John Locke

(1632-1704)

Philosophical Labels:
Rationalist, Realist, Empiricist, Utilitarian

Influences:
John Amos Comenius, John Milton, Michel de Montaigne,
Roger Ascham, William Peggy, Aristotle, Plato

Significant Works:
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)

Treatises on Government (1690)

Thoughts Concerning Reading and Study for a Gentleman

Two Treatises on Civil Government

Letters Concerning Toleration

Of Study

Conduct of the Understanding

Significant Claims:
Regarding the human mind:

“How came it to be furnished? Whence came it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man
has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To
this I answer in one word, from experience.”

Regarding ideas:

To Locke, ideas sat in two categories: simple and compound. Simple ideas are those that first enter a child’s
consciousness via the senses. Those ideas which are developed by “a combination of all the ways of
sensation and reflection” are compound ideas. This claim repudiates the doctrine of innate ideas, held by
Socrates.

Regarding the chief aim of education (a fit body and mind):

“He whose mind directs not wisely will never take the right way; and he whose body is crazy and feeble will
never be able to advance in it.”
Contributions to Education:
By rejecting the doctrine of innate ideas, Locke argued the following:

1) If the mind is a tabula rasa at birth, man is incapable of innate depravity. Depravity, therefore, is a
learned behavior.
2) If the mind is a tabula rasa at birth, all men are born with equal ability, if not opportunity, to
experience the vicissitudes of the physical world.
3) If the mind is a tabula rasa at birth, education is the gradual development from the initial stage of
total ignorance to the employment of the reflective faculty to make the world meaningful and useful;
“truth is the measure of knowledge and the business of understanding”.

Locke fundamentally opposed the following in education:

1) Scholasticism
2) Humanistic curriculum, especially the emphasis of Latin, Greek, and rhetoric.

Locke advocated for the following practices:

1) Studying the vernacular language.

2) Physical sciences, to provide an understanding of the world.
3) Biological studies to understand the body.
4) Mathematics as a foundation for the study of other sciences, and to think clearly and logically
5) History and geography to appreciate one’s heritage.
6) Study of practical arts.

Locke advocated for two schemes of education – one for the lower classes and one for the upper classes.
Lower classes should be relegated to vocational training and basic literacy. For the upper classes, the aims of
education included:

1) Moral education.
2) “Cultivation of wisdom in the practical affairs of living – the management of personal life, the control
of one’ environment, and the art of living with others as a gentleman and as a useful citizen.
3) Good breeding including a sense of dignity.
4) Acquisition of knowledge, not for its own sake, but to contribute to the good life, to lead not the life
of scholar but that of a gentleman concerned with practical affairs.
Jean Jacques Rousseau
(1712-1778)

Philosophical Labels:
Naturalist, Pragmatist

Influences:
Voltaire, Diderot, Turgot, Montesquieu, Aristotle, Plato,
Fenelon, Basedow

Significant Works:
Emile

The New Heloise

Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

Discourse on the Arts and the Sciences

The Social Contract

Considerations on the Government of Poland

Significant Claims:
Regarding the study of arts and sciences:

“Where there is no effect, it is idle to look for a cause: but here the effect is certain and the depravity actual;
our minds have been corrupted in proportion as the arts and sciences have improved. Will it be said that this is
a misfortune peculiar to the present age? No, gentlemen, the evils resulting from our vain curiosity are as old
as the world. The daily ebb and flow of the tides are not more regularly influenced by the moon, than the
morals of a people by the progress of the arts and sciences. As their light has risen above our horizon, virtue
has take flight, and the same phenomenon has been constantly observed in all times and places.”

Regarding his views of a model state, and the relation of education and the individual to it:

“Public education, according to regulations prescribed by government, and under magistrates appointed by the
supreme authority, is therefore one of the fundamental requirements of popular government.”

Regarding the effect of a “bad” education:

“Íf the cultivation of the sciences is prejudicial to military qualities, it is still more so to moral qualities. Even
from our infancy an absurd system of education serves to adorn our wit and corrupt our judgment. We see, on
every side, huge institutions, where our youth are educated at great expense, and instructed in everything but
their duty. Your children will be ignorant of their own language, when they can talk others which are no spoken
anywhere.”
Regarding the compromise between man’s natural state and one within a social contract:

“The passage from the state of Nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by
substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they had formerly lacked…
Although, in this state, he deprives himself o some advantages which he got from nature, he gains in return
others so great, his faculties are so stimulated and developed, his ideas so extended, his feelings so ennobled,
and his whole soul so uplifted, that, did not the abuses of this new condition often degrade him below that
which he had left, he would be bound to bless continually the happy moment which took him from it for ever,
and, instead of a stupid and unimaginative animal, made him an intelligent being and a man. What man loses
by the social contract is his natural liberty, and an unlimited right to everything he tries to get and succeeds in
getting; what he gains is civil liberty and the proprietorship of all he possesses.”

