CONTRIBUTIONS
OF GREAT EDUCATORS
Many great educators have contributed in the past to the development of educational ideas, ideal and ideologies. The super structure of present day education rests on the firm foundations laid by those great personalities. It is quite relevent to discuss educational ideas of some of the great educators so that the prospective teacher can develop deeper insight in to many of the educational issues from a pedagogue’s point of view. Here I tried to depict following factors on some great educators such as:
Life sketch
Philosophy
Educational philosophy
Main publications
Major contributions
1. PLATO
Plato (428/427 BC – 348/347 BC), was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy.Plato was originally a student of Socrates, and was as much influenced by his thinking as by what he saw as his teacher's unjust death.
Plato's sophistication as a writer is evident in his Socratic dialogues; thirty-five dialogues and thirteen letters have traditionally been ascribed to him, although modern scholarship doubts the authenticity of at least some of these. Plato's writings have been published in several fashions; this has led to several conventions regarding the naming and referencing of Plato's texts.
Although there is little question that Plato lectured at the Academy that he founded, the pedagogical function of his dialogues, if any, is not known with certainty. The dialogues since Plato's time have been used to teach a range of subjects, mostly including philosophy, logic, rhetoric, mathematics, and other subjects about which he wrote.
LIFE SKETCH
Based on ancient sources, most modern scholars estimate that he was born in Athens or Aegina between 429 and 423 BC His father was Ariston. According to a disputed tradition, reported by Diogenes Laertius, Ariston traced his descent from the king of Athens, Codrus, and the king of Messenia, Melanthus. Plato's mother was Perictione, whose family boasted of a relationship with the famous Athenian lawmaker and lyric poet Solon. Perictione was sister of Charmides and niece of Critias, both prominent figures of the Thirty Tyrants, the brief oligarchic regime, which followed on the collapse of Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War (404-403 BC). Besides Plato himself, Ariston and Perictione had three other children; these were two sons, Adeimantus and Glaucon, and a daughter Potone, the mother of Speusippus (the nephew and successor of Plato as head of his philosophical Academy). According to the Republic, Adeimantus and Glaucon were older than Plato. Nevertheless, in his Memorabilia, Xenophon presents Glaucon as younger than Plato.
Ariston tried to force his attentions on Perictione, but failed of his purpose; then the ancient Greek god Apollo appeared to him in a vision, and, as a result of it, Ariston left Perictione unmolested. Another legend related that, while he was sleeping as an infant, bees had settled on the lips of Plato; an augury of the sweetness of style in which he would discourse philosophy.
Ariston appears to have died in Plato's childhood, although the precise dating of his death is difficult. Perictione then married Pyrilampes, her mother's brother, who had served many times as an ambassador to the Persian court and was a friend of Pericles, the leader of the democratic faction in Athens. Pyrilampes had a son from a previous marriage, Demus, who was famous for his beauty. Perictione gave birth to Pyrilampes' second son, Antiphon, the half-brother of Plato, who appears in Parmenides.
In contrast to his reticence about himself, Plato used to introduce his distinguished relatives into his dialogues, or to mention them with some precision: Charmides has one named after him; Critias speaks in both Charmides and Protagoras; Adeimantus and Glaucon take prominent parts in the Republic. From these and other references one can reconstruct his family tree, and this suggests a considerable amount of family pride. According to Burnet, "the opening scene of the Charmides is a glorification of the whole [family] connection ... Plato's dialogues are not only a memorial to Socrates, but also the happier days of his own family".
NAME: According to Diogenes Laërtius, the philosopher was named Aristocles after his grandfather, but his wrestling coach, Ariston of Argos, dubbed him "Platon", meaning "broad," on account of his robust figure. According to the sources mentioned by Diogenes (all dating from the Alexandrian period), Plato derived his name from the breadth (platytês) of his eloquence, or else because he was very wide (platýs) across the forehead. In the 21st century some scholars disputed Diogenes, and argued that the legend about his name being Aristocles originated in the Hellenistic age.
EDUCATION:Apuleius informs us that Speusippus praised Plato's quickness of mind and modesty as a boy, and the "first fruits of his youth infused with hard work and love of study". Plato must have been instructed in grammar, music, and gymnastics by the most distinguished teachers of his time. Dicaearchus went so far as to say that Plato wrestled at the Isthmian games. Plato had also attended courses of philosophy; before meeting Socrates, he first became acquainted with Cratylus (a disciple of Heraclitus, a prominent pre-Socratic Greek philosopher) and the Heraclitean
Plato may have traveled in Italy, Sicily, Egypt and Cyrene. Said to have returned to Athens at the age of forty, Plato founded one of the earliest known organized schools in Western Civilization on a plot of land in the Grove of Hecademus or Academus. The Academy was "a large enclosure of ground which was once the property of a citizen at Athens named Academus... some, however, say that it received its name from an ancient hero", and it operated until AD 529, when it was closed by Justinian I of Byzantium, who saw it as a threat to the propagation of Christianity. Many intellectuals were schooled in the Academy, the most prominent one being Aristotle.
MAIN PUBLICATIONS
The Republic,The Laws, Protogoras and Symposium are his famous works.
PHILOSOPHY
Plato (left) and Aristotle (right), a detail of The School of Athens, a fresco by Raphael. Aristotle gestures to the earth, representing his belief in knowledge through empirical observation and experience, while holding a copy of his Nicomachean Ethics in his hand. Plato holds his Timaeus and gestures to the heavens, representing his belief in The Forms.
Plato often discusses the father-son relationship and the "question" of whether a father's interest in his sons has much to do with how well his sons turn out. A boy in ancient Athens was socially located by his family identity, and Plato often refers to his characters in terms of their paternal and fraternal relationships. Socrates was not a family man, and saw himself as the son of his mother, who was apparently a midwife. A divine fatalist, Socrates mocks men who spent exorbitant fees on tutors and trainers for their sons, and repeatedly ventures the idea that good character is a gift from the gods. Crito reminds Socrates that orphans are at the mercy of chance, but Socrates is unconcerned. In the Theaetetus, he is found recruiting as a disciple a young man whose inheritance has been squandered. Socrates twice compares the relationship of the older man and his boy lover to the father-son relationship (Lysis 213a, Republic 3.403b), and in the Phaedo, Socrates' disciples, towards whom he displays more concern than his biological sons, say they will feel "fatherless" when he is gone. Many dialogues, like these, suggest that man-boy love (which is "spiritual") is a wise man's substitute for father-son biology (which is "bodily").
In several dialogues, Socrates floats the idea that Knowledge is a matter of recollection, and not of learning, observation, or study. He maintains this view somewhat at his own expense, because in many dialogues, Socrates complains of his forgetfulness. Socrates is often found arguing that knowledge is not empirical, and that it comes from divine insight. He is quite consistent in believing in the immortality of the soul, and several dialogues end with long speeches imagining the afterlife. More than one dialogue contrasts knowledge and opinion, perception and reality, nature and custom, and body and soul. The only contrast to this is his Parmenides.
Several dialogues tackle questions about art: Socrates says that poetry is inspired by the muses, and is not rational. He speaks approvingly of this, and other forms of divine madness (drunkenness, eroticism, and dreaming) in the Phaedrus (265a–c), and yet in the Republic wants to outlaw Homer's great poetry, and laughter as well. In Ion, Socrates gives no hint of the disapproval of Homer that he expresses in the Republic. The dialogue Ion suggests that Homer's Iliad functioned in the ancient Greek world as the bible does today in the modern Christian world: as divinely inspired literature that can provide moral guidance, if only it can be properly interpreted.
On politics and art, religion and science, justice and medicine, virtue and vice, crime and punishment, pleasure and pain, rhetoric and rhapsody, human nature and sexuality, love and wisdom, Socrates and his company of disputants had something to say.
EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY
Education should aim at achievement of the absolutes- beauty, goodness and truth. It shoud give to the body and soul all the perfection to which they are susceptible. In the Republic he describes an Ideal State that maintains social justice. The citizens of this state belong to three classes,viz administrators, soldiers and farmers. The first two should be given education, the third one need no education at all.
The aims of education are inculcation of virtue and citizenship, development of the body and soul, vision of truth and appreciation of beauty. Music and Physical Education along with Mathematics and Geometry should be included in primary school curriculum. In higher education one should get Physical Education in addition to virtue and aesthetic sense developed through the study of Higher Mathematics, Geometry, Astronomy, Philosophy and Music.
2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
LIFE SKETCH
Jean Jacques Rousseau (Geneva, 28 June 1712 – Ermenonville, 2 July 1778) was a major philosopher, writer, and composer of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, whose political philosophy influenced the French Revolution and the development of modern political and educational thought. His novel, Emile: or, On Education, which he considered his most important work, is a seminal treatise on the education of the whole person for citizenship.
Rousseau's father, Isaac Rousseau, was a watchmaker who, notwithstanding his artisan status, was well educated and a lover of music. Rousseau's mother, Suzanne Bernard Rousseau, the daughter of a Calvinist preacher, died of birth complications nine days after his birth. He and his older brother François were brought up by their father and a paternal aunt, also named Suzanne.
When Jean Jacques Rousseau was ten, his father, an avid hunter, got into a legal quarrel with a wealthy landowner on whose lands he had been caught trespassing. To avoid certain defeat in the courts, he moved away to Nyon in the territory of Bern, taking Rousseau's aunt Suzanne with him. He remarried, and from that point Jean-Jacques saw little of him. Jean-Jacques was left in with his maternal uncle, who packed him, along with his own son, Abraham Bernard, away to board for two years with a Calvinist minister in a hamlet outside of Geneva.
At school he was punnished quite often, and this hurt him very much. For a few months Rousseau worked in the office of the registrar of the city. He soon left the job and began to roam about till he was thirty, when he came back to Paris and got married. But he left his family of five children and started leading a new life for the pursuit of truth. His teachings were found revolutionary and he was watched by the French authorities. So he left for Switzerland and later died while he was in England.
Philosophy
Rousseau was the champion of naturalism and pleaded for liberty, fraternity and equality. In Emile, we can see a detailed description of his educational ideas. According to Rousseau education is a process of developing in to an enjoyable, rational, harmoniously blended, usful and hence natural life. To live is not merly to breathe; it is to act, to make use of our organs, sences, our faculties and of all those are ours, which in turn will give us the feeling of an existence. Discipline is acquired only by natural consequences.
educational Philosophy
According to Rousseau education is life itself, not a preparation for a future stage in life. Education should result in real development-ie. development of the nature and virtues of the learner to the highest level.
Main publications
Rousseau published a no of essays and books. The Progress of Arts and Sciences, The New Heloise, The Social Contract, Emile,etc.
3. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi
LIFE SKETCH
Coat of arms of Pestalozzi's family from Zürich.He was born on January 12, 1746 in Zürich, Switzerland. His father died when he was young, and he was brought up by his mother. At the University of Zürich he associated himself with Lavater and the party of reform. His earliest years were spent in schemes for improving the condition of the people. The death of his friend Johann Kaspar Bluntschli turned him from politics, however, and induced him to devote himself to education. He married Anna Schulthess in 1769 at twenty-three and bought a piece of waste land at Birr, Aargau called Neuhof (New Farm), where he attempted the cultivation of madder. Pestalozzi knew nothing of business, and the plan failed. Before this he had opened his farm-house as a school, but that plan also met with failure.
His first published book was The Evening Hours of a Hermit (1780), a series of aphorisms and reflections. This was followed by his masterpiece, Leonard and Gertrude (1781), an account of the gradual reformation, first of a household, and then of a whole village, by the efforts of a good and devoted woman. It was avidly read in Germany, and the name of Pestalozzi was rescued from obscurity.
During the French invasion of Switzerland in 1798, a number of orphaned children had been left without food or shelter in the Canton of Nidwalden. Pestalozzi took some of them under his charge, and he converted a deserted convent into a school for them. During the winter he personally tended them with the utmost devotion, but in June 1799 the building was requisitioned by the French to use as a hospital, and his charges were dispersed.
Philosophy
Pestalozzi was not a theoretical philosopher. His life itself was his work beyond all theory Pestalozzi is acclaimed as a practical educator. He enunciated psychological principles of teaching rather than philosophical ideas. As much, one can’t find much by way of Pestalozzian philosophy. He was a man who stuggled hard and believed in alleviation of misery among the poor and the down-trodden, through a healthy system of education. He emphasised the value of individual and social experiences gained by learners under the guidance of competent educators.
Educational philosophy
The educational philosophy of Pestalozzi can be summarised as follows:-
Ø A good home is the ideal educational institution,for it is the centre of love of active co-peration.
Ø Schools are necessary since homes can’t provide everything.
Ø The harmonious development of all the powers of the individual is the aim of education.
Ø Education is to be social and universal.
Ø Instruction is to be psychological.
Ø Instruction is to be imparted by way of observation and graded activities.
Ø Curriculum must be expanded along practical and scientific lines.
Ø Teaching is a skilled occupation and a moral vocation.
Main publications
Pestalozzi wrote a no of books. How Gertrude her children, Books for mothers, Mother and child, etc. are his important books.
4. FRIEDRICH WILHELM AUGUST FROEBEL
LIFE SKETCH
Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel (April 21, 1782 – June 21, 1852) was a German pedagogue, a student of Pestalozzi who laid the foundation for modern education based on the recognition that children have unique needs and capabilities. He created the concept of the “kindergarten”, and also coined the word now used in German and English.Friedrich Froebel was born at Oberweißbach in the Principality of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt in Thuringia. His father, who died in 1802, was the pastor of the orthodox Lutheran (alt-lutherisch) parish there. The church and Lutheran Christian faith were pillars in Froebel's own early education. Oberweißbach was a wealthy village in the Thuringian Forest and had been known centuries long for its natural herb remedies, tinctures, bitters, soaps and salves. Families had their own inherited areas of the forest where herbs and roots were grown and harvested. Each family prepared, bottled, and produced their individual products which were taken throughout Europe on trade routes passed from father to son, who were affectionately called "Buckelapotheker" or Rucksack Pharmacists. They adorned the church with art acquired from their travels, many pieces of which can still be seen in the renovated structure. The pulpit from which Froebel heard his father preach is the largest in all Europe and can fit a pastor and 12 men, a direct reference to Christ's apostles.
Shortly after Froebel's birth, his mother's health began to fail. She died when he was nine months old, profoundly influencing his life. In 1792, Froebel went to live in the small town of Stadt-Ilm with his uncle, a gentle and affectionate man. At the age of 15 Froebel, who loved nature, became the apprentice to a forester. In 1799, he decided to leave his apprenticeship and study mathematics and botany in Jena. From 1802 to 1805, he worked as a land surveyor.
On 11 September 1818, Froebel wed Wilhelmine Henriette Hoffmeister (b. 1780) in Berlin. The union was childless. Wilhelmine died in 1839, and Froebel married again in 1851. His second wife was Louise Levin.
PHILOSOPHY
He began as an educator in 1805 at the Musterschule (a secondary school) in Frankfurt, where he learnt about Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi’s ideas. He later worked with Pestalozzi in Switzerland where his ideas further developed. From 1806 Froebel was the live-in teacher for a Frankfurt noble family’s three sons. He lived with the three children from 1808 to 1810 at Pestalozzi’s institute in Yverdon-les-Bains in Switzerland.
In 1811, Froebel once again went back to school in Göttingen and Berlin, eventually leaving without earning a certificate. He became a teacher at the Plamannsche Schule in Berlin, a boarding school for boys, and at that time also a pedagogical and patriotic centre.
During his service in the Lützow Free Corps in 1813 and 1814 – when he was involved in two campaigns against Napoleon – Fröbel befriended Wilhelm Middendorf, a theologian and fellow pedagogue, and Heinrich Langethal, also a pedagogue.
Allgemeine Deutsche Erziehungsanstalt in Keilhau, nowadays the Keilhau Free Froebel School
After Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna, Froebel found himself a civilian once again and became an assistant at the Museum of Mineralogy under Prof. Weiß. This did not, however, last very long, and by 1816 he had quit and founded the Allgemeine Deutsche Erziehungsanstalt (“German General Education Institute”) in Griesheim near Arnstadt in Thuringia. A year later he moved this to Keilhau near Rudolstadt. In 1831, work was continued there by the other cofounders Wilhelm Middendorf and Heinrich Langethal.
In 1820, Froebel published the first of his five Keilhau pamphlets, An unser deutsches Volk (“To Our German People”). The other four were published between then and 1823.
In 1826 he published is main literary work, Die Menschenerziehung (“The Education of Man”) and founded the weekly publication Die erziehenden Familien (“The Educating Families”). In 1828 and 1829 he pursued plans for a people’s education institute (Volkserziehungsanstalt) in Helba (nowadays a constituent community of Meiningen), but they were never realized.
From 1831 to 1836, Fröbel once again lived in Switzerland. In 1831 he founded an educational institute in Wartensee (Lucerne). In 1833 he moved this to Willisau, and from 1835 to 1836, he headed the orphanage in Burgdorf (Berne), where he also published the magazine Grundzüge der Menschenerziehung (“Features of Human Education”). In 1836 appeared his work Erneuerung des Lebens erfordert das neue Jahr 1836 (“The New Year 1836 Calls For the Renewal of Life”).
He returned to Germany, dedicated himself almost exclusively to preschool child education and began manufacturing playing materials in Bad Blankenburg. In 1837 he founded a “care, playing and activity institute for small children in Bad Blankenburg. From 1838 to 1840 he also published the magazine Ein Sonntagsblatt für Gleichgesinnte (“A Sunday Paper for the Like-Minded”).
In 1840 he coined the word kindergarten for the Play and Activity Institute he had founded in 1837 at Bad Blankenburg for young children, together with Wilhelm Middendorf and Heinrich Langethal. These two men were Fröbel’s most faithful colleagues when his ideas were also transplanted to Keilhau near Rudolstadt.
He designed the educational play materials known as Froebel Gifts, or Fröbelgaben, which included geometric building blocks and pattern activity blocks. A book entitled Inventing Kindergarten, by Norman Brosterman, examines the influence of Friedrich Froebel on Frank Lloyd Wright and modern art.
Friedrich Froebel's great insight was to recognise the importance of the activity of the child in learning. He introduced the concept of “free work” (Freiarbeit) into pedagogy and established the “game” as the typical form that life took in childhood, and also the game’s educational worth. Activities in the first kindergarten included singing, dancing, gardening and self-directed play with the Froebel Gifts. Froebel intended, with his Mutter- und Koselieder – a songbook that he published – to introduce the young child into the adult world.
These ideas about childhood development and education were introduced to academic and royal circles through the tireless efforts of his greatest proponent, the Baroness (Freiherrin) Bertha Marie von Marenholtz-Bülow. Through her Froebel made the acquaintance of the Royal House of the Netherlands, various Thuringian dukes and duchesses, including the Romanov wife of the Grand Duke von Sachsen-Weimar. Baroness von Marenholtz-Bülow, Duke von Meiningen and Froebel gathered donations to support art education for children in honor of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Goethe. The Duke of Meiningen granted the use of his hunting lodge, called Marienthal (the Vale of Mary) in the resort town of Bad Liebenstein for Froebel to train the first women as Kindergarten teachers (called Kindergärtnerinnen).
Froebel died on 21 June 1852 in Mariental. His grave is still found at the cemetery at Schweina, where his widow, who died in Hamburg, was also buried on 10 January 1900.
EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY
Many ideas in the educational philosophy of Froebel were the outcomes of his philosophy of life as applied in education. The aim of education is to enable the child to realise the unity principles. Self activity is the method of education. The innate tendancies of the child have to be developed through self activiy. The purpose of education is to unfold the innate powers of children in order to enable them to attain spiritual union with God. He believed in the innate goodness of the child. Education should lead to moral, religious and spiritual development.
Main publications
He published many books on education. The education of Man, The Pedagogies of kindergarten,Mother’s Play and Nursery Songs, Education and Development,etc.are the main publications.
5. Maria Montessori
LIFE SKETCH AND PHILOSOPHY
Maria Montessori (August 31, 1870 – May 6, 1952) was an Italian physician, educator, philosopher, humanitarian and devout Catholic; she is best known for her philosophy and the Montessori method of education of children from birth to adolescence. Her educational method is in use today in a number of public as well as private schools throughout the world.Maria Montessori was born in Chiaravalle (Ancona), Italy to Alessandro Montessori, and Renilde Stoppani (niece of Antonio Stoppani). At the age of thirteen she attended an all-boy technical school in preparation for her dreams of becoming an engineer. Montessori was the first woman to graduate from the University of Rome La Sapienza Medical School, becoming the first female doctor in Italy. She was a member of the University's Psychiatric Clinic and became intrigued with trying to educate the "mentally retarded or "unhappy little ones" and the "uneducatable" in Rome. In 1896, she gave a lecture at the Educational Congress in Torino about the training of the disabled. The Italian Minister of Education was in attendance, and was impressed by her arguments sufficiently to appoint her the same year as director of the Scuola Ortofrenica, an institution devoted to the care and education of the mentally retarded. She accepted, in order to put her theories to proof. Her first notable success was to have several of her 8 year old students apply to take the State examinations for reading and writing. The "defective" children not only passed, but had above-average scores, an achievement described as "the first Montessori miracle." Montessori's response to their success was "if mentally disabled children could be brought to the level of normal children then (she) wanted to study the potential of 'normal' children".
“Scientific observation has established that education is not what the teacher gives; education is a natural process spontaneously carried out by the human individual, and is acquired not by listening to words but by experiences upon the environment. The task of the teacher becomes that of preparing a series of motives of cultural activity, spread over a specially prepared environment, and then refraining from obtrusive interference. Human teachers can only help the great work that is being done, as servants help the master. Doing so, they will be witnesses to the unfolding of the human soul and to the rising of a New Man who will not be a victim of events, but will have the clarity of vision to direct and shape the future of human society”.
Because of her success with these children, she was asked to start a school for children in a housing project in Rome, which opened on January 6, 1907, and which she called "Casa dei Bambini" or Children's House. Children's House was a child care center in an apartment building in the poor neighborhood of Rome. She was focused on teaching the students ways to develop their own skills at a pace they set, which was a principle Montessori called "spontaneous self-development".A wide variety of special equipment of increasing complexity is used to help direct the interests of the child and hasten development. When a child is ready to learn new and more difficult tasks, the teacher guides the child’s first endeavors in order to avoid wasted effort and the learning of wrong habits; otherwise the child learns alone. It has been reported that the Montessori method of teaching has enabled children to learn to read and write much more quickly and with greater facility than has otherwise been possible. The Montessori Method of teaching concentrates on quality rather than quantity. The success of this school sparked the opening of many more, and a worldwide interest in Montessori's methods of education.After the 1907 establishment of Montessori's first school in Rome, by 1917 there was an intense interest in her method in North America, which later waned, in large part due to the publication of a small booklet entitled "The Montessori System Examined" by Kirkpatrick- a follower of John Dewey. (Nancy McCormick Rambusch contributed to the revival of the method in America by establishing the American Montessori Society in 1960); at the same time Margaret Stephenson came to the US from Europe and began a long history of training Montessori teachers under the auspices of the Association Montessori Internationale (AMI). Montessori was exiled by Mussolini mostly because she refused to compromise her principles and make the children into soldiers. She moved to Spain and lived there until 1936 when the Spanish Civil War broke out. She then moved to the Netherlands until 1939.
