. It can only organize it or differentiate it in some particular direction.

I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child's powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself. Through these demands he is stimulated to act as a member of a unity, to emerge from his original narrowness of action and feeling, and to conceive of himself from the standpoint of the welfare of the group to which he belongs. Through the responses which others make to his own activities he comes to know what these mean in social terms. The value which they have is reflected back into them. For instance, through the response which is made to the child's instinctive babblings the child comes to know what those babblings mean; they are transformed into articulate language and thus the child is introduced into the consolidated wealth of ideas and emotions which are now summed up in language.

I believe that this educational process has two sides-one psychological and one sociological; and that neither can be subordinated to the other or neglected without evil results following. Of these two sides, the psychological is the basis. The child's own instincts and powers furnish the material and give the starting point for all education. Save as the efforts of the educator connect with some activity which the child is carrying on of his own initiative independent of the educator, education becomes reduced to a pressure from without. It may, indeed, give certain external results, but cannot truly be called educative. Without insight into the psychological structure and activities of the individual, the educative process will, therefore, be haphazard and arbitrary. If it chances to coincide with the child's activity it will get a leverage; if it does not, it will result in friction, or disintegration, or arrest of the child nature.

I believe that knowledge of social conditions, of the present state of civilization, is necessary in order properly to interpret the child's powers. The child has his own instincts and tendencies, but we do not know what these mean until we can translate them into their social equivalents. We must be able to carry them back into a social past and see them as the inheritance of previous race activities. We must also be able to project them into the future to see what their outcome and end will be. In the illustration just used, it is the ability to see in the child's babblings the promise and potency of a future social intercourse and conversation which enables one to deal in the proper way with that instinct.

I believe that the psychological and social sides are organically related and that education cannot be regarded as a compromise between the two, or a superimposition of one upon the other. We are told that the psychological definition of education is barren and formal--that it gives us only the idea of a development of all the mental powers without giving us any idea of the use to which these powers are put. On the other hand, it is urged that the social definition of education, as getting adjusted to civilization, makes of it a forced and external process, and results in subordinating the freedom of the individual to a preconceived social and political status.

I believe that each of these objections is true when urged against one side isolated from the other. In order to know what a power really is we must know what its end, use, or function is; and this we cannot know save as we conceive of the individual as active in social relationships. But, on the other hand, the only possible adjustment which we can give to the child under existing conditions, is that which arises through putting him in complete possession of all his powers. With the advent of democracy and modern industrial conditions, it is impossible to foretell definitely just what civilization will be twenty years from now. Hence it is impossible to prepare the child for any precise set of conditions. To prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities; that his eye and ear and hand may be tools ready to command, that his judgment may be capable of grasping the conditions under which it has to work, and the executive forces be trained to act economically and efficiently. It is impossible to reach this sort of adjustment save as constant regard is had to the individual's own powers, tastes, and interests-say, that is, as education is continually converted into psychological terms.

In sum, I believe that the individual who is to be educated is a social individual and that society is an organic union of individuals. If we eliminate the social factor from the child we are left only with an abstraction; if we eliminate the individual factor from society, we are left only with an inert and lifeless mass. Education, therefore, must begin with a psychological insight into the child's capacities, interests, and habits. It must be controlled at every point by reference to these same considerations. These powers, interests, and habits must be continually interpreted--we must know what they mean. They must be translated into terms of their social equivalents--into terms of what they are capable of in the way of social service.

I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life in which all those agencies are concentrated that will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends.

I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

I believe that the school must represent present life-life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the playground.

I believe that education which does not occur through forms of life, or that are worth living for their own sake, is always a poor substitute for the genuine reality and tends to cramp and to deaden.

I believe that the school, as an institution, should simplify existing social life; should reduce it, as it were, to an embryonic form. Existing life is so complex that the child cannot be brought into contact with it without either confusion or distraction; he is either overwhelmed by the multiplicity of activities which are going on, so that he loses his own power of orderly reaction, or he is so stimulated by these various activities that his powers are prematurely called into play and he becomes either unduly specialized or else disintegrated.

I believe that as such simplified social life, the school life should grow gradually out of the home life; that it should take up and continue the activities with which the child is already familiar in the home.

I believe that it should exhibit these activities to the child, and reproduce them in such ways that the child will gradually learn the meaning of them, and be capable of playing his own part in relation to them.

I believe that this is a psychological necessity, because it is the only way of securing continuity in the child's growth, the only way of giving a back-ground of past experience to the new ideas given in school.

I believe that it is also a social necessity because the home is the form of social life in which the child has been nurtured and in connection with which he has had his moral training. It is the business of the school to deepen and extend his sense of the values bound up in his home life.

I believe that much of present education fails because it neglects this fundamental principle of the school as a form of community life. It conceives the school as a place where certain information is to be given, where certain lessons are to be ]earned, or where certain habits are to be formed. The value of these is conceived as lying largely in the remote future; the child must do these things for the sake of something else he is to do; they are mere preparation. As a result they do not become a part of the life experience of the child and so are not truly educative.

I believe that the moral education centers upon this conception of the school as a mode of social life, that the best and deepest moral training is precisely that which one gets through having to enter into proper relations with others in a unity of work and thought. The present educational systems, so far as they destroy or neglect this unity, render it difficult or impossible to get any genuine, regular moral training.

I believe that the child should be stimulated and controlled in his work through the life of the community.

I believe that under existing conditions far too much of the stimulus and control proceeds from the teacher, because of neglect of the idea of the school as a form of social life.

I believe that the teacher's place and work in the school is to be interpreted from this same basis. The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these influences.

I believe that the discipline of the school should proceed from the life of the school as a whole and not directly from the teacher.

I believe that the teacher's business is simply to determine on the basis of larger experience and riper wisdom, how the discipline of life shall come to the child.

I believe that all questions of the grading of the child and his promotion should be determined by reference to the same standard. Examinations are of use only so far as they test the child's fitness for social life and reveal the place in which he can be of the most service and where he can receive the most help.

I believe that the social life of the child is the basis of concentration, or correlation, in all his training or growth. The social life gives the unconscious unity and the background of all his efforts and of all his attainments.

I believe that the subject-matter of the school curriculum should mark a gradual differentiation out of the primitive unconscious unity of social life.

I believe that we violate the child's nature and render difficult the best ethical results, by introducing the child too abruptly to a number of special studies, of reading, writing, geography, etc., out of relation to this social life.

I believe, therefore, that the true center of correlation on the school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child's own social activities.

I believe that education cannot be unified in the study of science, or so called nature study, because apart from human activity, nature itself is not a unity; nature in itself is a number of diverse objects in space and time, and to attempt to make it the center of work by itself, is to introduce a principle of radiation rather than one of concentration.

I believe that literature is the reflex expression and interpretation of social experience; that hence it must follow upon and not precede such experience. It, therefore, cannot be made the basis, although it may be made the summary of unification.

I believe once more that history is of educative value in so far as it presents phases of social life and growth. It must be controlled by reference to social life. When taken simply as history it is thrown into the distant past and becomes dead and inert. Taken as the record of man's social life and progress it becomes full of meaning. I believe, however, that it cannot be so taken excepting as the child is also introduced directly into social life.

I believe accordingly that the primary basis of education is in the child's powers at work along the same general constructive lines as those which have brought civilization into being.

I believe that the only way to make the child conscious of his social heritage is to enable him to perform those fundamental types of activity which make civilization what it is.

I believe, therefore, in the so-called expressive or constructive activities as the center of correlation.

I believe that this gives the standard for the place of cooking, sewing, manual training, etc., in the school.

I believe that they are not special studies which are to be introduced over and above a lot of others in the way of relaxation or relief, or as additional accomplishments. I believe rather that they represent, as types, fundamental forms of social activity; and that it is possible and desirable that the child's introduction into the more formal subjects of the curriculum be through the medium of these activities.

I believe that the study of science is educational in so far as it brings out the materials and processes which make social life what it is.

I believe that one of the greatest difficulties in the present teaching of science is that the material is presented in purely objective form, or is treated as a new peculiar kind of experience which the child can add to that which he has already had. In reality, science is of value because it gives the ability to interpret and control the experience already had. It should be introduced, not as so much new subject-matter, but as showing the factors already involved in previous experience and as furnishing tools by which that experience can be more easily and effectively regulated.

I believe that at present we lose much of the value of literature and language studies because of our elimination of the social element. Language is almost always treated in the books of pedagogy simply as the expression of thought. It is true that language is a logical instrument, but it is fundamentally and primarily a social instrument. Language is the device for communication; it is the tool through which one individual comes to share the ideas and feelings of others. When treated simply as a way of getting individual information, or as a means of showing off what one has learned, it loses its social motive and end.

I believe that there is, therefore, no succession of studies in the ideal school curriculum. If education is life, all life has, from the outset, a scientific aspect, an aspect of art and culture, and an aspect of communication. It cannot, therefore, be true that the proper studies for one grade are mere reading and writing, and that at a later grade, reading, or literature, or science, may be introduced. The progress is not in the succession of studies but in the development of new attitudes towards, and new interests in, experience.

I believe finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing.

I believe that to set up any end outside of education, as furnishing its goal and standard, is to deprive the educational process of much of its meaning and tends to make us rely upon false and external stimuli in dealing with the child.

I believe that the question of method is ultimately reducible to the question of the order of development of the child's powers and interests. The law for presenting and treating material is the law implicit within the child's own nature. Because this is so I believe the following statements are of supreme importance as determining the spirit in which education is carried on:

1. I believe that the active side precedes the passive in the development of the child nature; that expression comes before conscious impression; that the muscular development precedes the sensory; that movements come before conscious sensations; I believe that consciousness is essentially motor or impulsive; that conscious states tend to project themselves in action.

I believe that the neglect of this principle is the cause of a large part of the waste of time and strength in school work. The child is thrown into a passive, receptive, or absorbing attitude. The conditions are such that he is not permitted to follow the law of his nature; the result is friction and waste.

I believe that ideas (intellectual and rational processes) also result from action and devolve for the sake of the better control of action. What we term reason is primarily the law of orderly or effective action. To attempt to develop the reasoning powers, the powers of judgment, without reference to the selection and arrangement of means in action, is the fundamental fallacy in our present methods of dealing with this matter. As a result we present the child with arbitrary symbols. Symbols are a necessity in mental development, but they have their place as tools for economizing effort; presented by themselves they are a mass of meaningless and arbitrary ideas imposed from without.

2. I believe that the image is the great instrument of instruction. What a child gets out of any subject presented to him is simply the images which he himself forms with regard to it.

I believe that if nine tenths of the energy at present directed towards making the child learn certain things, were spent in seeing to it that the child was forming proper images, the work of instruction would be indefinitely facilitated.

I believe that much of the time and attention now given to the preparation and presentation of lessons might be more wisely and profitably expended in training the child's power of imagery and in seeing to it that he was continually forming definite, vivid, and growing images of the various subjects with which he comes in contact in his experience.

3. I believe that interests are the signs and symptoms of growing power. I believe that they represent dawning capacities. Accordingly the constant and careful observation of interests is of the utmost importance for the educator.

I believe that these interests are to be observed as showing the state of development which the child has reached.