Contributions to Education:
Rousseau advocated for the following education model in Emile:

Rousseau’s greatest contributions to education include the following ideas:

1) His concept of the family as “the fundamental educational institution”.

2) His account of the successive stages of human life from birth to maturity, and in the general
treatment of the child based on the characterization of the several stages. These subsequently
influenced developmentalism theories espoused by Piaget and Bruner.
3) His insistence, as with religious education, on postponing certain areas of intellectual and moral
training until the individual is ready.
4) His transfer of the real work of education from childhood to adolescence, particularly in preparing a
student for life in society.
5) His emphasis on the providing of an education environment.
6) His great passion for humane treatment of children.
7) His insistence on natural, meaningful, and purposive methods of guidance.
8) His emphasis on the importance of self-education.
9) His doctrine of learning by doing.
10) His suggestion of a professional knowledge of the child and his environment as a necessity in
teacher education.
Johann Berhnard Basedow
(1723-1790)

Philosophical Labels:
Naturalism, Pragmatism

Influences:
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Francis Bacon, John Amos Comenius

Significant Works:
Book of Method for Fathers and Mothers of Families and of
Nations

Elementary Work

Significant Claims:
Contributions to Education:
Basedow was an enthusiastic disciple of Rousseau, and
attempted to put Rousseau’s theories into practice on a large scale. He did so by opening a school, named
Philanthropinum in Dessau, Denmark in 1774. Unfortunately, his quarrelsome character and tendency towards
alcoholism caused him to be replaced a few years, and the school closed its doors in 1793.

The school did receive attention and funding from Joseph II of Austria, Empress Catherine of Russia, King
Christian VII of Denmark, and many other eminent nobles and groups.

His experiments with Rousseauistic methods of teaching influenced Germany educational thought, and he
developed revolutionary methods of teaching geography, history, arithmetic, geometry, natural history, and
physics.

His work, Book of Method, emphasized teaching practices such as:

1) Teaching through nature

2) Treatment of children as children
3) Impartial religious instruction
4) Natural methods in teaching languages
5) “Teaching through the senses”, learning by doing instruction in crafts, exposure to real things, music,
dancing, drawing, and physical training.
Immanuel Kant
(1724-1804)

Philosophical Labels:
Naturalism, Pragmatism, Empiricism

Influences:
Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau

Significant Works:
Critique of Pure Reason

Critique of Practical Reason

Critique of Judgement

Significant Claims:
Regarding the necessity and absolute possibility of scientific knowledge:

The realms of nature are trustworthy because they always follow the same never changing laws of cause and
effect. These necessary truths in nature may be arrived at without reference to experience. For, we find them
in the pure laws or judgments of the mind free from the sanction of experience. This pure activity of the mind
not only arrives at conclusions in scientific fields without reference to experience, but it dominates all
knowledge and presides over the life of experience as well. Knowledge presupposes a knower and a thing
known – a mind that perceives and a thing that is perceived – a mental and an external world – a subject and
an object. Hence, Kant attempted to reconcile realism with spiritualism.

Contributions to Education:
Kant argued that the age of reasoning determined the appropriate time to begin formal education. Children “do
not have to know the reason for everything”, but where ever they are confronted with a question of duty, they
should be helped to understand its principle. When the right time comes, the educator should encourage free
and open discussion on individual and social rights and duties.
 Johann Gottlieb Fichte
(1762-1814)

Philosophical Labels:
Naturalism, Pragmatism, Empiricism

Influences:
Plato, Pestalozzi, Rousseau, Kant

Significant Works:
Foundations of Natural Right

Vocation of Man

Vocation of the Scholar

Significant Claims:
Regarding the aim of education:

“As a national system, [Germany] sought to produce good citizens”.

The achievement of, or at least, the attempt toward the achievement of, freedom is the aim od education.
Education for manhood should be relieved from the fluctuating and immature sense of freedom in the pupil and
be placed under the effective supervision of a wise agency.

Regarding Kant’s dualism of mind and matter:

Knowing and the object being known form knowledge.

