Directions:
For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one
that fits best according to the information given in the passage you have just
read.
Philosophy of Education is a label applied to the study of
the purpose, process, nature and ideals of education. It can be considered a
branch of both philosophy and education. Education can be defined as the teaching
and learning of specific skills, and the imparting of knowledge, judgment and
wisdom, and is something broader than the societal institution of education we
often speak of.
Many educationalists consider it a weak and imprecise field,
too far removed from the practical applications of the real world to be useful.
But philosophers dating back to Plato and the Ancient Greeks have given the
area much thought and emphasis, and there is little doubt that their work has
helped shape the practice of education over the millennia.
Plato is the earliest important educational thinker, and
education is an essential element in “The
Republic” (his most important work on philosophy and political theory,
written around 360 B.C.). In it, he advocates some rather extreme methods:
removing children from their mothers' care and raising them as wards of the
state, and differentiating children suitable to the various castes(社会等级), the highest receiving the most
education, so that they could act as guardians of the city and care for the
less able. He believed that education should be holistic(全面的), including facts, skills, physical discipline, music and
art. Plato believed that talent and intelligence is not distributed genetically
and thus is to be found in children born to all classes, although his proposed
system of selective public education for an educated minority of the population
does not really follow a democratic model.
Aristotle considered human nature, habit and reason to be
equally important forces to be cultivated in education, the ultimate aim of
which should be to produce good and virtuous citizens. He proposed that
teachers lead their students systematically, and that repetition be used as a
key tool to develop good habits, unlike Socrates' emphasis on questioning his
listeners to bring out their own ideas. He emphasized the balancing of the
theoretical and practical aspects of subjects taught, among which he clearly
mentions reading, writing, mathematics, music, physical education, literature,
history, and a wide range of sciences, as well as play, which he also
considered important.
During the period of Middle Age, the idea of Perennialism
was first formulated by St. Thomas Aquinas in his work “De Magistro”.
Perennialism holds that one should teach those things deemed to be of
everlasting importance to all people everywhere, namely principles and
reasoning, not just facts (which are apt to change over time), and that one
should teach first about people, not machines or techniques. It was originally
religious in nature, and it was only much later that a theory of worldly
Perennialism developed.
During the Renaissance(文艺复兴), the French doubter Michel de
Montaigne (1533 - 1592) was one of the first to critically look at education.
Unusually for his time, Montaigne was willing to question the conventional
wisdom of the period, calling into question the whole structure of the
educational system, and the assumption that university-educated philosophers
were necessarily wiser than uneducated farm workers, for example.