I believe that only through the continual and sympathetic observation of childhood's interests can the adult enter into the child's life and see what it is ready for, and upon what material it could work most readily and fruitfully.

I believe that these interests are neither to be humored nor repressed. To repress interest is to substitute the adult for the child, and so to weaken intellectual curiosity and alertness, to suppress initiative, and to deaden interest. To humor the interests is to substitute the transient for the permanent. The interest is always the sign of some power below; the important thing is to discover this power. To humor the interest is to fail to penetrate below the surface and its sure result is to substitute caprice and whim for genuine interest.

I believe that to endeavor to stimulate or arouse the emotions apart from their corresponding activities, is to introduce an unhealthy and morbid state of mind.

I believe that if we can only secure right habits of action and thought, with reference to the good, the true, and the beautiful, the emotions will for the most part take care of themselves.

I believe that next to deadness and dullness, formalism and routine, our education is threatened with no greater evil than sentimentalism.

I believe that this sentimentalism is the necessary result of the attempt to divorce feeling from action.

I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.

I believe that all reforms which rest simply upon the enactment of law, or the threatening of certain penalties, or upon changes in mechanical or outward arrangements, are transitory and futile.

I believe that education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction.

I believe that this conception has due regard for both the individualistic and socialistic ideals. It is duly individual because it recognizes the formation of a certain character as the only genuine basis of right living. It is socialistic because it recognizes that this right character is not to be formed by merely individual precept, example, or exhortation, but rather by the influence of a certain form of institutional or community life upon the individual, and that the social organism through the school, as its organ, may determine ethical results.

I believe that in the ideal school we have the reconciliation of the individualistic and the institutional ideals.

I believe that the community's duty to education is, therefore, its paramount moral duty. By law and punishment, by social agitation and discussion, society can regulate and form itself in a more or less haphazard and chance way. But through education society can formulate its own purposes, can organize its own means and resources, and thus shape itself with definiteness and economy in the direction in which it wishes to move.

I believe that when society once recognizes the possibilities in this direction, and the obligations which these possibilities impose, it is impossible to conceive of the resources of time, attention, and money which will be put at the disposal of the educator.

I believe that it is the business of every one interested in education to insist upon the school as the primary and most effective interest of social progress and reform in order that society may be awakened to realize what the school stands for, and aroused to the necessity of endowing the educator with sufficient equipment properly to perform his task.

I believe that education thus conceived marks the most perfect and intimate union of science and art conceivable in human experience.

I believe that the art of thus giving shape to human powers and adapting them to social service, is the supreme art; one calling into its service the best of artists; that no insight, sympathy, tact, executive power, is too great for such service.

I believe that with the growth of psychological service, giving added insight into individual structure and laws of growth; and with growth of social science, adding to our knowledge of the right organization of individuals, all scientific resources can be utilized for the purposes of education.

I believe that when science and art thus join hands the most commanding motive for human action will be reached; the most genuine springs of human conduct aroused and the best service that human nature is capable of guaranteed.

I believe, finally, that the teacher is engaged, not simply in the training of individuals, but in the formation of the proper social life.

I believe that every teacher should realize the dignity of his calling; that he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of proper social order and the securing of the right social growth.

I believe that in this way the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God.

How to cite this piece: Dewey, John (1897) 'My pedagogic creed', The School Journal, Volume LIV, Number 3 (January 16, 1897), pages 77-80. Also available in the informal education archives, http://www.infed.org/archives/e-texts/e-dew-pc.htm.

JEAN PIAGET (1)
Jean Piaget, was a scientist (genetics, then psychology) who investigated mental development with only occasional direct attention to educational practices. Piaget understood Darwin better than Hall, but used him less. This reflects in part the timing of his work, which started just as the neo-Darwinian synthesis of evolution and genetics was achieved, but it also reflects his focus on the nature of mental development in modern children, uncluttered by theories about evolutionary causation and by any cultural factors except those (such as language) which are universally distributed and rooted in biological predispositions. Even language is seen as of marginal importance, primarily indicating development rather than influencing it. Because he was a scientist rather than an educator, Piaget was not content with suggestive but imprecise analogies such as "ontogeny recapitulates philogeny", but instead carefully investigated and documented the actual patterns of mental development in children (e.g., Paiget & Inhelder, 1969). His experimental results supported the existence of stages of mental development similar to those perceived by Hall, although his focus was on the emergence of specific capabilities rather than on the tactical questions of designing an appropriate educational path to guide children into successful adulthood.

In fact, the most striking difference between Hall and Piaget is the lack of attention Piaget gives to the adult world, except perhaps as a source of disturbance when depended-upon supports are not supplied. This tendency is increased by Piaget's focus on mental traits related to basic physical activities and "logico-mathematical" operations rather than messier issues (history, nonintuitive science, etc.) which cannot be approached solely through direct experience. The emphasis is on the emergence of intelligence rather than the acquisition of external knowledge. The extent and nature of the interaction between these two processes is the central area of dispute among the three developmentalists examined here, with Piaget and Vogotsky diverging in opposite directions from Hall's position on the relative leadership roles of innate and social factors.

Piaget clearly sees maturation (and direct experience) as preceding instruction as a source of children's knowledge, although this issue is clouded a little by his emphasis (stronger late in his career) on the importance of "constructive" activity by students, in which teachers should "create the situations and construct the initial devices which present useful problems to the child" and "provide counter-examples that compel reflection and reconsideration of over-hasty solutions" (Piaget, 1969, p. 16). While still minimizing the role of adult society and existing knowledge, this final position does admit at least one adult to the process of a child's education. In fact, it is a quite reasonable description of a methodology (guided discovery) whose utility in many places no one would dispute. However, any confidence in Piaget's assertion that such discovery should be the sole mode of instruction is shaken by his reference on the following page to New Math as "such a notable advance over traditional methods". While Piaget shares Hall's disdain for directly providing abstract theory to children (although I think that Piaget would see this more as futile than as harmful), they seem to me to differ more than agree on what should actually be done in schools, with Piaget minimizing the drill and practice which Hall saw as the main activity, and with Hall providing adult-world "ready-made solutions" (though without much theory) which would undermine the discovery processes Piaget sees as vital.

L. S. VYGOTSKY
Lev S. Vygotsky not only mastered Darwin's explanation of phylogenic development, but was kept from an unbalanced use of it by his even-greater reliance on the Marx/Engel explanation of social development. This theory basis was well matched to the needs of a psychology of human development, since it encouraged explanations based on how the interaction of society and biology drive individual development (analogous to the way the interaction of society and the physical world drive economic and cultural development).

In both cases, Vygotsky held that it is the use and elaboration of complex tools (language/concepts and the means of production, respectively) in a social context that drives development in the corresponding area. The period after the revolution and civil war also created an expansive sense of the possibilities for educational reform by directing attention to the success of recent massive changes in intellectual, material, and political conditions. The great emphasis communism has always placed on education also helped it attract the attention of some of the best minds of the new Soviet society.

Vygotsky was well suited to take advantage of the opportunities this situation presented. After an exuberant youthful start in which he sounded rather like both what would now be called a radical constructivist ("... parents and teachers have just as much power or right to prescribe to this new being as to tell the stars what path to follow ... the real secret of education lies in not teaching ... The student educates himself." [Vygotsky, 1997, p. 339]) and at the same time a behaviorist ("... at its very foundation education ultimately always rests upon the mechanism of the conditioned reflex", [p. xvii of author's preface]), Vygotsky quickly worked out a coherent and persuasive theory of psychological development that is clearly developmentalist ("The development of these behaviors is characterized by complicated, qualitative transformations of one form into another ... the conception of maturation as a passive process cannot adequately explain these complex phenomena"), but with reservations and extensions: "The fact is that maturation per se is a secondary factor in the development of the most complex, unique forms of human behavior." (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 19)

The basis of Vygotsky's theory is that "human learning presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them" (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 88). Its central tenet is that "learning awakens a variety of internal developmental processes that are able to operate only when the child is interacting with people in his environment and in cooperation with his peers. Once these processes are internalized, they become part of the child's independent developmental achievement." (p. 90). Thus Vygotsky reverses Piaget's analysis, and sees instruction as causing "proximal" development rather than tagging along behind it; the child does not so much discover the world as absorb (and become transformed by) it. Note, however, that Vygotsky's zone-of-proximal-development analysis may often lead to the same instructional practices as Piaget's assimilation-leads-to accommodation principle, despite the substantial differences between their overall theoretical positions.

Vygotsky's analysis raises the stakes on educational decisions, since it implies that they will really have substantial effects, and that a more detailed program is needed than just provision of "playground" situations and restraint in teaching theories. Fortunately, much of the program can be provided naturally by the society in which the school is imbedded, which is to be welcomed into the classroom rather than guarded against, with students informed of (but not immediately expected to be able to independently recreate) the history, scientific knowledge, and current issues of their culture. Note the similarities to Hall. Vygotsky provides a comprehensive theoretical basis for the construction of an effective educational program, with some surprising conclusions. For example, children's play is seen not as rehearsal or escape but as a powerful mode of self/group-development supplementing instruction by providing a context in which action can be made to follow meaning, so that "play provides a much wider background for changes in needs and consciousness" than instruction, for which it provides a basis in many ways, such as rule consciousness and use of symbols (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 102).

Instruction holds a high place in Vygotsky's theory, however. He explicitly opposes the position that the "scientific" concepts delivered by instruction damage those naturally formed by uninstructed children: "We believe the two processes -- the development of spontaneous and nonspontaneous concepts -- are related to and constantly influence each other. They are parts of a single process: the development of concept formation, which is affected by varying external and internal conditions but is essentially a unitary process, not a conflict of antagonistic, mutually exclusive forms of mentation. Instruction is one of the principal sources of the schoolchild's concepts and is also a powerful force in directing their evolution; it determines the fate of his total mental development." (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 85 [my emphasis]).

The two types of concepts develop in different but converging courses: natural concepts start with familiar meanings but have no clear place in a mental structure (thus making abstraction difficult), while scientific concepts have only vague meanings to the child at first but have clearer relationships to other concepts (since that is how they are introduced). Vygotsky (1986, p. 108) offers this as an explanation of why a child often has more trouble solving formal logic problems using concepts developed informally ("Who is your brother's brother?") than those they acquired by instruction. During development, natural concepts acquire more structural connections (via abstract intermediary concepts introduced by instruction) while scientific concepts acquire more connotative connections to concrete actions (via observations of the concept's effect in action, especially when it touches already-known concrete objects). Thus the scientific and natural concept-development processes reinforce each other rather than compete. The other major theoretical insight that Vygotsky provided relevant to instruction (and to human psychology generally) is in the mutual interaction of language and thought. Vygotsky (1986, p. 125) expresses his thesis strongly: "Thought is not merely expressed in words: it comes into existence through them."