Contributions to Education:
Some of Fichte’s most important contributions include:

1) If freedom is the ultimate goal of education, freedom must be developed through practice. This
necessitates a guided environment in which freedom, that is, creative activity and originality, takes
place.
2) Education is the art of preparing a specified and carefully arranged physical and spiritual environment
to which the child is exposed, and in which he gradually receives a course of training leading to
eventual freedom in a political and spiritual sense.
3) The belief that education is a preparation for manhood, and that it must train a man intellectually,
socially, morally, religiously, and aesthetically. To create a perfect state, “we must first create perfect
men”.
 Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi
(1746-1827)

Philosophical Labels:
Naturalism, Pragmatism, Empiricism

Influences:
John Amos Comenius, John Locke, Voltaire, Kant, Gibbon,
Goethe, Fichte, Rousseau, Plato, Aristotle

Significant Works:
Leonard and Gertrude

How Gertrude Teachers Her Children

Lyrical Ballads

The Evening Hours of a Hermit

On Infants’ Education

The Swan Song

My Fortunes as a Superintendent of My Educational Establishments at Burgdorf and Yverdun

On Fatherland and Education

An Attempt at a sketch on the Essence of the idea of Elementary Education

Book for Mothers

A Guide for Teaching Spelling and Reading

My Investigations into the Course of Nature in the Development of the Human Race

Significant Claims:
Regarding his concept of organic development:

“It is a principle of ours that the teacher should aim rather at increasing the powers of his pupils than in
increasing his knowledge…Even to know what is right and what is best, unless it is combined with the will and
capacity to act accordingly, can only be a source of weakness; it is in fact rather a hindrance than a help.”

Regarding matching instruction to a child’s natural growth:

“Whatever the child learns should be proportioned to his strength, getting more complicated and difficult in the
same degree as his powers of attention, of judgment and thought increase.”
“Education is like the art of the gardener under whose care a thousand trees blossom and grow. He
contributes nothing to their actual growth; the principle of growth lies in the trees themselves. He plants and
waters but God gives the increase…So with the educator: he imparts no single power to men. He only watches
lest any external force should injure or disturb. He takes care that development runs its course in accordance
with its own laws.

Contributions to Education:
Pestalozzi’s writings were largely devoted to discussions on methods of instruction in three main areas of child
development: intellectual, moral, and vocational.

 Intellectual: number, form and language as “elementary means of instruction, because the whole sum
of the external properties of any object is comprised in its outline and its number, and is brought home
to consciousness through language.”
 Moral: Moral and religious education are fundamental in that the latter brings man to God and the
former places man in society. A child’s relationship with their mother is the first and most important
relationship for teaching love and moral rectitude.
 Vocational: Vocational training would life the children of the poor from a condition of misery to a position
of dignity. These practical powers of the child should begin with the earliest bodily movements and
advance to constructive activities.

Pestalozzi believed that teachers could foster growth through a specific process to evolve thought, called
Auschauung:

1) Sense perceptions leading to the formation of ideas

2) Formation of ideas through combinations of sense impressions and observations (Lockean)
3) Creation of new ideas within the mind intuitively, without the intervention of external things (Kantian)

Some of Pestalozzi’s most important contributions are based on the following beliefs:

1) If freedom is the ultimate goal of education, freedom must be developed through practice. This
necessitates a guided environment in which freedom, that is, creative activity and originality, takes
place.
2) Education is the art of preparing a specified and carefully arranged physical and spiritual environment
to which the child is exposed, and in which he gradually receives a course of training leading to
eventual freedom in a political and spiritual sense.
3) The belief that education is a preparation for manhood, and that it must train a man intellectually,
socially, morally, religiously, and aesthetically. To create a perfect state, “we must first create perfect
men”.

Pestalozzi’s theories of organic development were used at the two boys boarding schools he taught at, and
influenced Prussian educational thought. He also influenced music pedagogy, particularly the methods created
by Michael Traugott Pfeiffer and Hans Georg Nageli. Their methods advocated “sound-before-symbol”, thus
imitating the principles Pestalozzi advocated, and hearkening to the eventual development of Gordon
methododlogy.
Johann Friedrich Herbart
(1776-1841)

Philosophical Labels:
Naturalism, Pragmatism, Empiricism

Influences:
Pestalozzi, Rousseau, Kant, Leibnitz

Significant Works:
Outlines of Educational Doctrine

Significant Claims:
Regarding the nature of reality:

Each element of reality has its independent nature

and existence. There is a pluralism of things. Reality
is a collectible term to cover realities. The mind, or
self, is one such reality. When it interacts with other realities of the physical world, the result is a definite
disturbance or disturbances leading to “sensations” of the realities causing the disturbances. All sensations
originate in the contact of the soul, or mind, with external realities.

