My Views On Education Philosophy

My Views On Education Philosophy

When I first began college I wanted to be an accountant. I had taken accounting class in high school and really enjoyed it. Accounting is finite and rigid in terms of how it is structured. The rules did not change in regards to how you went about learning and applying it. Once you mastered the principles of accounting you would be able to do your assignments in class or your work in the real world proficiently. As I began taking the core accounting classes in my first years of college I noticed that the same reasons that once attracted me to accounting were now acting as a deterrent toward the profession. The finite, rigid nature of accounting was making it mundane, boring, and overall displeasing to study and do the class assignments. I wanted to study a subject that was not mundane, rigid, or boring. A subject that would challenge me to use my analytical mind in order to create my own informed opinions about the world around me. I changed my major to history and it has been one of the best decisions that I have ever made. I love learning about the past, understanding the causes of previous events, what the implications were behind the events, and how the events relate to and influence society of today. This love for learning about history is why I want to be a social studies teacher. Learning and teaching are related to and dependent upon one another. If a person has not learned an adequate amount of knowledge about a particular subject then that person will not be as effective at teaching the subject. People who do not like to study, learn, and keep up with new ideas and theories in their subject will be letting their students down and may not develop into effective ...

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...e of Essentialism and Perennialism. Essentialism tries to teach the essential core course of a civilization with a back to the basics approach. This would encapsulate the direct teaching lecture part of my social studies class. The lecture must be teacher centered and learned by the students before they can get into the deep though, the why of history as previously explained. After the lecture has been given and the students understand in general terms what took place then the class will be shifted to the philosophical tendencies of Perennialism. Using the ideas behind Perennialism, I will have my students read the Great Books of the time which relate to the events and ideas that they are studying. For example, after I have lectured on the Enlightenment I would have them read Candide by Voltaire, which illustrates all the aspects of the Enlightenment movement.