In the year 1939, the Theosophical Society of India extended an invitation asking Maria Montessori to visit India. She accepted the invitation and reached India the very same year accompanied by her only son, Mario Montessori Sr. This heralded the beginning of her special relationship with India. She made the international Headquarters of the Theosophical Society at Adyar, Chennai, her home. However the war forced her to extend her stay in India. With the help of her son, Mario, she conducted sixteen batches of courses called the Indian Montessori Training Courses. These courses laid a strong foundation for the Montessori Movement in India. In 1949 when she left for The Netherlands she appointed Albert Max Joosten as her personal representative, and assigned him the responsibility of conducting the Indian Montessori Training Courses. Joosten along with Swamy S R, another disciple of Dr. Maria Montessori, continued the good work and ensured that the Montessori Movement in India was on a sound footing.During a teachers conference in India she was interned by the authorities and lived there for the duration of the war. Montessori lived out the remainder of her life in the Netherlands, which now hosts the headquarters of the AMI, or Association Montessori Internationale. She died in Noordwijk aan Zee. Her son Mario headed the AMI until his death in 1982.
Maria Montessori died in the Netherlands in 1952, after a lifetime devoted to the study of child development. Her early work centered on women’s rights and social reform and evolved to encompass a totally innovative approach to education. Her success in Italy led to international recognition, and for over 40 years she traveled all over the world, lecturing, writing and establishing training programs. In later years, ‘Educate for Peace’ became a guiding principle, which underpinned her work.
EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY
The child is a body it grows and a soul which develops. If any educational activity is to be efficient, it should cater to the complete, unfolding of the childs individuality. The school must promote free and natural activities of the child if he is to benefit from education. Discipline must come through liberty.
Main publications
Dr.Maria Montessori wrote a no of books on education. The Discovery of the Child, Education for a New World, The Secret of Education, Child Training, The Child’s Place and Education, Reconstruction in Education, The Montessori Method, The Advanced Montessori Method, etc. are some of her works.
6. John Dewey
LIFE SKETCH AND PHILOSOPHY
John Dewey (October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose thoughts and ideas have been highly influential in the United States and around the world. Dewey, along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, is recognized as one of the founders of the philosophical school of pragmatism. He is also one of the founders of functional psychology and was a leading representative of the progressive movement in U.S. schooling during the first half of the 20th century.
Although Dewey is best known for his works on education, he also wrote on a wide range of subjects, including experience and nature, art and experience, logic and inquiry, democracy, and ethics.
In his advocacy of democracy, Dewey considered two fundamental elements—schools and civil society—as being key areas needing attention and reconstruction to encourage experimental intelligence and plurality. In the necessary reconstruction of civil society, Dewey asserted that full democracy was to be obtained not just by extending voting rights but also by ensuring that there exists a fully-formed public opinion, accomplished by effective communication among citizens, experts, and politicians, with the latter being held accountable for the policies they adopt.
Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont of modest family origins. Like his older brother, Davis Rich Dewey, he attended the University of Vermont, from which he graduated (Phi Beta Kappa) in 1879. After three years as a high school teacher in Oil City, Pennsylvania, Dewey decided that he was unsuited for employment in primary or secondary education. After studying one year under G. Stanley Hall, working in the first American laboratory of psychology, Dewey received his Ph.D. from the School of Arts & Sciences at Johns Hopkins University in 1884, he took a faculty position at the University of Michigan (1884-1888 and 1889-1894) with the help of George Sylvester Morris. His unpublished and now lost dissertation was titled "The Psychology of Kant" and he made a special study of Hegel's Absolute idealism.
In 1894 Dewey joined the newly founded University of Chicago (1894-1904) where he shaped his belief in an empirically based theory of knowledge aligning his ideals with the newly emerging Pragmatic school of thought. His time at the University of Chicago resulted in four essays collectively entitled Thought and its Subject-Matter which was published with collected works from his colleagues at Chicago under the collective title Studies in Logical Theory (1903). During this time Dewey also founded the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools where he was able to actualize his pedagogical beliefs which provided material for his first major work on education, The School and Society (1899). Disagreements with the administration ultimately led to his resignation from the University at which point he left for the East Coast. In 1899, John Dewey was elected president of the American Psychological Association. From 1904 until his death he was professor of philosophy at both Columbia University and Teachers College, Columbia University. In 1905 he became president of the American Philosophical Association. He was a long-time member of the American Federation of Teachers.
EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY
Pragmatism in education is John Dewey’s main contribution. He was influenced by the philosophy of Hegal in his early days and William James in his later days. His philosophy is a combination of Darwin’s theory of evelution and William James’s theory of pragmatism. So, experience has become the core of his philosophy. Practical side of life is more relevant here. He considers truth as a force which fulfiles the purposes of life.
Main publications
John Dewey published a no of books on Education, Philosophy, Psychology, Ethics and Political Science. The School and Society, The School and the Child, School of Tomorrow, Education Today, Democracy and Education, Moral Principles of Education, etc. are his famous works.
EDUCATIONAL CONTRIBUTIONS
§ Emphasis on the relation of the school, community and education with the realities of life.
§ Stress on social aspects of education.
§ Stress given to experiments and experiences in the curriculum.
§ Emphasis on psychological and social aspect of education.
§ Emphasis on the project method.
§ Emphasis on critical thinking.
7. Paulo Freire
LIFE SKETCH
Paulo Freire (Recife, Brazil September 19, 1921 – São Paulo, Brazil May 2, 1997) was a Brazilian educator and influential theorist of critical pedagogy Born on September 19, 1921 to middle class parents in Recife, Brazil, Freire became familiar with poverty and hunger during the 1929 Great Depression. These experiences, though brief, would shape his concerns for the poor and would help to construct his particular educational viewpoint.
Freire enrolled at Law School at the University of Recife in 1943. He also studied philosophy, more specifically phenomenology, and the psychology of language. Although admitted to the legal bar, he never actually practiced law but instead worked as a teacher in secondary schools teaching Portuguese. In 1944, he married Elza Maia Costa de Oliveira, a fellow teacher. The two worked together for the rest of their lives and had five children.
