Lesson 3.8- ESSENTIALISM

ESSENTIALISM

·       It is a theory that asserts that education properly involves the learning of the basic skills, arts, and sciences that have been useful in the past and are likely to remain useful in the future
·       It focuses on INTELLECTUAL DISCIPLINES
·       It is the educational theory that sees the primary function of the school to be the preservation and transmission of the basic elements of human culture
·       It opposes catering to childish whims or transitory fads that will cause schools to degenerate into mindless and irrelevant institutions

CURRICULUM

Core skills like reading, writing and arithmetic
·       Teaching essential facts and concepts on Science, Literature, Health and PE
·       Hard Sciences, technical and vocational courses
·       Arts for aesthetic expression
·       Values of discipline, hard work, and perfect authority
·       It is not to take on nonessential functions such as “social adjustment”, career education, consumer education, cooking classes and the like
·       It’s primary mission is ACADEMIC
·       It opposes using the school as experimental laboratories to test curricular or institutional innovations
·       It has a well-defined CURRICULAR ORIENTATION
·       It asserts that the curriculum should provide students with a differentiated and organized learning experience rather than with an undifferentiated experience that students must organize themselves
·       The teacher is an academic authority figure

METHODS OF TEACHING

·       Deductive Method
·       Recitation
·       Assignments
·       Analysis and synthesis
·       “Race and Social Heritage” over experiences

ROLE OF TEACHERS

·       Provide stimulating activities for learning
·       Prepare well-organized lessons to prove he is an authority of instruction
·       Authoritative and Disciplinarian
·       The school is the cultural transmitter,   identifies and perpetuates the basic cultural elements
·       The school should provide a standard of intellectual training in the fundamental disciplines geared to the needs of serious students and to the capacities of the upper two-thirds of the school population
·       The school should diversify its offering to include certain areas of vocational training, physical education, extracurricular activities
·       The most effective and efficient mode of providing a differentiated educational experience is the subject-matter curriculum in which each subject or intellectual discipline is organized separately from other subjects

ARTHUR BESTOR


·       He postulated the mastery of subject matter as the basis for ACADEMIC DEVELOPMENT
·       A good education provides sound training in the fundamental ways of thinking represented by history, science, mathematics, literature, art and other disciplines evolved in the course of mankind’s long quest for usable knowledge, cultural understanding and intellectual power

ESSENTIALISM’S PHILOSOPHICAL AND IDEOLOGICAL RELATIONSHIPS

ESSENTIALISM IS SIMILAR TO:

CONSERVATISM

-view education’s primary function as that of transmitting the funded and approved knowledge and values of the culture

 CLASSICAL LIBERAL

-emphasizes the skills, knowledge and values that enhance social and economic efficiency
It emphasizes:
A return to systematic subjects
Learning as the mastery of basic skills and knowledge
The teacher as mature representative
of the culture and someone who is competent in both subject matter and instruction.
4.  Education as preparation for work and citizenship
5.  The preservation of the school’s academic function.