I have in the last two postings made a case: those concerned with local schools should
know something about educational philosophies.
This includes those parents who take an active role in their children’s
education. And while I believe that
local business people and other citizens should be likewise engaged, they too
would benefit in their interactions with schools by knowing this material. The call is not for such people to be
experts, but to have a conversational familiarity with the subject. The main reasons for this is to apply that
knowledge toward, one, evaluating the schools in question – each philosophy
sets a normative direction for what a particular school’s efforts should be –
and, two, determining where the school people they interact with are “coming
from.” The lay person can be armed with
an albeit limited language so that interactions can be more meaningful and
better directed.
This posting is dedicated to reviewing the first of four
philosophical traditions and two “near” philosophical traditions. The first addressed philosophy is considered
the most conservative of the four and is one of two philosophies that are
classified as teacher centered approaches to education; I’ll explain shortly.
Perennialism, at its core, is based on an assumption. That is, in life, throughout the course of
history, there is a list of principles and concerns that is timeless,
universal, and deserving of our continued interest. This list includes liberty, happiness, equality,
trust, and the like. This focus is
preferred over educational efforts to convey facts, structures, or processes,
for example. As these listed concerns
indicate, topics of interest are aimed at human issues as opposed to technical,
mechanical, or vocational topics. A main
difference between perennialism and essentialism, the other conservative
philosophy, is that essentialism tends to be centered on what is considered
essential knowledge and skills for the given economy in a school’s location. So, present day conditions, for example,
would be aimed, in part, at teaching computer skills. Perennialism would consider such a focus
short-sighted and a bit superfluous.
Those who subscribe to perennialism would instead state that the aim of
education is to prepare students to live more meaningful lives and that calls
for them to be engaged in dialogues over the time honored principles and values,
such as those just listed, as they pertain to contemporary realities. In terms
of initiating such discussions, students should be exposed to the great
thinkers of Western Civilization.
This approach has been popularly related to the Great Books
program that originated at Columbia University through the efforts of John
Erskine back in the 1920s and later popularized chiefly through the public
efforts of Mortimer Adler. Encyclopedia
Britannica publishes the set known as the Great Books series and provides
in-service teacher training programs on the use of the Great Books for
classroom use. Their training is based
on perennialist principles and teaching instructional strategies. Adler provides the following three standards
by which to include a particular work in the Great Books collection:
·
The
book has contemporary significance; that is, it has relevance to the problems
and issues of our time;
·
The
book is inexhaustible; it can be read again and again with benefit; “This is an
exacting criterion, an ideal that is fully attained by only a small number of
the 511 works that [were] selected. It
is approximated in varying degrees by the rest.”
·
The
book is relevant to a large number of the great ideas and great issues that
have occupied the minds of thinking individuals for the last 25 centuries.[1]
Along with the assumption regarding timeless principles and
values, perennialism also assumes that mental capacity can be likened to a
muscle and that appropriate educational efforts should be about exercising that
“muscle” by engaging in active discussions that challenge accepted beliefs and
values. If this sounds familiar, it is
highly reliant on the Socratic method.
Based on, in my opinion, a not so accurate view of Socrates’ “gadfly”
role in ancient Athens, teachers skillfully using focused questions challenge
students to reflect and reconsider opinions, beliefs, values, and attitudes
associated with an issue. The questions
would probably reflect some position proffered by a great thinker. Who are these thinkers? The list includes, randomly, Plato, Livy,
Cicero, Plutarch, Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Jane Austin, Charles Darwin;
you get the idea.
What can be said about perennialism in relation to federation
theory? In effect, federation theory is
a perennialist approach in that it banks on Enlightenment ideals – its strong
reliance on reason, for example – as those ideals influenced the philosophical
basis of our nation’s constitutional principles. But it does not solely depend on this
tradition (I will further develop this theme when in a future posting I review
progressivism). Pure perennialism has an
absolutist view of values; they are valuable in and of themselves and do not
rely on consequential factors. That is
what gives these values and principles their timeless character. As with essentialism, this philosophy has an
objective view of reality – it shies away from relativistic and constructed
views of knowledge. The teacher is
expected to control the teaching/learning process, although he or she is
counted on to pose the challenging questions mentioned above. In this, perennialist ideals call on teachers
to open instruction so that students can engage in the give and take of
dialectic discussion. This process will
find corresponding strategies in the more liberal philosophies of progressivism
and reconstructionism. As such, it also
mirrors what I have indicated my favored instructional approach would be in
implementing federation theory content – a modified values clarification
approach.
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