He approached the question through the study of the evolution of the meanings of words during the processes of both cultural and individual development (pp. 120- 130). Here he put his full understanding of Darwin to good use -- not by superficial analogy to somatic evolution or speculative hypotheses about long-past events, but by outlining a model of just how the meaning of words could change gradually and how explosive positive feedback could result between language, action, and thought. The initial invention and elaboration of language is thus seen as a part of the tool-development process which is believed, because of its strongly adaptive value, to be the main basis on which natural selection physically differentiated humans from their progenitors. While the historical aspect of this analysis is of great general importance (it is why humans differ so drama tically from pigeons), the immediate implications for instruction flow mainly from the way word meanings develop in individuals. Vygotsky points out that the simplicity of infant sentences is interrelated with the vagueness of the meanings associated with words at that point; since the child isn't yet capable of meaning much, one or two words at a time are plenty. As the child's ability to analyze and control the world grows, there is a corresponding growth of complexity and precision in language -- the mental toolkit of concepts becomes fuller and more differentiated. But a major spur to this growth and refinement of vocabulary is the possibilities revealed by combinations of existing words. In fact, the process of word/concept combination itself becomes a tool, and proves to be a very powerful one. This process continues until the set of mental tools (each closely associated with the word used to label, connect, and evoke it) is adequate to deal with the problems the person encounters in living. When provided concepts do not apply to actual encountered problems, they are forgotten (e.g., algebra for most people).

On the other hand, new problems may create the need for new concepts to handle them, increasing the importance of instruction. Bringing his theory to bear on instructional issues, Vygotsky pointed out that the difficulty of writing stems from the abstractness inherent in the loss of intonation and other oral methods of supplementing the meanings of the words themselves, making writing "as much harder than oral speech for the child as algebra is than arithmetic" (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 99; he cites the ease of writing during foreign language learning as showing the problem is not writing per se). Not that he saw this as a reason to avoid writing; in fact, Vygotsky urged appropriately-layered instruction in abstraction, praising grammar study precisely because it creates consciousness (and thus the potential for full mastery) of what had previously been an unconscious competence, with the result that the sophistication of oral speech itself increases in response – an example of a positive feedback loop.

This example illustrates the core of Vygotsky's instructional message: promote the development of children by providing concepts and activities which are beyond their current unaided capabilities but within their reach with some assistance, and don't fear theory or abstraction, but prepare the ground for it properly. One implication is that since a lesson can be within the zone of proximal development for many children even if they are not all at the same place in their mental development, detailed personalization of instruction is generally not needed. Reacting to these three stands of developmentalism, I find myself most impressed by Vygotsky's extension of the ideas Hall expressed in a simpler form at an earlier time. In addition to being based on a persuasive theoretical analysis, Vygotsky's prescriptions for instruction seem to be validated by the experience of successful teachers and to match the needs of modern societies to provide their members a large amount of knowledge structured in a sophisticated way. In fact, my own experience (in my youth and that of my children) is that a good abstract structure greatly increases the ease with which factual knowledge can be absorbed and retained.

There are also many places where Hall, Piaget, and Vygotsky agree with each other but differ from the orthodoxy of their time (and often of ours). These are mostly based on their common beliefs that: [a] the mental habits of the child should be used as components in a succession of restructurings, not erased and filled in with adult ones, and [b] there is substantial integration of the motor, intellectual, and emotional aspects of a child's development, indicating a need for a well-integrated curriculum. All this sounds like good advice to me.

1. Theory of Value: What knowledge and skills are worthwhile learning? What are the goals of education?
In order to keep pace with the ever increasing changes of technology, education should focus on the basic skills that will be needed to manage this technology (B, p. 136) These skills should continuously be updated as technology grows more complex. Skills in handling, seeing and imaging and symbolic operations(especially as they relate to technology) are also worthwhile learning. In addition, skills that incorporate necessary tools, such as language are also very important (13, p. 132). The goals of education, according to Bruner, are to free society and assist students in developing their full potential (Bruner, p. 129). To instruct students in how to use the tools, especially language, (which encodes reality by using grammar and vocabulary) instruments and technologies at their disposal to amplify and express their own powers. In this way, we increase our knowledge and our capacity to learn (B, p. 132). An additional goal of education should be for the student to experience cognitive and intellectual mastery. This was found to be very rewarding to students according to pedagogical experiments. Students realize that, as they learn, they are able to access information that they were previously unable to utilize. This reward and excitement perpetuates the student to learn even more. Educators should assist with this (B, p. 135).

2. Theory of Knowledge: What is knowledge? How is it different from belief? What is a mistake? What is a lie?
What is knowledge? Knowledge is not simply thinking and the result of intellectual activity and experience, it is the "internalizing of tools that are used within the child's culture" (GB, p. 109). It is characterized by the development of language to convey, in words or symbols, what is felt and known. Language is key to knowledge, it is the primary way that concepts can be taught and questioned. It is also the increasing ability to deal with a variety of activities simultaneously and sequentially (GB, p. I 10). How is knowledge different from belief?. I believe that Bruner would not see much difference between knowledge and belief. He felt that students learn best when their instructor leads them to discovering information on their own. As this is done, knowledge would first occur as a belief, that would later be validated by the instructor. What is a mistake? Because Bruner believes discovery learning, there is, inherently, a trial and error process that the child must go through. Mistakes are therefore simply alternative mental processes and a necessary part of learning. What is a lie? A lie, to Bruner, is anything that takes away from discovery learning, that does not capitalize on young learners who have the ability to learn anything and that does not utilize the technology and tools of our society.

3. Theory of Human Nature: What is a human being? How does it differ from other species? What are the limits of human potential?
What is a human being? A human being is one that has the ability to learn and grow. How do human beings differ from other species? Human beings differ from other species because the have the above capabilities. They are able to learn, grow, instruct, write, dance and be free. What are the limits of human potential? There are no limits to human potential. Anything can be taught to anyone at any age, the important factor is how it is taught. No matter the age, or stage of development as Piaget believed, there is an appropriate version that corresponds to that age-even if it is preparatory (B, p. 139).

4. Theory of Learning: What is learning? How are skills and knowledge acquired?
What is learning? Learning is an active, social process in which students construct new ideas or concepts based on their current knowledge. The student selects the information, forms hypothesis and then integrates this new material into their own existing knowledge and mental constructs (DJB, p.2). This is a continual process. Learning occurs in three stages: Enactive- in which children need to experience the concrete (manipulating objects in their hands, touching a real dog) in order to understand. Iconic-students are able to represent materials graphically or mentally (they can do basic addition problems in their heads) (M, p.215). Symbolic- students are able to use logic, higher order thinking skills and symbol systems (formulas, such as f--ma and understand statements like "too many cooks spoil the broth") (GB, p. 111).

How are skills and knowledge acquired? These things are not acquired gradually, but more in a staircase pattern which consists of spurts and rests. Spurts are caused by certain concepts "clicking", being understood. These "clicks" have to be mastered before others are acquired, before there is movement to the next step. These steps are not linked to age but more toward environment. Environments can slow down the sequence or speed it up (B, p. 133). Bruner felt that knowledge was best acquired when students were allowed to discover it on their own (Mi, p.464).

5. Theory of Transmission: Who is to teach? By what methods? What will the curriculum be?
Who is to teach? Everyone has something to teach. Many skills are taught to students through subtle interaction between their parents and members of their culture and society. When greater demands for knowledge are placed on the child, teachers in school are relied on for more formal education. He saw instructors as human events, not as transmission devices (Mi, p. 466) Our educational system can be seen as the sole agent of evolution, it is the sole means of providing instruction for our constantly changing society (B, p. 132). By what methods should we teach? During this time period, Piaget believed that children were only able to accept information at specific levels of development and at no time before. Bruner disagreed with this viewpoint explaining that, if materials are presented in an appropriate manner, they can be taught at any age. He believed that readiness was something that should be taught while providing opportunities for learning, not waited for (B, p. 135).

Discovery learning is most important. Interaction between students and their instructors was necessary (GB, p. 109). What will the curriculum be? "A curriculum should involve the mastery of skills that in turn lead to the mastery of still powerful ones" (B, p. 139). Bruner believed that curriculum should be organized in a spiral manner, each new concept building on what was previously learned (JB, p. 1). Mathematics is very important because it is one of the few disciplines, along with poetry, that is able to withstand change. These things, at their foundation, have remained relatively the same for centuries, while the rest of our world has grown and changed. Courses in visual design were also important to give teachers, as well as students, fresh viewpoints and new ways to analyze their environments (13, p. 13 8). There should be more emphasis on social and behavioral sciences rather than history. He felt that it was better for students to learn about what was possible and ahead of them, than to dwell on what had already been achieved. ffistory only serves to develop stylestyles of writing, dance, etc (B, p. 139).

6. Theory of Society: What is society? What institutions are involved in the educational process?
What is society? Society is the cultural group that humans depend on for survival This cultural group provides a pool of resources which are socially inherited and acquired (BAH, p. 3). Bruner believed that there was no such thing as human nature independent of culture. Culture is the great molder of thinking, each culture enables individuals to make sense o and Prosper according to their culture (GB, p. I 11).

7. Theory of Opportunity: Who is to be educated? Who is to be schooled?
Everyone has the potential to acquire knowledge, the key lies in the instruction.

8. Theory of Consensus: Why do people disagree? How is consensus achieved? Whose opinion takes precedence?
Why do people disagree? People disagree when their ideas are not in alignment with each other. When learning is in a discovery format, their may very well be times when there is disagreement, different people will see the same situation differently, however, it is then up to the instructor to guide students to the desired outcome. How is consensus obtained? Consensus is obtained when there is agreement from everyone about what a concept is. Whose opinion takes precedence? Every opinion is important and offers perspective into the issue, however, the instructor, or the more learned person's opinion would have a slight precedence over the others.

David Kolb
David A. Kolb's model of experiential learning can be found in many discussions of the theory and practice of adult education, informal education and lifelong learning. We set out the model, and examine its possibilities and problems. As Stephen Brookfield (1983: 16) has commented, writers in the field of experiential learning have tended to use the term in two contrasting senses. On the one hand the term is used to describe the sort of learning undertaken by students who are given a chance to acquire and apply knowledge, skills and feelings in an immediate and relevant setting. Experiential learning thus involves a, 'direct encounter with the phenomena being studied rather than merely thinking about the encounter, or only considering the possibility of doing something about it.' (Borzak 1981: 9 quoted in Brookfield 1983). This sort of learning is sponsored by an institution and might be used on training programmes for professions such as social work and teaching or in field study programmes such as those for social administration or geography courses.

The second type of experiential learning is 'education that occurs as a direct participation in the events of life' (Houle 1980: 221). Here learning is not sponsored by some formal educational institution but by people themselves. It is learning that is achieved through reflection upon everyday experience and is the way that most of us do our learning.

Much of the literature on experiential learning, as Peter Jarvis comments (1995: 75), 'is actually about learning from primary experience, that is learning through sense experiences'. He continues, 'unfortunately it has tended to exclude the idea of secondary experience entirely'. Jarvis also draws attention to the different uses of the term, citing Weil and McGill's (1989: 3) categorization of experiential learning into four 'villages':

Village One is concerned particularly with assessing and accrediting learning from life and work experience....

Village Two focuses on experiential learning as a basis for bringing change in the structures... of post-school education....

Village Three emphasizes experiential learning as a basis for group consciousness raising....

These 'villages' of approaches retain a focus on primary experience (and do not really problematize the notion of experience itself). Jarvis (1995: 77-80) makes the case for a concern for secondary or indirect experience (occurring through linguistic communication).