Regarding the nature of teaching:

To the extent that the teacher can prepare the mind and present the realities of the external world in logical
steps to the mind, he truly educates. The logical steps are the preparation of the subject matter (analysis), the
presentation of the subject matter (synthesis), association, systemization, and application.

Contributions to Education:
Herbart believed the following were necessary to teach (provided groundwork for cognitivism):

1) Arousal of interest in pupils for the activities in which they are engaged.
2) See to it that students develop interdisciplinary literacy and interest – literature, history,
mathematics, the sciences, etc. – to bring them in direct contact with things and men, and affect
their attitudes towards both.
3) Self-activity in itself is not educative.
4) Material should be presented concretely (pictorially), rather than descriptively, gradually and
logically, and allow the student direct contact.
5) Authority should be combined with affection; “without love authority is negative, and without
authority love tends to weaken respect”.
Friedrich
Froebel
(1782-1852)

Philosophical Labels:
Idealism, Pragmatism

Influences:
Pestalozzi, Rousseau, Herbart, Kant, Leibnitz

Significant Works:
On the Education of Man

Significant Claims:
In regards to the aim of education:

“A seed is potentially a tree; a child is a man undeveloped. Infancy, childhood, youth, even old age, may be
steps leading toward the summit of growth – the completion of life- of which the first are preliminary stages. It
is the business of education to provide the proper environment in which the individual can bring to maturity or
perfection what he was prospectively at birth. The aim of education is to realize the innately potential goals of
the life of the individual.”

Regarding education:

False education is education imposed from outside. True education is education initiated from within. A free
growth of the child’s own essence is the only aim of education. To promote this, an environment for free
development should be set up as early as possible”

Contributions to Education:
Among Froebel’s greatest contributions:

1) Kindergarden!
2) Developmental stages that would preclude Piaget and Bruner’s developmental theories. He
advanced the connectedness and continuity of child development, and argued that curriculum
should incorporate self-activity, self-expression, and play.
John Curwen
(1816-1880)

Philosophical Labels:
Pragmatism, Idealism

Influences:
Sarah Anna Glover, Pestalozzi

Significant Works:
Lessons on Singing

Tonic Sol-fa

Contributions to Education:
Synthesized and marketed a method of teaching sightsinging that was not
based on notation, including Tonic Sol-fa syllables, and Curwen hand
signals. Essentially Tonic Sol-fa syllables allowed for a moveable “doh”.

Curwen founded the Tonic Sol-fa College in 1869, which sought to bring
religion and music to the poor. He incorporated Pestalozzian principles such as
“let the easy come before the difficult”, “to
introduce the real and concrete before the
abstract”, “to teach the elemental
before the compound”, and “to do one
thing at a time”.

Curwen taught without an instrument; the

aim was to create an independent
learner. He argued that every note of a
scale produced its own “mental
effect”; essentially a precursor to
training students to audiate.
Philosophically, this is reminiscent of the
doctrine of ethos. Taught harmony
with tonic and dominant chords, and
always separated teaching rhythm
from pitch.
Name: ____________________________________ Date: ______________________

Museum of Philosophy

Instructions: As the class travels through the museum, make observations about the following philosophers, and be
prepared to make connections to contemporary music education theory, psychological principles, and pedagogy.

Name: John Locke Date of birth:

Philosophical Date of
Label(s): death:
Significant
Influences:
Works:

Significant Contributions
Claims: to Education:

Name: Jean Jacques Rousseau Date of birth:

Philosophical Date of
Label(s): death:
Significant
Influences:
Works:

Significant Contributions
Claims: to Education:

Name: Johann Basedow Date of birth:

Philosophical Date of
Label(s): death:
Significant
Influences:
Works:
Significant Contributions
Claims: to Education:
Name: Date of birth:
Immanuel Kant
Philosophical Date of
Label(s): death:
Influences: Significant
Works:

Significant Contributions
Claims: to Education:

Name: Johann Fichte Date of birth:

Philosophical Date of
Label(s): death:
Significant
Influences:
Works:

Significant Contributions
Claims: to Education:

Name: Johann Pestalozzi Date of birth:

Philosophical Date of
Label(s): death:
Significant
Influences:
Works:

Significant Contributions
Claims: to Education:
Name: Johann Herbart Date of birth:
Philosophical Date of
Label(s): death:
Significant
Influences:
Works:

Significant Contributions
Claims: to Education:

Name: Friedrich Froebel Date of birth:

Philosophical Date of
Label(s): death:
Significant
Influences:
Works:

Significant Contributions
Claims: to Education:

Name: John Curwen Date of birth:

Philosophical Date of
Label(s): death:
Significant
Influences:
Works:

Significant Contributions
Claims: to Education: