Question

Philosophy of Education is a lable 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 woolly 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, 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, including facts, skills, physical discipline, music and art. Plato believed that talent or intelligence is not distributed genetically and thus is 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 explicitly 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 Medieval period, 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 secular perennialism developed.
During the Renaissance, the French sceptic 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 edifice of the educational system, and the implicit assumption that university-educated philosophers were necessarily wiser than uneducated farm workers, for example.

1. What is the difference between the approaches of Socrates and Aristotle?
2. Why do educationists consider philosophy a ‘weak and woolly’ field?
3. What do you understand by the term ‘Perennialism’, in the context of the given comprehension passage?
4. What were Plato’s beliefs about democratic education?
5. Why did Aquinas propose a model of education which did not lay much emphasis on facts?
6. a. In the passage, the synonym of ‘refined’ is_______.
b. In the passage, the antonym of ‘transient’ is______.
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Answer 1

Explanation:

1. While Socrates casted fatalistic and monolithic dispositions in his analysis and elaborated his thoughts in dialectic form, Aristotle, in contrast, embraced freedom of choice and diversity (pluralism) and articulated the importance of contingent particularity of historical experiences.
2. Philosophy is the tag applied to the study of the objective, process, nature, and ideals of the preparation. Many educationalists observed as weak and indefinite field because it is too far from the practical applications.
3. Perennialists believe that the focus of education should be the ideas that have lasted over centuries. They believe the ideas are as relevant and meaningful today as when they were written. They recommend that students learn from reading and analyzing the works by history's finest thinkers and writers.
4. Plato treats the subject of education in The Republic as an integral and vital part of a wider subject of the well-being of human society. The ultimate aim of education is to help people know the Idea of the Good, which is to be virtuous.
5. The third option is correct – facts do change with the changing times, hence, they are not of the utmost importance when aiming for holistic education.
6. purified
7. permanent