14. Discussion club “children and school”

Exchange ideas about the contribution made by some prominent educators of the past into children education. Rely on your knowledge of the History of education and the following information.

The ideas of the child-centred approach to education were first explored in Europe, notably in Rousseau's Emile (1762) and in Pestalozzi's How Gertrude Teaches Her Children (1801). According to the principles of the child-centred approach the school should be fitted to the needs of the child and not the child to the school. These ideas were developed in America by Francis W. Parker. Parker became superintendent of schools in Quincy, Mass., in 1875. He fought against the mechanical, assembly-line methods of traditional schools and stressed "quality teaching," by which he meant such things as activity, creative self-expression, excursions, understanding the individual, and the development of personality.

During the first decade of the 20th century, the educationists Maria Montessori of Rome and Ovide Decroly of Brussels both successfully applied their educational inventions in schools. The Montessori method's underlying assumption is the child's need to escape from the domination of parent and teacher. According to Montessori, children, who are the unhappy victims of adult suppression, have been compelled to adopt defensive measures foreign to their real nature in the struggle to hold their own. The first move toward the reform of education, therefore, should be directed toward educators: to enlighten their consciences, to remove their perceptions of superiority, and to make them humble and passive in their attitudes toward the young. The next move should be to provide a new environment in which the child has a chance to live a life of his own. In the Montessori method, the senses are separately trained by means of apparatuses calculated to encourage spontaneous interest at the successive stages of mental growth. By similar self-educative devices, the child is led to individual mastery of the basic skills of everyday life and then to schoolwork in arithmetic and grammar.

The Decroly method can be characterized as a program of work based on centres of interest and educative games. Its basic feature is the workshop-classroom, in which children can go freely about their own occupations. Behind the complex of individual activities there is a carefully organized scheme of work based on an analysis of the fundamental needs of the child. The principle of giving priority to wholes rather than to parts is emphasized in teaching children to read, write, and count, and care is taken to reach a comprehensive view of the experiences of life.

The Montessori and the Decroly methods have spread throughout the world and have widely influenced attitudes and practices of educating young children.

Pestalozzian principles have also encouraged the introduction of music education into early childhood programs. Research has shown that music has an undeniable effect on the development of the young child, especially in such areas as movement, temper, and speech and listening patterns. The four most common methods of early childhood music education are those developed by Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, Carl Orff, and Zoltan Kodaly and the Comprehensive Musicianship approach. The Dalcroze method emphasizes movement; Orff, dramatization; Kodaly, singing games; and Comprehensive Musicianship, exploration and discovery. Another popular method, developed by the Japanese violinist Shinichi Suzuki, is based on the theory that young children learn music in the same way that they learn their first language.

Continue the discussion voicing your opinions on the following problems:

Before sending their children to school parents should provide them with preliminary preparation in reading, writing, counting.

Children's attitide to school depends on what their parents say and feel about school, teachers, school administration, etc.

Cooperation is the key to constructive relations between school and parents.