While there have been various additions to the literature, such as the above, it is the work of David A. Kolb (1976; 1981; 1984) and his associate Roger Fry (Kolb and Fry 1975) that still provides the central reference point for discussion. Following on from Kolb's work there has been a growing literature around experiential learning and this is indicative of greater attention to this area by practitioners - particularly in the area of higher education. David Kolb's interest lay in exploring the processes associated with making sense of concrete experiences - and the different styles of learning that may be involved. In this he makes explicit use of the work of Piaget, Dewey and Lewin.

David A. Kolb is Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Weatheread School of Management. He joined the School in 1976. Born in 1939, Kolb received his Batchelor of Arts from Knox College in 1961, his MA from Harvard in 1964 and his PhD from Harvard in 1967. Besides his work on experiential learning, David A. Kolb is also known for his contribution to thinking around organizational behaviour (1995a; 1995b). He has an interest in the nature of individual and social change, experiential learning, career development and executive and professional education.

David A. Kolb (with Roger Fry) created his famous model out of four elements: concrete experience, observation and reflection, the formation of abstract concepts and testing in new situations. He represented these in the famous experiential learning circle (after Kurt Lewin):

Kolb and Fry (1975) argue that the learning cycle can begin at any one of the four points - and that it should really be approached as a continuous spiral. However, it is suggested that the learning process often begins with a person carrying out a particular action and then seeing the effect of the action in this situation. Following this, the second step is to understand these effects in the particular instance so that if the same action was taken in the same circumstances it would be possible to anticipate what would follow from the action. In this pattern the third step would be understanding the general principle under which the particular instance falls.

Generalizing may involve actions over a range of circumstances to gain experience beyond the particular instance and suggest the general principle. Understanding the general principle does not imply, in this sequence, an ability to express the principle in a symbolic medium, that is, the ability to put it into words. It implies only the ability to see a connection between the actions and effects over a range of circumstances. (Coleman 1976: 52).

An educator who has learnt in this way may well have various rules of thumb or generalizations about what to do in different situations. They will be able to say what action to take when say, there is tension between two people in a group but they will not be able to verbalize their actions in psychodynamic or sociological terms. There may thus be difficulties about the transferability of their learning to other settings and situations.

When the general principle is understood, the last step, according to David Kolb is its application through action in a new circumstance within the range of generalization. In some representations of experiential learning these steps, (or ones like them), are sometimes represented as a circular movement. In reality, if learning has taken place the process could be seen as a spiral. The action is taking place in a different set of circumstances and the learner is now able to anticipate the possible effects of the action.

Two aspects can be seen as especially noteworthy: the use of concrete, 'here-and-now' experience to test ideas; and use of feedback to change practices and theories (Kolb 1984: 21-22). Kolb joins these with Dewey to emphasize the developmental nature of the exercise, and with Piaget for an appreciation of cognitive development. He named his model so as to emphasize the link with Dewey, Lewin and Piaget, and to stress the role experience plays in learning. He wished to distinguish it from cognitive theories of the learning process (see Coleman 1976).

David Kolb and Roger Fry (1975: 35-6) argue that effective learning entails the possession of four different abilities (as indicated on each pole of their model): concrete experience abilities, reflective observation abilities, abstract conceptualization abilities and active experimentation abilities. Few us can approach the 'ideal' in this respect and tend, they suggest, to develop a strength in, or orientation to, in one of the poles of each dimension. As a result they developed a learning style inventory (Kolb 1976) which was designed to place people on a line between concrete experience and abstract conceptualization; and active experimentation and reflective observation. Using this Kolb and Fry proceeded to identify four basic learning styles.

When Howard Gardner's book, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (Basic Books, 1983) burst on the scene, it seemed to answer many questions for experienced teachers. We all had students who didn't fit the mold; we knew the students were bright, but they didn't excel on tests. Gardner's claim that there are several different kinds of intelligence gave us and others involved with teaching and learning a way of beginning to understand those students. We would look at what they could do well, instead of what they could not do.

Later Gardner books, such as The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach (Basic Books, 1991) and Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice (Basic Books, 1993) helped us understand how multiple intelligences could help us teach and evaluate our students in new and better ways.

Howard Gardner, Ph.D. is a professor at Harvard University and the author of many books and articles. His theory of multiple intelligences has challenged long-held assumptions about intelligence -- especially about a single measure of intelligence. Dr. Gardner also co-directs Harvard's Project Zero.

Howard Gardner first identified and introduced to us seven different kinds of intelligence in Frames of Mind.

* Linguistic intelligence: a sensitivity to the meaning and order of words.
* Logical-mathematical intelligence: ability in mathematics and other complex logical systems.
* Musical intelligence: the ability to understand and create music. Musicians, composers and dancers show a heightened musical intelligence.
* Spatial intelligence: the ability to "think in pictures," to perceive the visual world accurately, and recreate (or alter) it in the mind or on paper. Spatial intelligence is highly developed in artists, architects, designers and sculptors.
* Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence: the ability to use one's body in a skilled way, for self-expression or toward a goal. Mimes, dancers, basketball players, and actors are among those who display bodily-kinesthetic intelligence.
* Interpersonal intelligence: an ability to perceive and understand other individuals -- their moods, desires, and motivations. Political and religious leaders, skilled parents and teachers, and therapists use this intelligence.
* Intrapersonal intelligence: an understanding of one's own emotions. Some novelists and or counselors use their own experience to guide others.

Gardner discussed the "eighth intelligence" with Kathy Checkley, in an interview for Educational Leadership, The First Seven... and the Eighth. Gardner said, "The naturalist intelligence refers to the ability to recognize and classify plants, minerals, and animals, including rocks and grass and all variety of flora and fauna. The ability to recognize cultural artifacts like cars or sneakers may also depend on the naturalist intelligence. …(S)ome people from an early age are extremely good at recognizing and classifying artifacts. For example, we all know kids who, at 3 or 4, are better at recognizing dinosaurs than most adults."

Gardner identified Charles Darwin as a prime example of this type of intelligence.

The naturalist intelligence meshed with Gardner's definition of intelligence as "…the human ability to solve problems or to make something that is valued in one or more cultures." And the naturalist intelligence met Gardner's specific criteria:

Existential intelligence can be defined as the ability to be sensitive to, or have the capacity for, conceptualizing or tackling deeper or larger questions about human existence, such as the meaning of life, why are we born, why do we die, what is consciousness, or how did we get here.

There are many people who feel that there should be a ninth intelligence, existential intelligence (A.K.A.: "wondering smart, cosmic smart, spiritually smart, or metaphysical intelligence"). The possibility of this intelligence has been alluded to by Gardner in several of his works. He has stated that existential intelligence might be manifest in someone who is concerned with fundamental questions about existence, or who questions the intricacies of existence. And while Professor Gardner has offered a preliminary definition as: "Individuals who exhibit the proclivity to pose and ponder questions about life, death, and ultimate realities," he has not fully confirmed, endorsed, or described this intelligence.

Perhaps the difficulty is that Gardner wisely believes that this will open a can of worms best left out of the arena of education. Or, since a great deal of the importance and credibility of Gardner's work rests on neurological evidence of site specific locations within the brain, it might be that it is a bit risky for any author or scientist to definitively pinpoint the exact biological seat of spiritual wonder or cosmic awareness without offending any number of people, or some cultural or religious groups. It is important to remember that part of the power of Gardner's work depends upon careful examination of the available data and scientific evidence. So, at this point in time, it might be safer to say that existential intelligence is the "half" in 8-1/2 intelligences that comprise MI Theory.

Despite this avoidance on Gardner's part to definitively commit to existential intelligence, there are many who have accepted the presence of this intelligence as fact and have attempted to clarify what it might look like if it were part of the MI array. For those who have met children who appear to have "old souls," it is often easy to accept the existence of existential intelligence as something very real and important. These are the children who appear to have a sixth sense, they may be psychic, or ones who pose, and sometimes even answer, life's larger questions. Like:

These may be those children who can be described as "fully aware" of the cosmos -- of its diversity, complexity, and wonder. Frequently, these are the children who persist in asking those "big" questions that adults cannot answer.

Existential intelligence, a concern with 'ultimate issues', is, thus, the next possibility that Howard Gardner considers - and he argues that it 'scores reasonably well on the criteria' (ibid.: 64). However, empirical evidence is sparse - and although a ninth intelligence might be attractive, Howard Gardner is not disposed to add it to the list. 'I find the phenomenon perplexing enough and the distance from the other intelligences vast enough to dictate prudence - at least for now' (ibid.: 66).

The final, and obvious, candidate for inclusion in Howard Gardner's list is moral intelligence. In his exploration, he begins by asking whether it is possible to delineate the 'moral domain'. He suggests that it is difficult to come to any consensual definition, but argues that it is possible to come to an understanding that takes exploration forward. Central to a moral domain, Howard Gardner suggests, 'is a concern with those rules, behaviours and attitudes that govern the sanctity of life - in particular, the sanctity of human life and, in many cases, the sanctity of any other living creatures and the world they inhabit' (ibid.: 70). If we accept the existence of a moral realm is it them possible to speak of moral intelligence? If it 'connotes the adoption of any specific moral code' then Howard Gardner does not find the term moral intelligence acceptable (ibid.: 75). Furthermore, he argues, researchers and writers have not as yet 'captured the essence of the moral domain as an instance of human intelligence' (ibid.: 76).

When asked how educators should implement the theory of multiple intelligences, Gardner says, "(I)t's very important that a teacher take individual differences among kids very seriously … The bottom line is a deep interest in children and how their minds are different from one another, and in helping them use their minds well."

An awareness of multiple-intelligence theory has stimulated teachers to find more ways of helping all students in their classes. Some schools do this by adapting curriculum. In "Variations on a Theme: How Teachers Interpret MI Theory," (Educational Leadership, September 1997), Linda Campbell describes five approaches to curriculum change:

With an understanding of Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, teachers, school administrators, and parents can better understand the learners in their midst. They can allow students to safely explore and learn in many ways, and they can help students direct their own learning. Adults can help students understand and appreciate their strengths, and identify real-world activities that will stimulate more learning.

Robbie Case, Professor of Education at Stanford from 1988 to 1998, died suddenly and unexpectedly in Toronto on May 19, 2000 at the age of 55, of an aortal aneurysm. Professor Case earned his Ph.D. in education at the University of Toronto, at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Before he joined the faculty at Stanford, he held faculty positions at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. At the time of his death, he was a professor at the Institute of Child Study, Faculty of Education, University of Toronto. Case’s research contributions ranged widely, including important papers on social, emotional, and linguistic development and on the development of creative intelligence. His main research focus centered on child developmental psychology, and particularly on theories of intellectual development in relation to education. He was the author of a stage theory of cognitive development, presented in its most general form in his book, intellectual development: Birth to adulthood (1985). The theory and empirical research presented in this book were a major advance in developmental psychology, integrating important aspects of the Piagetian stage theory and cognitive information-processing theory to capitalize on the strengths and overcome limitations of each, and particularly to draw out from this integration implications for the design of instruction. In subsequent research, during his Stanford tenure, Case deepened the scientific theory of the mind further by developing a concept that he termed central conceptual structures. Using this concept, Case developed explanations of the kinds of information children can mentally represent and operate upon as they progress, which incorporate important aspects of the informational and conceptual content of their growing cognitive abilities, along with important advances in the complexity of their cognitive capabilities. Through analyses of the
processing requirements of a wide variety of tasks, Case demonstrated that the main consequence of these cognitive developments is increased power in the representation of information in several broad domains, such as number, space, and social interaction. An important presentation of his research and theorizing on these topics was the monograph The role of central conceptual structures in the development of children’s thought (1996, coauthored with Y. Okamoto).