In 1946, Freire was appointed Director of the Department of Education and Culture of the Social Service in the State of Pernambuco, the Brazilian state of which Recife is the capital.
In 1961, he was appointed director of the Department of Cultural Extension of Recife University, and in 1962 he had the first opportunity for significant application of his theories, when 300 sugarcane workers were taught to read and write in just 45 days. In response to this experiment, the Brazilian government approved the creation of thousands of cultural circles across the country.
In 1964, a military coup put an end to that effort. Freire was imprisoned as a traitor for 70 days. After a brief exile in Bolivia, Freire worked in Chile for five years for the Christian Democratic Agrarian Reform Movement and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In 1967, Freire published his first book, Education as the Practice of Freedom. He followed this with his most famous book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, first published in Portuguese in 1968.
On the strength of reception of his work, Freire was offered a visiting professorship at Harvard University in 1969. The next year, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was published in both Spanish and English, vastly expanding its reach. Because of the political feud between Freire, a Christian socialist, and the successive authoritarian military dictatorships, it wasn't published in his own country of Brazil until 1974, when General Ernesto Geisel took control of Brazil and began his process of cultural liberalisation.
After a year in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, Freire moved to Geneva, Switzerland to work as a special education advisor to the World Council of Churches. During this time Freire acted as an advisor on education reform in former Portuguese colonies in Africa, particularly Guinea Bissau and Mozambique.
In 1979, he was able to return to Brazil, and moved back in 1980. Freire joined the Workers' Party (PT) in the city of Sao Paulo, and acted as a supervisor for its adult literacy project from 1980 to 1986. When the PT prevailed in the municipal elections in 1988, Freire was appointed Secretary of Education for Sao Paulo.
In 1986, his wife Elza died. Freire married Maria Araújo Freire, who continues with her own educational work.
Freire died of heart failure on May 2, 1997.
Philosophy
Those who attempt to reddress the ill of the suffering of humanity are not leaders who work for the people, but who work with the people as their servents. This is freire’s philosophy which he preferes to be known as scientific revolutionary humanism. This is essentially a philosophy involving techniques of adult and non formal education, through the message is applicable to any form of educaton.
educational contributions
"There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the ‘practice of freedom’, the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world." —Paulo Freire,
Paulo Freire contributed a philosophy of education that came not only from the more classical approaches stemming from Plato, but also from modern Marxist and anti-colonialist thinkers. In fact, in many ways his Pedagogy of the Oppressed may be best read as an extension of, or reply to, Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, which emphasized the need to provide native populations with an education which was simultaneously new and modern (rather than traditional) and anti-colonial (not simply an extension of the culture of the colonizer).
Freire is best-known for his attack on what he called the "banking" concept of education, in which the student was viewed as an empty account to be filled by the teacher. The basic critique was not new — Rousseau's conception of the child as an active learner was already a step away from tabula rasa (which is basically the same as the "banking concept"), and thinkers like John Dewey were strongly critical of the transmission of mere "facts" as the goal of education. Freire's work, however, updated the concept and placed it in context with current theories and practices of education, laying the foundation for what is now called critical pedagogy.
More challenging is Freire's strong aversion to the teacher-student dichotomy. This dichotomy is admitted in Rousseau and constrained in Dewey, but Freire comes close to insisting that it should be completely abolished. This is hard to imagine in absolute terms, since there must be some enactment of the teacher-student relationship in the parent-child relationship, but what Freire suggests is that a deep reciprocity be inserted into our notions of teacher and student. Freire wants us to think in terms of teacher-student and student-teacher - that is, a teacher who learns and a learner who teaches - as the basic roles of classroom participation.
This is one of the few attempts anywhere to implement something like democracy as an educational method and not merely a goal of democratic education. Even Dewey, for whom democracy was a touchstone, did not integrate democratic practices fully into his methods, though this was in part a function of Dewey's attitudes toward individuality. In its strongest early form this kind of classroom has been criticized on the grounds that it can mask rather than overcome the teacher's authority.
Freire's work has also been subject to criticism. Rich Gibson has critiqued his work as a cul-de-sac, a combination of old-style socialism (wherever Freire was not) and liberal reformism (wherever Freire was). Paul V. Taylor, in his "Texts of Paulo Freire," comes close to calling Freire a plagiarist, while Gibson notes Freire borrows heavily from Hegel's "Phenomenology." Gibson's dissertation which examines Freire's theory, practice, and history in a Marxist context is the sharpest critique of Freire to date.
Main publications
Paulo Freire summarised his philosophy, methods of work and the abstract realities of his working environment in a book titled ‘ Pedagogy of the Oppressed’. ‘Cultural Action for Freedom’ is another famous book.
8. Swami Vivekananda
LIFE SKETCH
Swami Vivekananda (January 12, 1863–July 4, 1902), born Narendranath Dutta is the chief disciple of the 19th century mystic Ramakrishna and the founder of Ramakrishna Mission. He is considered a key figure in the introduction of Vedanta and Yoga in Europe and America and is also credited with raising interfaith awareness, bringing Hinduism to the status of a world religion during the end of the 19th Century. Vivekananda is considered to be a major force in the revival of Hinduism in modern India. He is best known for his inspiring speech beginning with "sisters and brothers of America",through which he introduced Hinduism at the Parliament of the World's Religions at Chicago in 1893.
