Five Paradigms for Education

Foundational Views and Key Issues

T. Newell

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137398017
• eBook ISBN: 9781137391803
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

Newell compares the fundamental assumptions of five major worldviews of education and their implications for classroom practice, incorporating history and case studies and posing questions about the limits and benefits of employing each today.

1

Introduction: Why Learn about Paradigms of Education?

Abstract: Sets out advantages of studying education foundations or philosophy of education. Historical or narrative presentation avoids unfamiliar abstractions. Explains the book’s thesis that Whitehead’s aphorism, “The essence of education is that it be religious,” most fully explains features of the five educational paradigms. Advocates that pre-service teachers can comprehensively grasp the work of teaching when they see educating as “religious” work. Whitehead said that education should seek to implant “reverence” in students—respect for what is most important in their tradition—and “duty,” or readiness for appropriate action. The five paradigms show distinctive reverences and duties.

Keywords: aims of education; education foundations; philosophy of education; religion; Smart, Ninian; Whitehead, A. N.

Newell, Ted. Five Paradigms for Education: Foundational Views and Key Issues. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137391803.0007.

Why learn about paradigms of education?

This book gives readers a map to see education as a whole. Its bird’s eye view can place aspects of education in right proportion. Seen from the highest vantage point, the significance of a teacher’s work can appear in right perspective.

Education is far more than classrooms, student desks, and an orderly day. Education is not only what people in Western societies associate with public schooling or university. Most broadly, education is a society’s process of cultural transmission. A paradigm of education depends on a distinct meaning of self and society; it works toward a conception of ideal humanity. Rival educational paradigms come from rival concepts of what is important about life. Underlying conceptions of reality are radically different. For their own purposes, the educations in this book shape their initiates in radically different ways.

The five paradigms of education are:

1Traditional paradigm

2Plato’s academic paradigm

3Locke’s empirical paradigm

4Rousseau’s paradigm

5Jesus’s paradigm

Facets of paradigms

Alternative educational practices come from alternative basic assumptions. The meaning of educational excellence, a conception of “teacher,” and so on are different within each paradigm, because the whole point of “education” differs. People in Western societies are familiar with a main way of educating—the Empirical paradigm with its precise routines (more or less). How most people in Western societies understand a teacher’s role, expectations for students, school discipline, regular rituals, and other facets come from the Empirical paradigm. But the word “teacher” does not mean the same to Jean-Jacques Rousseau as in the Empiricist paradigm. The character of Rousseau’s ideal graduate differs radically from Plato’s ideal graduate. Variation also emerges in a Traditional paradigm compared to Jesus’s paradigm—and between all paradigms. By comparing, readers see the range of possibilities for “teacher,” “discipline,” and other facets. Pre-service teachers can learn to relate the facets of an educational paradigm to a core purpose and meaning. Each facet shares in the task of passing on to its graduates the desired personal attributes. “Facets” is term of choice because, like a diamond, these are aspects of education.

Even if most readers return to teaching in an Empirical educational paradigm, they come to a wider understanding of teaching. They appreciate how teachers can be mentors as in, say, the Traditional Greek Athenian paradigm.

Questions a reader can ask about each paradigm include:

Aims: In this paradigm, what makes a person “educated”? That is, what are its aims of education? When are sponsors of learners satisfied with graduates? Why did the society educate? What knowledge is important? What is its telos?

Assessment: How is learning assessed? By ability to repeat a body of knowledge; certain abilities; values, dispositions, or moral qualities?

Students’ nature: Who was educated? From which ages onward? What is the student’s nature? For example, is it innocent, depraved, receptive, resistant, social, individualistic, conceptual, embodied, or holistic? What psychologies are relevant?

Teacher: What is the teacher’s role for students? Is it passive or active? Is the teacher the knowledge source, facilitator, coach, or mechanic? How are students shaped toward the preferred outcome? Which teaching approaches are appropriate or efficient?

Knowledge: What is valued as knowledge? What is truthful? What is “content”? How is it gained? What was taught? What is the human horizon? Is teaching about the material world or a spiritual world, or both?

Motivation: How do sponsors motivate? Which ways of discipline or management are emphasized and which are avoided or minimized?

Setting: Which learning environments are important—classrooms, outdoors, labs, hands-on settings, workshops, library, individual study, or the drill square? Is teaching institutionalized in a school?

Characteristic events: Which regular events characterize the paradigm? Are any rituals shared? For example, how would a visitor know that a particular educational setting is within this paradigm?

Proposition: educating is spiritual or “religious” work

Alfred North Whitehead urged fresh aims for education. His address on the right aims for education appears in dozens of volumes on philosophy of education or educational foundations. It is a classic expression.¹

Speaking when World War I made British leaders aware that the education system fell short, the eminent mathematician and philosopher says that teachers and administrators have tolerated disconnected facts and subjects for too long. Education is unnecessarily boring because its information is separated from life. Whitehead urged that education move to a holistic approach. Educational data should connect to form a comprehensive picture. Showing how subjects have coherent meaning should be so much a priority that teachers should teach some elements intensively even if they teach less of a range. Better to sacrifice coverage than lose meaning. Education must also draw lines between subjects that seem isolated from each other. Mathematics should connect to language and history, for example. For full meaningfulness, education must adopt the broadest possible aim.

Whitehead concludes with his recommendation for that basic connection. He says: “The essence of education is that it be religious.” Whitehead suggests a basic understanding that will join all parts together is a comprehensive view of the world and calls it “religious.” Perhaps he chooses the term “religious” instead of “philosophical,” because the first term denotes a wide-angle understanding of reality that shapes and directs one’s personality.

How could anyone assert that education is “always religious”? Public education in Western societies claims to be not religious at all. It believes itself to favor no religion, nor suppress any religion. Courts boost school neutrality and pluralism as they secularize facets of school life such as holiday displays or names. Occasionally public schools in North America, Europe, or Australia teach about religion. Few, if any, teach a particular religion as the way the world really is—as public truth.²

Let’s be clear that Whitehead is not promoting any particular religion. The terms he chooses show he refers to spirituality. Whitehead believed that all religions are manifestations of an underlying reality, a single religion that underlies the different religions. Though widely accepted in Western societies, his relativistic conception is far from uncontroversial. Few committed Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, or Christians—to say nothing of other faiths—are relativists. Each believes that their religion gives an account of the world as it is, and their lives are more or less consistent with their understanding.

Whitehead’s insight is that education must be religious in the sense of making meaning. The task of building the fullest comprehension lends it a clear purpose. For Whitehead, an education makes complete sense when its parts are oriented to character development. His perceptive and freeing advocacy is for education to empower people by connecting to meaning.³

Whitehead says that education’s specific “religious” aims are “reverence” and “duty.” He maintains that reverence is “an intense awareness of how the past is present as the future unrolls. The present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity.” Whitehead is saying—at least—that a society lives its history. The novelist William Faulkner said the same when he wrote, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” Reverence is conscious respect for a society’s foundations. Traditions become alive as a new generation comes to live in them. Traditions die if they are not taken up and renewed. The need for renewal is true of every new generation even in the present-day West. Cynicism about a society tears at its future.⁴

Duty is reverence’s companion virtue. It “arises from our potential control over the cou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: Why Learn about Paradigms of Education?
• 2  Traditional Paradigm of Education
• 3  Plato the Revolutionary
• 4  The Empirical Paradigm
• 5  Rousseaus Paradigm
• 6  Jesuss Paradigm
• 7  Summary: What Is Education?
• Index