The implications of Case’s work have broad generality. The development of scientific and mathematical understanding are particularly illuminated by his research, and principles of curriculum design and teaching in these domains are guided directly. His work also showed how instructional analysis can be used to drive fundamental advances in basic developmental theory. Collaborating with his research students, many of whom were
experienced school teachers, he developed innovative curricula, especially in mathematics, that support successful learning by students, and exemplify and advance fundamental principles of learning.
Robbie’s intellectual style was that of an eager explorer of big questions. His main concern was such a big question: How does the mind of the child develop into that of the adult? Do children go through stages on their way from childish thinking to mature thinking? If so, what are these stages and why do they exist?

Toward the end of his life, Robbie became interested in the question: Do civilizations go through stages of development? He collaborated with social scientist Tom Rohlen in developing a speculative theory of the development of civilizations from hunter-gatherer groups through early cities supported by farming to larger empires linking these cities with trade to modern nations linking their populations with modern transportation and communication infrastructures.

In a small town near Boston, a teacher of mathematics asks his students to design the floor plan of a community center, including dance areas, a place for a band, and other elements. Why? Because the floor plan involves several geometric shapes and a prescribed floor area. The students must use what they have studied about area to make a suitable plan.

In a city not far away, a teacher asks students to identify a time in their lives when they had been treated unjustly and a time when they had treated someone else unjustly. Why? Because the students will soon start reading works of literature, including To Kill a Mockingbird, that deal with issues of justice and who determines it. Making connections with students' own lives is to be a theme throughout. In a classroom in the Midwest, a student, using his own drawings explains to a small group of peers how a certain predatory beetle mimics ants in order to invade their nests and eat their eggs. Why? Each student has an individual teaching responsibility for the group. Learning to teach one another develops secure comprehension of their topics (Brown, et al., in press). In an elementary school in Arizona, students studying ancient Egypt produce a National Enquirer style, four-page tabloid call King Tut's Chronicle. Headlines tease "Cleo in Trouble Once Again?" Why? The format motivates the students and leads them to synthesize and represent what they are learning (Fiske, 1991, pp. 157-8).

Quirky, perhaps, by the measure of traditional educational practice, such episodes are not common in American classrooms. Neither are they rare. The first two examples happen to reflect the work of teachers collaborating with my colleagues and me in studies of teaching for understanding. The second two are drawn from an increasingly rich and varied literature. Anyone alert to current trends in teaching practice will not be surprised. These cases illustrate a growing effort to engage students more deeply and thoughtfully in subject-matter learning. Connections are sought between students' lives and the subject matter, between principles and practice, between the past and the present. Students are asked to think through concepts and situations, rather than memorize and give back on the quiz.

These days it seems old-fashioned to speak of bringing an apple to the teacher. But each of these teachers deserves an apple. They are stepping well beyond what most school boards, principals, and parents normally require of teachers. They are teaching for understanding. They want more from their students than remembering the formula for the area of a trapezoid, or three key kinds of camouflage, or the date of King Tut's reign, or the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. They want students to understand what they are learning, not just to know about it.

Wouldn't it be nice to offer the same apple to all teachers in all schools? . . . an apple for education altogether. However, teaching for understanding is not such an easy enterprise in many educational settings. Nor is it always welcome. Teaching for understanding? . . . the phrase has a nice sensible ring to it: Nice . . . but is it necessary?

Yes. It is absolutely necessary to achieve the most basic goal of education: preparing students for further learning and more effective functioning in their lives. In the paragraphs and pages to come, I argue that teaching for understanding amounts to a central element of any reasonable program of education. Moreover, once we pool insights from the worlds of research and from educational practice, we understand enough about both the nature of understanding and how people learn for understanding to support a concerted and committed effort to teach for understanding.

Knowledge and skill have traditionally been the mainstays of American education. We want students to be knowledgeable about history, science, geography, and so on. We want students to be skillful in the routines of arithmetic, the craft of writing, the use of foreign languages. Achieving this is not easy, but we work hard at it.

So with knowledge and skill deserving plenty of concern and getting plenty of attention, why pursue understanding? While there are several reasons, one stands out: Knowledge and skill in themselves do not guarantee understanding. People can acquire knowledge and routine skills without understanding their basis or when to use them. And, by and large, knowledge and skills that are not understood do students little good! What use can students make of the history or mathematics they have learned unless they have understood it?

In the long term, education must aim for active use of knowledge and skill (Perkins, 1992). Students garner knowledge and skill in schools so that they can put them to work--in professional roles--scientist, engineer, designer, doctor, businessperson, writer artist, musician--and in lay roles--citizen, voter, parent--that require appreciation, understanding, and judgment. Yet rote knowledge generally defies active use, and routine skills often serve poorly because students do not understand when to use them. In short, we must teach for understanding in order to realize the long-term payoffs of education.

But maybe there is nothing that needs to be done. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Perhaps students understand quite well the knowledge and skills they are acquiring.

Unfortunately, research says otherwise. For instance, studies of students' understanding of science and mathematics reveal numerous and persistent shortfalls. Misconceptions in science range from youngsters' confusions about whether the Earth is flat or in just what way it is round, to college students' misconceptions about Newton's laws (e.g., Clement, 1982, 1983; McCloskey, 1983; Nussbaum, 1985). Misunderstandings in mathematics include diverse "malrules," where students overgeneralize rules for one operation and carry them over inappropriately to another; difficulties in the use of ratios and proportions; confusion about what algebraic equations really mean, and more (e.g., Behr, Lesh, Post, and Silver, 1983; Clement, Lochhead and Monk, 1981; Lochhead and Mestre, 1988; Resnick, 1987, 1992).

Although the humanistic subject matters might appear on the surface less subject to misunderstanding than the technically challenging science and mathematics, again research reveals that this is not true. For instance, studies of students' reading abilities show that, while they can read the words, they have difficulty interpreting and making inferences from what they have read. Studies of writing show that most students experience little success with formulating cogent viewpoints well supportcd by arguments (National Assessment of Educational Progress, 1981). Indeed, students tend to write essays in a mode Bereiter and Scardamalia (1985) call "knowledge telling," simply writing out paragraph by paragraph what they know about a topic rather than finding and expressing a viewpoint.

Examinations of students' understanding of history reveal that they suffer from problems such as "presentism" and "localism" (Carretero, Pozo, and Asensio, 1989; Shelmit, 1980). For instance, students pondering Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima often are severely critical because of more recent history. Suffering from "presentism," they have difficulty projecting themselves into the era and pondering the issue in terms of what Truman knew at the time. Yet such shifts of perspective are essential for understanding history--and indeed for understanding other nations, cultures, and ethnic groups today. Moreover, Gardner (1991) argues that students' understanding of the humanistic subject matters is plagued by a number of stereotypes--for instance those concerning racial, sexual, and ethnic identity--that amount to misunderstandings of the human condition in its variety.

So understanding is "broke" far more often than we can reasonably tolerate. Moreover, we can do something about it. The time is ripe. Cognitive science, educational psychology, and practical experience with teachers and students put us in a position to teach for understanding--and to teach teachers to teach for understanding (Gardner, 1991; Perkins, 1986, 1992). As the following sections argue, today, more than ever before, teaching for understanding is an approachable agenda for education.

At the heart of teaching for understanding lies a very basic question: What is understanding? Ponder this query for a moment and you will realize that good answers are not obvious. To draw a comparison, we all have a reasonable conception of what knowing is. When a student knows something, the student can bring it forth upon call--tell us the knowledge or demonstrate the skill. But understanding something is a more subtle matter. A student might be able to regurgitate reams of facts and demonstrate routine skills with very little understanding. Somehow, understanding goes beyond knowing. But how?

Clues can be found in this fantasy: Imagine a snowball fight in space. Half a dozen astronauts in free fall arrange themselves in a circle. Each has in hand a net bag full of snowballs. At the word "go" over their radios, each starts to fire snowballs at the other astronauts. What will happen? What is your prediction?

If you have some understanding of Newton's theory of motion, you may predict that this snowball fight will not go very well. As the astronauts fire the snowballs, they will begin to move away from one another: Firing a snowball forward pushes an astronaut backward. Moreover, each astronaut who fires a snowball will start to spin with the very motion of firing, because the astronaut's arm that hurls the snowball is well away from the astronaut's center of gravity. It's unlikely that anyone would hit anyone else even on the first shot, because of starting to spin, and the astronauts would soon be too far from one another to have any chance at all. So much for snowball fights in space.

If making such predictions is a sign of understanding Newton's theory, what is understanding in general? My colleagues and I at the Harvard Graduate School of Education have analyzed the meaning of understanding as a concept. We have examined views of understanding in contemporary research and looked to the practices of teachers with a knack for teaching for understanding. We have formulated a conception of understanding consonant with these several sources. We call it a "performance perspective" on understanding. This perspective reflects the general spirit of "constructivism" prominent in contemporary theories of learning (Duffy and Jonassen, 1992) and offers a specific view of what learning for understanding involves. This perspective helps to clarify what understanding is and how to teach for understanding by making explicit what has been implicit and making general what has been phrased in more restricted ways (Gardner, 1991; Perkins, 1992).

In brief, this performance perspective says that understanding a topic of study is a matter of being able to perform in a variety of thought-demanding ways with the topic, for instance to: explain, muster evidence, find examples, generalize, apply concepts, analogize, represent in a new way, and so on. Suppose a student "knows" Newtonian physics: The student can write down equations and apply them to three or four routine types of textbook problems. In itself, this is not convincing evidence that the student really understands the theory. The student might simply be parroting the test and following memorized routines for stock problems. But suppose the student can make appropriate predictions about the snowball fight in space. This goes beyond just knowing. Moreover, suppose the student can find new examples of Newton's theory at work in everyday experience (Why do football linemen need to be so big? So they will have high inertia.) and make other extrapolations. The more thought-demanding performances the student can display, the more confident we would be that the student understands.

In summary, understanding something is a matter of being able to carry out a variety of "performances" concerning the topic--performances like making predictions about the snowball fight in space that show one's understanding and, at the same time, advance it by encompassing new situations. We call such performances "understanding performances" or "performances of understanding".

Understanding performances contrast with what students spend most of their time doing. While understanding performances can be immensely varied, by definition they must be thought-demanding; they must take students beyond what they already know. Most classroom activities are too routine to be understanding performances--spelling drills, true-and-false quizzes, arithmetic exercises, many conventional essay questions, and so on. Such performances have their importance too, of course. But they are not performances of understanding; hence they do not do much to build understanding.

Given this performance perspective on understanding, how can students learn with understanding? An important step toward an answer comes from asking a related but different question: How do you learn to roller skate? Certainly not just by reading instructions and watching others, although these may help. Most centrally, you learn by skating. And, if you are a good learner, not just by idle skating, but by thoughtful skating where you pay attention to what you are doing--capitalize on your strengths, figure out (perhaps with the help of a coach) your weaknesses, and work on them.

