Educational Philosophy Disposition Paper

Educational Philosophy Disposition Paper

The teacher is the most important aspect in educated the students in the classroom. It helps when the teacher is charismatic and has a passion to teach; after all they did choose to educate in a particular subject because of their love for that subject. Consistency is the key to a teacher's success. That means being consistent in communicating, grading, and most importantly the classroom management.

Historical

The public school system that we known and operate today has taken centuries of trial and error to create. The education system today has pulled strategies and methods from societies as old as pre-Mesopotamia and as recent as yesterday, not to say that education is constantly changing, but people are always trying to find new ways to improve upon the methods of educating the youth.

In preliterate societies schools did not exist. Children learned through the stories and songs that were told by their parents; these stories and songs were passed from one generation to the next for thousands of years. In these preliterate societies the skills of survival of the environment as well as the incoming attacks of surrounding villages. Once these skills were learned people in the village celebrated with dancing and music, this was their passage into adulthood.

One thing that is definitely worth noting is that every civilization had its own influence on the world without using the same methods or teaching the same people. The past societies did not even teach the same materials to their youth. The preliterate societies are an excellent example of that; they taught survival skills more than anything else. Another excellent example is the city-states of Greece, Athens and Sparta were neighbors and had two completely different methods of teaching as well as what was taught. The Athenians believed in teaching music, art, and all other sorts of culture. The Athenian goal was for their society to be filled with well-rounded persons. Spartans only taught military. They taught small groups of boys at a time until they were a certain age, then they were sent to train with one soldier until they were old enough to be a part of the Spartan military.

Progressing through time even more people started creating combination methods of teaching from the ideas of philosophers like Confucius as well as many educational pioneers like John Dewey or Friedrich Froebel. The addition of such methods and ideas led to the classroom system that is enforced and used by teachers today.

Philosophical

I do not believe in any one philosophy but if I had to pick one that related to my field of interest it would be realism. Theorists like Plato, Hegel, Froebel, and Emerson supported realism. Realism strongly emphasizes on sensory learning and after learning that information is put into different categories. There are three basic principals of realism: 1) there is a world of existence, of objects, not made by human beings; 2) the human mind can know about the real world; 3) such knowledge is a reliable guide to individual and social behavior.

In a music classroom the teacher guides the students through music but also gives background on that piece of music so the group can perform that piece of music properly. For a music class, the teacher should have a degree in music and have a full knowledge of any music that the teacher would want his group to perform. The teacher must also be fluent in liberal arts and sciences so they can relate their area of expertise and other subjects. The teacher must also be fluent in many methods of instruction, like lecture, discussion, demonstration, and experiment. With music there is more of the demonstrating and experimenting done, but there is the occasional lecture done when the teacher is explaining the piece of music.

Realists favor the standardized testing method that we use today. These standardized tests help keep the students and teachers honest when it comes to the grades of the students. The only problem with these tests is that not every student is very good at taking these tests; it is also becoming a problem for some classrooms because the teacher will sometimes only teach the test.

Political

In today's world there are many hoops that