Educators.Thinker

|| **John Dewey** made seminal contributions to nearly every field and topic in philosophy and psychology. Besides his role as a primary originator of both functionalist and behaviorist psychology, Dewey was a major inspiration for several allied movements that have shaped 20th century thought, including empiricism, humanism, naturalism, contextualism, and process philosophy. For over 50 years Dewey was the voice for a liberal and progressive democracy that has shaped the destiny of America and the world.
 * < ==John Dewey==

Dewey ranks with the greatest thinkers of this or any age on the subjects of pedagogy, philosophy of mind, epistemology, logic, philosophy of science, and social and political theory. His pragmatic approaches to ethics, aesthetics, and religion have also remained influential. || ||< **Francis Wayland Parker** (October 9, 1837 – March 2, 1902) was a pioneer of the progressive school movement in the United States. He believed that education should include the complete development of an individual — mental, physical, and moral. John Dewey called him the "father of progressive education." He worked to create curriculum that centered on the whole child and a strong language background. He was against standardization, isolated drill and rote learning. August 1861, at the beginning of the American Civil War, Parker enlisted as a private in the 4th New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry. He was elected lieutenant and was later promoted to captain and commander of the company. He was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and commander of the 4th New Hampshire in January 1865, serving in St. Augustine, Florida—part of that time in the brig. He was captured and held prisoner in North Carolina in May 1865. After the war ended, Colonel Parker resumed teaching, first in Ohio, where he became the head of the normal school in Dayton, Ohio. In 1872, he traveled to Germany to study at the Humboldt University of Berlin. In Europe, Parker examined the new methods of pedagogy being developed there, proposed by European theorists, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Fröbel, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and particularly Johann Friedrich Herbart. Parker asserted that students benefit most from reading works of high interest, thereby activating background knowledge. A supporter of balanced instruction, he encouraged the use of the elements of phonics, as well as lists of word families, onsets and rimes, to assist in word recognition. This innovative educator integrated the skill areas of reading, writing, listening and speaking. Parker advocated many of the current language experience and process writing approach methodologies. He believed that children should write across the content areas on subjects that interested them, for enjoyment and that the proper form would come with practice. All writing should be natural and connected to authentic and meaningful activities, using the child’s own vocabulary; in other words, experience based writing. Parker was a teacher, principal and a lecturer, who wanted all children to have their own slate boards, so they could write and draw freely without fear of mistakes. || ||< **Booker T. Washington** stands out in American History as a school book blackhero. Some have even gone as far as to label Booker T. Washington a token Negro in the company of white heroes. This is because of his acceptance of segregation, his outward humility, and his opposition to black militancy, even more than because of his constructive achievements as an educator and race leader. His critics argue that his methods were too compromising and unheroic to be placed in the forefront as the spokesperson for black progress. Washington was best known as the Negro spokesperson who, in the Atlanta Compromise Address in 1895, accepted the Southern white demand for racial segregation. He was also the hero of this own success story, //Up From Slavery//. This autobiography described how he came up from poverty through self-help and the help of benevolent whites to be the foremost black educator and the successor of Frederick Douglass as a black leader and spokesman. Regardless of the position one chooses to take on Washington, he meant many things to many people, and his ideas were critical to helping blacks establish a foundation for progress here in the United States.
 * < ==﻿Francis Wayland Parker==
 * < ==Booker T. Washington==

Washington's views on education were representative of the fact that he was not an intellectual, but a man of action. Washington wanted blacks in the south to respect and value the need for industrial education both from a vantage of American and African experience. He was against the notion of education as a tool used merely to enable one to speak and write the English language correctly; he wanted school to be a place where one might learn to make life more endurable, and if possible, attractive - he wanted an education that would relieve him of the hard times at home, immediately. Washington, early in his life noticed that those who were considered educated were not that far removed from the conditions in which he was residing. Therefore, he disagreed with the post-emancipation ideologies of blacks who believed that freedom from slavery brought freedom from hard work. Moreover, education of the head would bring even more sweeping emancipation from work with the hands. He did not want his black people to be ashamed of using their hands, but to have respect for creating something and a sense of satisfaction upon completion of that task. ||
 * < ==William Torrey Harris==