It's the same with understanding. If understanding a topic means building up performances of understanding around that topic, the mainstay of learning for understanding must be actual engagement in those performances. The learners must spend the larger part of their time with activities that ask them to generalize, find new examples, carry out applications, and work through other understanding performances. And they must do so in a thoughtful way, with appropriate feedback to help them perform better.

Notice how this performance view of learning for understanding contrasts with another view one might have. It's all too easy to conceive of learning with understanding as a matter of taking in information with clarity. If only one listens carefully enough, then one understands. But this idea of understanding as a matter of clarity simply will not work Recall the example of Newton's theory of motion; you may listen carefully to the teacher and understand in the limited sense of following what the teacher says as the teacher says it. But this does not mean that you really understand in the more genuine sense of appreciating these implications for situations the teacher did not talk about. Learning for understanding requires not just taking in what you hear, it requires thinking in a number of ways with what you heard-- practicing and debugging your thinking until you can make the right connections flexibly.

This becomes an especially urgent agenda when we think about how youngsters typically spend most of their school time and homework time. As noted earlier, most school activities are not understanding performances: They are one or another kind of knowledge building or routine skill building. Knowledge building and routine skill building are important. But, as argued earlier, if knowledge and skills are not understood, the student cannot make good use of them.

Moreover, when students do tackle understanding performances--interpreting a poem, designing an experiment, or tracking a theme through an historical period--there is often little guidance as to criteria, little feedback before the final product to help them make it better, or few occasions to stand back and reflect on their progress.

In summary, typical classrooms do not give a sufficient presence to thoughtful engagement in understanding performances. To get the understanding we want, we need to put understanding up front. And that means putting thoughtful engagement in performances of understanding up front!

We've looked at learning for understanding from the standpoint of the learner. But what does learning for understanding mean from the standpoint of the teacher? What does teaching for understanding involve? While teaching for understanding is not terribly hard, it is not terribly easy, either. Teaching for understanding is not simply another way of teaching, just as manageable as the usual lecture-exercise-test method. It involves genuinely more intricate classroom choreography. To elaborate, here are six priorities for teachers who teach for understanding:

From the standpoint of the teacher, the message about performances of understanding boils down to this: Teaching is less about what the teacher does than about what the teacher gets the students to do. The teacher must arrange for the students to think with and about the ideas they are learning for an extended period of time, so that they learn their way around a topic. unless students are thinking with and about the ideas they are learning for a while, they are not likely to build up a flexible repertoire of performances of understanding.

Imagine, if you will, a period of weeks or even months committed to some rich theme--the nature of life, the origin of revolutions, the art of mathematical modeling. Imagine a group of students engaged over time in a variety of understanding performances focused on that topic and a few chosen goals. The students face progressively more subtle but still accessible challenges. At the end there may be some culminating understanding performance such as an essay or an exhibition as in Theodore Sizer's ( 1984) concept of "essential schools." Such a long term, thinking-centered process seems central to building students' understanding.

I emphasized earlier that students need criteria, feedback, and opportunities for reflection in order to learn performances of understanding well. Traditionally, assessment comes at the end of a topic and focuses on grading and accountability. These are important functions that need to be honored in many contexts. But they do not serve students' immediate learning needs very well. To learn effectively, students need criteria, feedback, and opportunities for reflection from the beginning of any sequence of instruction (cf. Baron, 1990; Gifford and O'Connor, 1991; Perrone, 1991b).

This means that occasions of assessment should occur throughout the learning process from beginning to end Sometimes they may involve feedback from the teacher, sometimes from peers, sometimes from students' self evaluation. Sometimes the teacher may give criteria, sometimes engage students in defining their own criteria. While there are many reasonable approaches to ongoing assessment, the constant factor is the frequent focus on criteria, feedback, and reflection throughout the learning process.

Research shows that how information is represented can influence enormously how well that information supports understanding performances. For instance Richard Mayer (1989) has demonstrated repeatedly that what he terms "conceptual models"--usually in the form of diagrams with accompanying story lines carefully crafted according to several principles--can help students to solve nonroutine problems that ask them to apply new ideas in unexpected ways. For another example, computer environments that show objects moving in frictionless Newtonian ways we rarely encounter in the world can help students understand what Newton's laws really say about the way objects move (White, 1984). For yet another example, well-chosen analogies often serve to illuminate concepts in science, history, English, and other domains (e.g. Brown, 1989; Clement, 1991; Royer and Cable, 1976).

Many of the conventional representations employed in schooling--for instance, formal dictionary definitions of concepts or formal notational representations as in Ohm's law, I = E/R--in themselves leave students confused or only narrowly informed (Perkins and Unger, in press). The teacher teaching for understanding needs to add more imagistic, intuitive, and evocative representations to support students' understanding performances. Besides supplying powerful representations, teachers can often ask students to construct their own representations, an understanding performance in itself.

The theory devised by the seminal developmental psychologist Jean Piaget averred that children's understanding was limited by the general schemata they had evolved. For instance, children who had not attained "formal operations" would find certain concepts inaccessible--notions of control of variables and formal proof, for example (Inhelder and Piaget, 1958). Many student teachers today still learn this scheme and come to believe that fundamental aspects of reasoning and understanding are lost on children until late adolescence. They are unaware that 30 years of research have forced fundamental revisions in the Piagetian conception. Again and again, studies have shown that, under supportive conditions, children can understand much more than was thought much earlier than was thought.

The "neo-Piagetian" theories of Robbie Case (1985), Kurt Fischer (1980), and others offer a better picture of intellectual development. Understanding complex concepts may often depend on what Case calls a "central conceptual structure," i.e., certain patterns of quantitative organization, narrative structure, and more that cut across disciplines (Case, 1992). The right kind of instruction can help learners to attain these central conceptual structures. More broadly, considerable developmental research shows that complexity is a critical variable. For several reasons, younger children cannot readily understand concepts that involve two or three sources of variation at once, as in concepts such as balance, density, or pressure (Case, 1985, 1992; Fischer, 1980).

The picture of intellectual development emerging today is less constrained, more nuanced, and ultimately more optimistic regarding the prospects of education.

Teachers teaching for understanding do well to bear in mind factors like complexity, but without rigid conceptions of what students can and cannot learn at certain ages.

Analyses of understanding emphasize that concepts and principles in a discipline are not understood in isolation (Perkins, 1992; Perkins and Simmons, 1988; Schwab, 1978). Grasping what a concept or principle means depends in considerable part on recognizing how it functions within the discipline. And this in turn requires developing a sense of how the discipline works as a system of thought. For example, all disciplines have ways of testing claims and mustering proof--but the way that's done is often quite different from discipline to discipline. In science, experiments can be conducted, but in history evidence must be mined from the historical record. In literature, we look to the text for evidence of an interpretation, but in mathematics we justify a theorem by formal deduction from the givens.

Conventional teaching introduces students to plenty of facts, concepts, and routines from a discipline such as mathematics, English, or history. But it typically does much less to awaken students to the way the discipline works--how one justifies, explains, solves problems, and manages inquiry within the discipline. Yet in just such patterns of thinking lie the performances of understanding that make up what it is to understand those facts, concepts, and routines in a rich and generative way. Accordingly, the teacher teaching for understanding needs to undertake an extended mission of explicit consciousness raising about the structure and logic of the disciplines taught.

Research shows that very often students do not carry over facts and principles they acquire in one context into other contexts. They fail to use in science class or at the supermarket the math they learned in math class. They fail to apply the writing skills that they mastered in English on a history essay. Knowledge tends to get glued to the narrow circumstances of initial acquisition. If we want transfer of learning from students--and we certainly do, because we want them to be putting to work in diverse settings the understandings they acquire--we need to teach explicitly for transfer, helping students to make the connections they otherwise might not make, and helping them to cultivate mental habits of connection-making (Brown, 1989; Perkins and Salomon, 1988; Salomon and Perkins, 1989).

Teaching for transfer is an agenda closely allied to teaching for understanding. Indeed, an understanding performance virtually by definition requires a modicum of transfer, because it asks the learner to go beyond the information given, tackling some task of justification, explanation, example-finding or the like that reaches further than anything in the textbook or the lecture. Moreover, many understanding performances transcend the boundaries of the topic, the discipline, or the class room--applying school math to stock market figures or perspectives on history to casting your vote in the current election. Teachers teaching for a full and rich understanding need to include understanding performances that reach well beyond the obvious and conventional boundaries of the topic.

Certainly much more can be said about the art and craft of teaching for understanding. However, this may suffice to make the case that plenty can be done. Teachers need not feel paralyzed for lack of means. On the contrary, a plethora of classroom moves suggest themselves in service of building students' understanding. The teacher who makes learning thinking-centered, arranges for rich ongoing assessment, supports learning with powerful representations, pays heed to developmental factors, inducts students into the disciplines taught, and teaches for transfer far and wide has mobilized a powerful armamentum for building students' understanding.

Much can be said about how to teach for understanding. But the "how" risks defining a hollow enterprise without dedicated attention to the "what"--what's most worth students' efforts to understand?

A while ago I found myself musing on this question: "When was the last time I solved a quadratic equation?" Not your everyday reminiscence, but a reasonable query for me. Mathematics figured prominently in my precollege education, I took a technical doctoral degree, I pursue the technical profession of cognitive psychology and education, and occasionally I use technical mathematies, mostly statistics. However, it's been a number of years since I've solved a quadratic equation.

My math teacher in high school--a very good teacher--spent significant time teaching me and the rest of the class about quadratic equations. Almost everyone I know today learned how to handle quadratic equations at some point. Yet most of these folks seem to have had little use for them lately. Most have probably forgotten what they once knew about them.

The problem is, for students not headed in certain technical directions, quadratic equations are a poor investment in understanding. And the problem is much larger than quadratic equations. A good deal of the typical curriculum does not connect--not to practical applications, nor to personal insights, nor to much of anything else. It's not the kind of knowledge that would connect. Or it's not taught in a way that would help learners to make connections. We suffer from a massive problem of "quadratic education."

What's needed is a connected rather than a disconnected curriculum, a curriculum full of knowledge of the right kind to connect richly to future insights and applications (Perkins, 1986; Perrone, 1991a). The great American philosopher and educator John Dewey (1916) had something like this in mind when he wrote of "generative knowledge." He wanted education to emphasize knowledge with rich ramifications in the lives of learners. Knowledge worth understanding.

What does generative knowledge look like (cf. Perkins, 1986, 1992; Perrone, 1991a)? Consider a cluster of mathematics concepts rather different from quadratic equations. Consider probability and statistics. The conventional precollege curriculum pays little attention to probability and statistics. Yet statistical information is commonplace in newspapers, magazines, and even newscasts. Probabilistic considerations figure in many common areas of life, for instance making informed decisions about medical treatment. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (1989) urges more attention to probability and statistics in the standards established a few years ago. Faced with a forced choice, one might do well to teach probability and statistics for understanding instead of quadratic equations for understanding. It's knowledge that connects!

Or for instance, early this year, the Boston Globe published a series on "the roots of ethnic hatred," the psychology and sociology of why ethnic groups from Northern Ireland to Bosnia to South Africa are so often and so persistently at one another's throats. It turns out that a good deal is known about the causes and dynamics of ethnic hatred. To teach social studies for understanding, one might teach about the roots of ethnic hatred instead of the French Revolution. Or one might teach the French Revolution through the lens of the roots of ethnic hatred. It's knowledge that connects!