Swami Vivekananda was born in an aristocratic family of Calcutta in 1863. His parents influenced the Swami's thinking—the father by his rational mind and the mother by her religious temperament. From his childhood, he showed inclination towards spirituality and God realization. While searching for a man who could directly demonstrate the reality of God, he came to Ramakrishna and became his disciple. As a guru Ramakrishna taught him Advaita Vedanta and that all religions are true, and service to man was the most effective worship of God. After the death of his Guru, he became a wandering monk touring the Indian subcontinent and getting a first hand account of India's condition. He later sailed to Chicago and represented India as a delegate in the 1893 Parliament of World religions. An eloquent speaker, Vivekananda was invited to several forums in United States and spoke at universities and clubs. He conducted several public and private lectures, disseminating Vedanta, Yoga and Hinduism in America, England and few other countries in Europe. He also established Vedanta societies in America and England. He later sailed back to India and in 1897 he founded the Ramakrishna Math and Mission, a philanthropic and spiritual organization. The Swami is regarded as one of India's foremost nation-builders. His teachings influenced the thinking of other national leaders and philosophers, like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Chandra Bose, Aurobindo Ghosh, Radhakrishnan.
philosophy
Vivekananda was a renowned thinker in his own right. One of his most important contributions was to demonstrate how Advaitin thinking is not merely philosophically far-reaching, but how it also has social, even political, consequences. According to Vivekananda, a important lesson he received from Ramakrishna was that "Jiva is Shiva" (each individual is divinity itself). This became his Mantra, and he coined the concept of daridra narayana seva - the service of God in and through (poor) human beings. If there truly is the unity of Brahman underlying all phenomena, then on what basis do we regard ourselves as better or worse, or even as better-off or worse-off, than others? - This was the question he posed to himself. Ultimately, he concluded that these distinctions fade into nothingness in the light of the oneness that the devotee experiences in Moksha. What arises then is compassion for those "individuals" who remain unaware of this oneness and a determination to help them.
Swami Vivekananda belonged to that branch of Vedanta that held that no one can be truly free until all of us are. Even the desire for personal salvation has to be given up, and only tireless work for the salvation of others is the true mark of the enlightened person. He founded the Sri Ramakrishna Math and Mission on the principle of Atmano Mokshartham Jagat-hitaya cha (for one's own salvation and for the welfare of the World).
However, Vivekananda also pleaded for a strict separation between religion and government ("church and state") a value found in Freemasonry which as a Freemason he had been exposed to. Although social customs had been formed in the past with religious sanction, it was not now the business of religion to interfere with matters such as marriage, inheritance and so on. The ideal society would be a mixture of Brahmin knowledge, Kshatriya culture, Vaisya efficiency and the egalitarian Shudra ethos. Domination by any one led to different sorts of lopsided societies. Vivekananda did not feel that religion, nor, any force for that matter, should be used forcefully to bring about an ideal society, since this was something that would evolve naturally by individualistic change when the conditions were right.
Vivekananda made a strict demarcation between the two classes of Hindu scriptures : the Sruti and the Smritis. The Sruti, by which is meant the Vedas, consist of eternally and universally valid spiritual truths. The Smritis on the other hand, are the dos and donts of religions, applicable to society and subject to revision from time to time. Vivekananda felt that existing Hindu smritis had to be revised for modern times. But the Srutis of course are eternal - they may only be re-interpreted.
Vivekananda advised his followers to be holy, unselfish and have shraddha (faith). He encouraged the practice of Brahmacharya (Celibacy). In one of the conversations with his childhood friend Priya Nath Sinha he attributes his physical and mental strengths, eloquence to the practice of Brahmacharya.
Vivekananda didn't advocate the emerging area of parapsychology, astrology (one instance can be found in his speech Man the Maker of his Destiny, Complete-Works, Volume 8, Notes of Class Talks and Lectures) saying that this form of curiosity doesn't help in spiritual progress but actually hinders it.
Educational philosophy
Vivekananda defines education as, “the manifestation of perfection already in man”. He believes in auto education or self teaching. As is the plant, so is the child. The growth and development of a plant and that of a child takes place according to their nature. A gardener prepares the ground for the growth of his plants, protects them and nurrishes them so that they grow properly. Similarly, the teacher takes care of the child, provides him a suitable environment and looks after his proper growth. Thus though education comes from within, the teacher is an indispensable part of it. While the motivaton comes from within, the teacher activates it. He encourages the child to use his mind, body and sense organs properly and achieve maximum development.
Vivekananda left a body of philosophical works (see Vivekananda's complete works) which Vedic scholar Frank Parlato has called, "the greatest comprehensive work in philosophy ever published." His books (compiled from lectures given around the world) on the four Yogas (Raja Yoga, Karma Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, Jnana Yoga) are very influential and still seen as fundamental texts for anyone interested in the Hindu practice of Yoga. His letters are of great literary and spiritual value. He was also considered a very good singer and a poet. By He had composed many songs including his favorite Kali the Mother.
9. Rabindranath Tagore
LIFE SKETCH
Rabindranath Tagore (7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941), also known by the sobriquet Gurudev, was a Bengali poet, visual artist, playwright, novelist, and composer whose works reshaped Bengali literature and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He became Asia's first Nobel laureate when he won the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Tagore wrote novels, short stories, songs, dance-dramas, and essays on political and personal topics. Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Gora (Fair-Faced), and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World) are among his best-known works. His verse, short stories, and novels, which often exhibited rhythmic lyricism, colloquial language, meditative naturalism, and philosophical contemplation, received worldwide acclaim. Tagore was also a cultural reformer and polymath who modernised Bengali art by rejecting strictures binding it to classical Indian forms. Two songs from his canon are now the national anthems of Bangladesh and India: the Amar Shonar Bangla and the Jana Gana Mana respectively.
Tagore (nicknamed "Rabi") was born the youngest of thirteen surviving children in the Jorasanko mansion in Calcutta (now Kolkata, India) of parents Debendranath Tagore (1817-1905) and Sarada Devi(1830-1875). The Tagore family were the Brahmo founding fathers of the Adi Dharm faith. After undergoing his upanayan at age eleven, Tagore and his father left Calcutta on 14 February 1873 to tour India for several months, visiting his father's Santiniketan estate and Amritsar before reaching the Himalayan hill station of Dalhousie. There, Tagore read biographies, studied history, astronomy, modern science, and Sanskrit, and examined the classical poetry of Kālidāsa.
Seeking to become a barrister, Tagore enrolled at a public school in Brighton, England in 1878. He studied law at University College London, but returned to Bengal in 1880 without a degree. On 9 December 1883 he married Mrinalini Devi.