[[image:william-torrey-harris-1.jpg width="238" height="260"]]
||< **William Torrey Harris**—an American educator, administrator, lecturer, editor, and philosopher—was one of the most significant second-generation Transcendentalists and was especially influential in popularizing Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in the second half of the nineteenth century. Like Amos Bronson Alcott, Harris became a superintendent of schools (in St. Louis, Missouri) and devoted much time and effort to educational reform. He supported the kindergarten movement inaugurated in Germany by Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852) and in 1873 succeeded in establishing a kindergarten as part of public education in St. Louis. He was also instrumental in founding the St. Louis Philosophical Society in 1866 and the Journal of Speculative Philosophy in 1867. This publication quickly became the organ of the American Hegelians as well as the most important philosophical journal in the United States for the next decade and beyond. Harris remained unfaltering in his appreciation and praise of his spiritual mentor Alcott. He encouraged Alcott to publish in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and Alcott, for his part, considered this periodical the “fittest organ” for publishing his writings and believed Harris the readiest of his contemporaries to comprehend and appreciate his speculations.

In 1879 Harris became a faculty member at the first session of Alcott’s famous Concord School of Philosophy, where he lectured primarily on Hegel. In 1880 he moved to Concord, Massachusetts and in 1884 purchased Alcott’s former residence there, Orchard House. He heartily participated in all the summer meetings of the Concord School of Philosophy until its close in 1888, when Alcott died. || ||< In 1879, **Calvin M. Woodward** opened the Manual Training School for boys in St. Louis. His curriculum included science, mathematics, language, literature, history, drawing and shop work. Shop was included to keep instruction more interesting, to provide learning in the use of basic tools common to a variety of jobs and to increase general education. Woodward felt that manual training was essential for proper intellectual and moral education and was also a way of restoring the value and dignity of hand labor. He advocated adding manual training to the traditional curriculum in order to bring education in line with the demands of modern society. Manual training would help students realize at any early age the connection between knowing and doing. "The contrast between the listless and often inattentive attitude of children occupied with some ordinary class-lesson, and the eager eyes and nimble fingers of the same children at the carpenter’s or modeling bench, is most instructive," wrote Sir Philip Magnus, one of the early supporters of manual training. || ||< **Elizabeth Peabody** was involved in a number of innovative educational ventures, culminating in the establishment of the kindergarten in America from 1859. In 1832, she held the first of her "reading parties" or "conferences" for women. The sessions consisted of reading, lecture, and dialogue on a particular topic, such as ancient history or the causes of the French Revolution. An early form of continuing education, this interactive process was in keeping with the Transcendental sense of knowledge as intuitive. Margaret Fuller later capitalized on the technique. Between 1879 and 1884, Miss Peabody attended and lectured at Bronson Alcott's Concord School of Philosophy, another experiment in adult education. From 1834 to 1836, Peabody served as Alcott's assistant at the Temple School in Boston (so-called because it was held in the Masonic Temple at the corner of Tremont Street and Temple Place). When Alcott returned to New England from Pennsylvania in 1834, Peabody was planning to open a school for boys in Boston. Rather than compete with him for pupils, she encouraged him to set up his school, transferred to him the students she had started to gather for her own school, and offered to assist him. Since Peabody's thoughts on education coincided to a remarkable degree with Alcott's, their collaboration started out auspiciously. Both believed that proper teaching elicited the truth and moral sense within children, and that the Socratic question-and-answer method was effective toward that end. || ||< In September 1873, **Susan Blow** opened the first public kindergarten at the Des Peres School in Carondelet. While most classrooms were plain, Blow’s kindergarten classroom was bright and cheerful. It had low tables and short benches just right for small children. The room contained many plants, books, and toys for children to use during work and play. Students learned about color, shapes, and fractions by using simple objects like balls and blocks. They also learned about keeping themselves clean, eating well, and getting regular exercise.
 * < ==Calvin Woodward==
 * < ==Elizabeth Peabody==
 * < ==Susan Blow==

Public schools in St. Louis and around the country started kindergarten classrooms using Blow’s classroom as a model. By 1879, there were 53 kindergarten rooms in the St. Louis school system. Because she had worked very hard and become too tired, Susan Blow became sick. She retired in 1884 and traveled to improve her health. In 1889 she left St. Louis and moved east. In New York and Boston, Blow wrote books and taught about the kindergarten movement. ||