Where are ideas for the knowledge in this "connected curriculum" to come from? One rich source is teachers. In some recent meetings and workshops, my colleagues and I have been exploring with teachers some of their ideas about generative knowledge. The question was this: "What new topic could I teach, or what spin could I put on a topic I already teach, to make it genuinely generative? To offer something that connects richly to the subject matter, to youngsters' concerns, to recurring opportunities for insight or application?"

* What is a living thing? Most of the universe is dead matter, with a few precious enclaves of life. But what is life in its essence? Are viruses alive? What about computer viruses (some argue that they are)? What about crystals? If they are not, why not?
* Civil disobedience. This theme connects to adolescents' concerns with rules and justice, to episodes of civil disobedience in history and literature, and to one's role as a responsible citizen in a nation, community, or, for that matter, a school.
* RAP: ratio and proportion. Research shows that many students have a poor grasp of this very central concept, a concept that, like statistics and probability, comes up all the time. Dull? Not necessarily. The teachers who suggested this pointed out many surprising situations where ratio and proportion enter--in poetry, music and musical notation, diet, sports statistics, and so on.
* Whose history? It's been said that history gets written by the victors. This theme addresses pointblank how accounts of history get shaped by those who write it-- the victors, sometimes the dissidents, and those with other special interests.

These examples drawn from teachers should persuade us that many teachers have excellent intuitions about generative knowledge.

It's important not to mix up generative knowledge with what's simply fun or doggedly practical. We might think of the most generative knowledge as a matter of powerful conceptual systems, systems of concepts and examples that yield insight and implications in many circumstances. Look back at the topics listed earlier. Yes, they can be read as particular pieces of subject matter knowledge. But every one also is a powerful conceptual system. Probability and statistics offer a window on chance and trends in the world; the roots of ethnic hatred reveal the dynamics of rivalry and prejudice at any level from neighborhoods to nations; the nature of life becomes a more and more central issue in this era of testtube babies and recombinant DNA engineering; civil disobedience involves a subtle pattern of relations between law, justice, and responsibility; ratio and proportion are fundamental modes of description; the "whose history?" question basically deals with the central human phenomenon of point-of-view.

If much of what we taught highlighted powerful conceptual systems, there is every reason to think that youngsters would retain more, understand more, and use more of what they learned. In summary, teaching for understanding is much more than a matter of method--of engaging students in understanding performances with frequent rich feedback, powerful representations, and so on. Besides method, it is also a matter of content--thoughtful selection of content that proves genuinely generative for students. If we teach within and across subject matters in ways that highlight powerful conceptual systems, we will have a "connected curriculum"--one that equips and empowers learners for the complex and challenging future they face.

At the outset, I called teaching for understanding an apple for education. It's the apple, I've argued, that education needs. The apple of course is the traditional Judeo-Christian symbol of knowledge and understanding. It was Eden's apple that got us into trouble in the first place, and the trouble with apples continues. Our efforts to serve up to students the apple of plain old knowledge seems to be serving them poorly.

What it all comes down to is this. Schools are providing the wrong apple. The apple of knowledge is not the apple that truly nourishes. What we need is the apple of understanding (which of course includes the requisite knowledge).

So what should be done? What does it take to organize education around the apple of understanding rather than the apple of knowledge? What energies must we muster in what direction to move toward a more committed and pervasive pedagogy of understanding?

Although the problem is complex, we have been exploring pathways toward such a pedagogy in collaboration with a number of teachers. An early discovery encouraged our efforts. We found that nearly every teacher could testify to the importance of the goal. Teachers are all too aware that their students often do not understand key concepts in science, periods of history, works of literature, and so on, nearly as well as they might. And most teachers are concerned about teaching for understanding. They strive to explain clearly. They look for opportunities to clarify. From time to time, they pose open-ended tasks such as planning an experiment, interpreting a poem, or critiquing television commercials that call for and build understanding.

Our teacher colleagues also helped us to realize that, in most settings, understanding was only one of many agendas. While concerned about teaching for understanding, most teachers distribute their effort more or less evenly over that and a number of other objectives. Relatedly, the institutions within which teachers work and the tests they prepare their students for often offer little support for the enterprise of teaching for understanding. In other words, as Theodore Sizer and many others have urged in recent years, better education calls for a simplification of agendas and a deepened emphasis on understanding (Sizer, 1984). This in turn demands some restructuring of priorities (as expressed by school boards, parents, and mandated tests) and of schedules and curricula that work against teaching for understanding.

Finally, our teacher colleagues help us see that teaching for understanding in a concerted and committed way calls for a depth of technique that most teachers' initial training and ensuing experiences have not provided. Thinking of instruction in terms of performances of understanding, arranging ongoing assessment, tapping the potential of powerful representations--these have a very limited presence in preservice and in-service teacher development. So a second strand of any effort to make a pedagogy of understanding real must be to help teachers acquire such techniques.

Fortunately, many teachers are already far along the way toward teaching for understanding, without any help from cognitive psychologists or educational researchers. Indeed, some of our most interesting work on teaching for understanding has been with teachers who already do much of what the framework that we are developing advocates. They are pleased to find that the framework validates their work. And they tell us that the framework gives them a more precise language and philosophy. It helps them to deepen their commitment and sharpen the focus of their efforts.

Frankly, we should all be suspicious if the kind of teaching advocated under the banner of teaching for understanding came as a surprise to most teachers. Instead it should look familiar, a bigger and juicier apple: "Yes, that's the kind of teaching I like to do--and sometimes do." Teaching for understanding does not aim at radical burn-the-bridges innovation, just more and better versions of the best we usually see.

The ideas discussed here were developed with support from the Spencer Foundation for research on teaching for understanding and from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for research on thinking, for which I am grateful. Many of the ideas reflect collaborative work with several good colleagues. I thank Rebecca Simmons, one of those colleagues, for her helpful comments on a draft of this paper.--D. P.

Children must master the language of things before they master the language of words.”

In one sentence, Froebel, father of the kindergarten, expressed the essence of early-childhood education. Children are not born knowing the difference between red and green, sweet and sour, rough and smooth, cold and hot, or any number of physical sensations. The natural world is the infant’s and young child’s first curriculum, and it can only be learned by direct interaction with things. There is no way a young child can learn the difference between sweet and sour, rough and smooth, hot and cold without tasting, touching, or feeling something. Learning about the world of things, and their various properties, is a time-consuming and intense process that cannot be hurried.

This view of early-childhood education has been echoed by all the giants of early-childhood development—Froebel, Maria Montessori, Rudolf Steiner, Jean Piaget, and Lev Vygotsky. It is supported by developmental theory, which demonstrates that the logical structure of reading and math requires syllogistic reasoning abilities on the part of the child. Inasmuch as most young children do not attain this form of reasoning until the age of five or six, it makes little sense to introduce formal instruction in reading and math until then. The theory is borne out by a number of longitudinal studies that show that children who have been enrolled in early-childhood academic programs eventually lose whatever gains they made vis-à-vis control groups.

Yet there is a growing call for early-childhood educators to engage in the academic training of young children. The movement’s beginnings lay in the fears sparked by the Soviet Union’s launching of Sputnik in 1957. The civil rights movement and the growing public awareness of our educational system’s inequality led to the creation of Head Start, a program aimed at preparing young disadvantaged children for school. Although Head Start is an important and valuable program, it gave rise to the pernicious belief that education is a race—and that the earlier you start, the earlier you finish. This encouraged educators like Carl Bereiter, Siegfried Engelmann, and, more recently, E. D. Hirsch to introduce early academic programs based on the learning theories of E. L. Thorndike and B. F. Skinner. These writers assume that learning follows the same principles at all age levels—ignoring both children’s developing mental abilities and the fact that academic skills vary in their logical complexity and difficulty.

Concerns over our educational system, fueled by our students’ poor performance in international comparisons of achievement, have reinvigorated the call for early academic instruction as a remedy for inadequate teaching later on. All too many kindergarten teachers are under pressure to teach their children numbers and letters and to administer standardized tests. In some kindergartens, children are even given homework in addition to the work sheets they must fill out during class time. In a developmentally appropriate classroom, children are busy taking care of plants and animals, experimenting with sand and water, drawing and painting, listening to songs and stories, and engaging in dramatic play. It is hard to believe that these young children learn more from work sheets than they do from engaging in these age-appropriate activities.

In the end, there is no solid research demonstrating that early academic training is superior to (or worse than) the more traditional, hands-on model of early education. Why take the risky step of engaging in formal academic training of the young when we already know what works?

The educators who established early childhood as a legitimate time for guided learning all emphasized the importance of manipulative experiences—of seeing, touching, and handling new things and of experiencing new sensations—for infants and young children and the dangers of introducing them to the world of symbols too early in life. Froebel, Montessori, and Steiner all created rich, hands-on materials for children to explore and conceptualize. Each of them acknowledged, in his or her own way, that the capacity to discriminate precedes the capacity to label, that the understanding of quality precedes that of quantity. Children, for example, learn to discriminate among different colors before they can distinguish different shades of the same color.
“Head Start gave rise to the pernicious belief that education is a race—and that the earlier you start, the earlier you finish.”

This is not to suggest that the founders of age-appropriate practice were of one mind. They disagreed on such matters as the teacher’s role in guiding young children’s learning and the comparative benefits of individual versus collaborative learning.

Froebel, for example, believed that introducing children to different manipulative materials (which he called gifts), such as a wooden ball, a square, and a diamond, would teach young children not only geometric shapes but also abstract concepts of unity and harmony. Montessori, by contrast, doubted whether children would learn abstract concepts by using manipulative materials. She did argue that there were critical periods in development during which children had to exercise their sensory-motor abilities if they were to fully realize them. Montessori regarded children’s exercise of their sensory abilities, and indeed of all their activities, as preparation for adult life. Froebel saw play as a valuable mode of learning for young children; to Montessori it was frivolous and should be the child’s work. For example, she wrote that children would be better served if they used their imaginations to fantasize about real foreign countries rather than fairytale kingdoms.

Steiner, founder of the Waldorf schools, believed that education should be holistic. In Waldorf schools, handicrafts, the arts, and music are integral parts of the curriculum. Children are asked to write and illustrate their own textbooks in science, history, and social studies, for example. Whereas Froebel and Montessori focused on having children learn from their own individual activity, Steiner’s activities were more social and collaborative.

Piaget, while not supporting any particular early-education program, argued that children learn primarily from their own spontaneous exploration of things and a subsequent reflective abstraction from those activities. This is an indirect argument for the importance of manipulative materials in early-childhood education. Vygotsky, while also believing that much of intellectual growth was spontaneous, nonetheless proposed that children could not fully realize their abilities without the help of adults. He argued that there was a zone of proximate development that could be attained only with guidance and modeling by adults. Vygotsky emphasized the teacher’s role much more than other writers, who entrusted much of young children’s learning to the children themselves.

