My Ideal Educational Philosophy
We live in a country built on knowledge and high standards of education. Ben Hecht (1893-1964), an American author and dramatist, described the significance of context well: “Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.” The education process is filled with billions of “seconds” and pieces of information that, all being emphasized as important to know, serve more to cloud than clarify the meaning of time and what happens within it. It emphasizes the threads not the tapestry, the parts not the whole.
For Dewey , it was vitally important that education should not be the teaching of mere dead fact, but that the skills and knowledge which students learn be integrated fully into their lives as persons, citizens and human beings, hence his advocacy of “learning-by-doing” and the incorporation …
My philosophy is student centered. But such concerns have so preoccupied its practitioners that at times these very questions seem to become the substance of the discipline, nearly to the exclusion of thinking about actual educational problems. This applies today in an even higher degree than in former times, for through modern development of the economic life, the family as bearer of tradition and education has been weakened.