Contemporary early-childhood educators also disagree on the teacher’s role in the learning process and continue to debate what is the most effective curriculum for young children. What unites them, and sets them apart from those who would make early-childhood education a one-size-smaller 1st or 2nd grade, is their commitment to building early-childhood practice on their observations of young children. Put a bit differently, the giants of early childhood and their followers agree that early education must start with the child, not with the subject matter to be taught.

The guiding principle of early-childhood education is, then, the matching of curriculum and instruction to the child’s developing abilities, needs, and interests. This principle is broadly accepted and advocated by most early-childhood educators. The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) has issued a policy statement entitled “Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early-Childhood Programs.” The NAEYC now evaluates and certifies early-childhood programs that meet its criteria for developmental appropriateness.

Those who believe in academic training for very young children make a fundamental error: They fail to recognize that there are different levels of understanding in math and reading. Learning to identify numbers and letters is far different from learning to perform mathematical operations and to read with understanding. This is easy to support. “Sesame Street” has run for more than 30 years. Children today know their numbers and letters earlier than ever before. Many know them by age two. Yet children today are not learning math or reading any earlier or better than did children before there was “Sesame Street.” Learning the names of numbers and letters is only the first step in the attainment of true numerical understanding and reading comprehension.

Take the concept of numbers. The three levels of numerical understanding—nominal, ordinal, and interval—correspond to different forms of scaling. Nominal numbering is the use of a number as a name, such as the numbers basketball players wear on their uniforms. By the age of two or three, children can use numbers in the nominal sense. By the age of four or five, children can begin to use ordinal numbers; they can order things according to quantitative differences. For instance, they can arrange a series of size-graded blocks or sticks from the smallest to the largest. Once the arrangement is complete, however, they are not able to insert a new, intermediate-sized element into the perceptual array.
The educators who established early childhood as a time for guided learning all emphasized the dangers of introducing the world of symbols too early in life.

It is only at age six or seven, when they have attained what Piaget calls “concrete operations,” that children can construct the concept of a “unit,” the basis for understanding the idea of interval numbers. To attain the unit concept, children must come to understand that every number is both like every other number, in the sense that it is a number, and at the same time different in its order of enumeration. Once children attain the unit concept, their notion of number is abstract and divorced from particular things, unlike nominal and ordinal numbers. Mathematical operations like addition, subtraction, and multiplication can be performed only on numbers that represent units that can be manipulated without reference to particular things.

The interval concept of numbers is an intellectual construction. It builds on children’s practice in classifying things (attending to their sameness) and in seriating them (attending to their difference). At a certain point, and with the aid of concrete operations, children are able to bring these two concepts, of sameness and difference, together into the higher-order concept of a unit, which brings together the ideas of sameness and difference. It is only when children understand that something can be the same and different that they have a true understanding of quantity. Learning the names of numbers and rote counting are less important in this attainment than is practice in classifying and seriating many different materials.

A similar hierarchy of understanding is involved in learning to read. In fact, in some respects reading is a more complex process than arithmetic, in that it involves auditory and visual discrimination as well as cognitive construction. Nonetheless, the principle is the same.

The earliest level of reading is the recognition of words by sight. At ages two or three, a child may learn “stop” and “go” in part by the perceptual configuration and in part by the colors associated with these words. Sight words are like nominal numbers; they reflect a very early level of reading achievement. A second level of reading is phonetic; this concept corresponds roughly to ordinal numbers. Children at four or five can learn the sounds for single letters and are able to read words like “hat,” “cat,” “sat,” and so on.
“Learning about the world of things, and their various properties, is a time-consuming and intense process that cannot be hurried.”

The same child who can read phonetically, however, may not be able to read phonemically. To read phonemically, a child must be able to recognize that a letter can be pronounced differently depending on the context. A child who can read “hat,” “cat,” and “sat” may have trouble with “ate,” “gate,” and “late.” Likewise, a child who knows “pin” may have trouble with “spin” because it involves a blend of consonants that may throw kids off. In Piaget’s terminology, “concrete” operations are required for this highest level of reading.

Those calling for academic instruction of the young don’t seem to appreciate that math and reading are complex skills acquired in stages related to age. Children will acquire these skills more easily and more soundly if their lessons accord with the developmental sequence that parallels their cognitive development.

From the outset, let’s acknowledge that hard data on the comparative benefits of one or another type of early-childhood educational program are hard to come by. The difficulty stems from the fact that education is a chaotic process. Each time children and their teacher come together they are different, thanks to the intervening experiences each has had. In other words, every classroom meeting is a nonreplicable experiment. Our research tools, however, are borrowed from the physical sciences, where regularity, rather than chaos, reigns. In physics and chemistry it is possible to control most, if not all, of the variables in play. This is almost impossible in education.

For example, classrooms that follow different educational philosophies will vary in many other ways as well. The teachers may vary in skill and experience as well as in personality. In addition, it is almost impossible to match two groups of children. A reliable match would require comparable families, a condition that is difficult, if not impossible, to satisfy. Moreover, the instruments used for assessment, whether observations or tests, are less reliable and less valid at the early level than they are at later ages. This does not mean that meaningful research cannot or has not been done. It just means that we may have to be more innovative in designing studies of educational methods than we have been in the past. The physical-science paradigm, which presupposes regularity and replicability, is simply not appropriate to the study of classrooms.

Longitudinal studies can overcome some of these difficulties, thereby providing meaningful evidence comparing one method with another. Long-term observation and measurement reduce the chance that random factors, such as a teacher’s bad week, are corrupting the data. In an analysis of ten independently conducted, and variously sponsored, longitudinal studies of the effects of early-childhood education for poor and at-risk children, High Scope Educational Research Foundation scholar Lawrence J. Schweinhart and his colleagues found that children who attended preschool performed significantly better intellectually, at least during the program and shortly thereafter. In some but not all of the studies, significantly fewer of the children who attended preschool were classified as disabled and placed in special-education classes. Likewise, in some but not all of the studies, children who attended preschool had higher rates of high-school completion.

These investigations of early-intervention programs provide clear evidence that early-childhood education, in most cases of the developmentally appropriate kind, had lasting effects on the lives of participating children. It is not clear, however, whether the results would be the same if advantaged children were the subjects. Consider an analogy. If you take children who are significantly below the norm and feed them a full-calorie, nutritious diet, they will make remarkable progress until they reach the norm. But if you put well-nourished children on a similar regimen, there will be few if any effects. If you start at a low level, you have more room for improvement than if you start at the norm.

Studies of children in different types of preschools are merely suggestive. One study by Leslie Recorla, Marion C. Hyson, and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek compared children who had attended an academic preschool with those who had attended a developmentally appropriate program. Although there were no academic differences between the two groups, the children attending the academic program were more anxious and had lower self-esteem. These results diminished after the children began to attend public school.

An older study was carried out by Carleton Washburn, the famed Evanston, Illinois, educator. He introduced children to formal instruction in reading at different grade levels from kindergarten to 2nd grade. The children who were introduced to reading at these three levels were then retested in junior high school. The assessors didn’t know the grade at which each child had learned to read. Washburn found little difference in reading achievement among the groups. The children who had been introduced to formal instruction in reading later than the others, however, were more motivated and spontaneous readers than those who had begun early. Similar findings were reported in the Plowden Report in England, which compared children from the informal schools of rural areas with children who attended the more formal schools of urban centers.

Studies of early readers, those who are able to read phonemically on entering kindergarten, have found similar results. In both the United States and Canada, only about 3 to 5 percent of children read early. In such studies, most children had IQs of 120 or higher and were at Piaget’s stage of concrete operations. In addition, almost all of them had a parent or relative who took special interest in them. These adults did not engage in formal instruction; they read to their children, took them to the library, and talked about books with them. In order to learn to read early in life, children need the requisite mental abilities, but they also benefit from the motivation that develops from rich exposure to language and books and the special attention of a warm and caring adult.
The movement toward academic training of the young is about parents anxious to give their children an edge in an increasingly competitive economy.

Evidence attesting to the importance of developmentally appropriate education in the early years comes from cross-cultural studies. Jerome Bruner reports that in French-speaking parts of Switzerland, where reading instruction is begun at the preschool level, a large percentage of children have reading problems. In German-speaking parts of Switzerland, where reading is not taught until age six or seven, there are few reading problems. In Denmark, where reading is taught late, there is almost no illiteracy. Likewise in Russia, where the literacy rate is quite high, reading is not taught until the age of six or seven.

Why, when we know what is good for young children, do we persist in miseducating them, in putting them at risk for no purpose? The short answer is that the movement toward academic training of the young is not about education. It is about parents anxious to give their children an edge in what they regard as an increasingly competitive and global economy. It is about the simplistic notion that giving disadvantaged young children academic training will provide them with the skills and motivation to continue their education and break the cycle of poverty. It is about politicians who push accountability, standards, and testing in order to win votes as much as or more than to improve the schools.

The deployment of unsupported, potentially harmful pedagogies is particularly pernicious at the early-childhood level. It is during the early years, ages four to seven, when children’s basic attitudes toward themselves as students and toward learning and school are established. Children who come through this period feeling good about themselves, who enjoy learning and who like school, will have a lasting appetite for the acquisition of skills and knowledge. Children whose academic self-esteem is all but destroyed during these formative years, who develop an antipathy toward learning, and a dislike of school, will never fully realize their latent abilities and talents.

If we want all of our children to be the best that they can be, we must recognize that education is about them, not us. If we do what is best for children, we will give them and their parents the developmentally appropriate, high-quality, affordable, and accessible early-childhood education they both need and deserve.

—David Elkind is a professor of child development at Tufts University and the author of Reinventing Childhood and The Hurried Child.

Taking into account everything we know about how children develop and learn, and matching that to the content and strategies planned for them in early childhood programs. Specialized knowledge about child development and learning is the cornerstone of professionalism in early childhood education. Such knowledge encompasses recognizing common developmental threads among all children and understanding significant variations across cultures. Teachers and caregivers with the knowledge needed to do these things are better equipped and more likely to engage in developmentally appropriate practices; more likely to accept typical variations among children and accurately recognize potential problems that may require specialized intervention; and more likely to understand the degree of developmental readiness children need to achieve particular goals.

Treating children as individuals, not as a cohort group. Practitioners are called on daily to make decisions that require Them to see each child as distinct from all others.In their efforts to guide children's instruction and establish appropriate expectations, teachers and caregivers must weigh such variables as the children's experiences, knowledge and skills, age, and level of comprehension. Contextual factors, and physical resources and the amount of time available, can also affect teacher judgments.

Treating children with respect by recognizing their changing capabilities, and viewing them in the context of their family, culture, and community, and their past experience and current circumstances. Respect involves having faith in children's ability to eventually learn the information, behavior, and skills they will need to constructively function on their own. Having respect implies believing children are capable of changing their behavior and of making self-judgments. Caregivers and teachers manifest respect when they allow children to think for themselves, make decisions, work toward their own solutions to problems, and communicate their ideas. Out of respect, child care workers allow children to make choices about activities and where to sit at the lunch table. They encourage toddlers to pour their own juice, preschoolers to become actively engaged in clean-up, and school-age children to help determine the activities for the day. Respect for children's increasing competence involves allowing them to experience the exhilaration of accomplishment, and recognizing that self-control is an emerging skill that children achieve over time, given adequate support and guidance. With this in mind, children's transgressions are handled as gaps in knowledge and skills, not as character flaws.