In 1901, Tagore left Shilaidaha and moved to Santiniketan (West Bengal) to found an ashram, which would grow to include a marble-floored prayer hall, an experimental school, groves of trees, gardens, and a library. There, Tagore's wife and two of his children died. His father died on 19 January 1905, and he began receiving monthly payments as part of his inheritance. On 14 November 1913, Tagore learned that he had won the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature. According to the Swedish Academy, it was given due to the idealistic and—for Western readers—accessible nature of a small body of his translated material, including the 1912 Gitanjali: Song Offerings. In 1915, Tagore received the knighthood from the British Crown. But as a mark of rebuke to the rulers, post the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919, he renounced the title.
In 1921, Tagore and agricultural economist Leonard Knight Elmhirst set up the Institute for Rural Reconstruction (which Tagore later renamed Shriniketan—"Abode of Wealth") in Surul, a village near the ashram at Santiniketan. Through it, Tagore sought to provide an alternative to Gandhi's symbol- and protest-based Swaraj movement, which he denounced. He recruited scholars, donors, and officials from many countries to help the Institute use schooling to "free village[s] from the shackles of helplessness and ignorance" by "vitaliz[ing] knowledge". In the early 1930s, he also grew more concerned about India's "abnormal caste consciousness" and untouchability, lecturing on its evils, writing poems and dramas with untouchable protagonists, and appealing to authorities at the Guruvayoor Temple to admit Dalits.
Tagore's last four years were marked by chronic pain and two long periods of illness. These began when Tagore lost consciousness in late 1937; he remained comatose and near death for an extended period. This was followed three years later in late 1940 by a similar spell, from which he never recovered. The poetry Tagore wrote in these years is among his finest, and is distinctive for its preoccupation with death. After extended suffering, Tagore died on 7 August 1941 (22 Shravan 1348) in an upstairs room of the Jorasanko mansion in which he was raised; his death anniversary is still mourned in public functions held across the Bengali-speaking world.
philosophy
Tagore believed in the vedas. He was of the view that God is one and he is the creator of man as well as of nature. He believed that in him and through him we find unity between man and man and unity between man and nature.
Educational philosophy
Tagore’s educational philosophy has been drawn from his philosophy of life. Freedom, creative self-expression and active communication with nature and man are three cardinal principles of his educational philosophy. According to him there are three sources of knowledge. They are nature, life and the teacher.
Main publications
His main publications were more in the field of poetry and literature, but he contributed a few essays on education as well. Gitanjali, My school, Sadhana, Greater India, The gardener, Creative unity, Personality, Fruit gathering, etc. are a few among them.
10. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
LIFE SKETCH
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948) was a major political and spiritual leader of India and the Indian independence movement. He was the pioneer of satyagraha—resistance to tyranny through mass civil disobedience, firmly founded upon ahimsa or total non-violence—which led India to independence and inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. He is commonly known around the world as Mahatma Gandhi an honorific first applied to him by Rabindranath Tagore) and in India also as Bapu.He is officially honoured in India as the Father of the Nation; his birthday, 2 October, is commemorated there as Gandhi Jayanti, a national holiday, and worldwide as the International Day of Non-Violence.
Gandhi first employed non-violent civil disobedience as an expatriate lawyer in South Africa, in the resident Indian community's struggle for civil rights. After his return to India in 1915, he set about organising peasants, farmers, and urban labourers in protesting excessive land-tax and discrimination. Assuming leadership of the Indian National Congress in 1921, Gandhi led nationwide campaigns for easing poverty, expanding women's rights, building religious and ethnic amity, ending untouchability, increasing economic self-reliance, but above all achieving Swaraj—the independence of India from foreign domination. Gandhi famously led Indians in the Non-cooperation movement in 1922 and in protesting the British-imposed salt tax with the 400 km (249 mi) Dandi Salt March in 1930, and later in calling for the British to Quit India in 1942. He was imprisoned for many years, on numerous occasions, in both South Africa and India.
As a practitioner of Ahimsa Gandhi swore to speak the truth, and advocated that others do the same. He lived modestly in a self-sufficient residential community and wore the traditional Indian dhoti and shawl, woven with yarn he had hand spun on a charkha. He ate simple vegetarian food, and also undertook long fasts as means of both self-purification and social protest.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in Porbander, a coastal town in present-day Gujarat, India, on 2 October 1869. His father, Karamchand Gandhi (1822-1885), who belonged to the Hindu Modh community, was the diwan (Prime Minister) of the eponymous Porbander state, a small princely state in the Kathiawar Agency of British India. His mother, Putlibai, who came from the Hindu Pranami Vaishnava community, was Karamchand's fourth wife, the first three wives having apparently died in childbirth. Growing up with a devout mother and the Jain traditions of the region, the young Mohandas absorbed early the influences that would play an important role in his adult life; these included compassion to sentient beings, vegetarianism, fasting for self-purification, and mutual tolerance between individuals of different creeds.
In May 1883, the 13-year old Mohandas was married to 14-year old Kasturbai Makhanji (her first name was usually shortened to "Kasturba," and affectionately to "Ba") in an arranged child marriage, as was the custom in the region However, as was also the custom of the region, the adolescent bride was to spend much time at her parents' house, and away from her husband. In 1885, when Gandhi was 15, the couple's first child was born, but survived only a few days; Gandhi's father, Karamchand Gandhi, had died earlier that year. Mohandas and Kasturbai had four more children, all sons: Harilal, born in 1888; Manilal, born in 1892; Ramdas, born in 1897; and Devdas, born in 1900. At his middle school in Porbandar and high school in Rajkot, Gandhi remained an average student academically. He passed the matriculation exam for Samaldas College at Bhavnagar, Gujarat with some difficulty. While there, he was unhappy, in part because his family wanted him to become a barrister.
On 4 September 1888, less than a month shy of his nineteenth birthday, Gandhi traveled to London, England, to study law at University College London and to train as a barrister. His time in London, the Imperial capital, was influenced by a vow he had made to his mother in the presence of the Jain monk Becharji, upon leaving India, to observe the Hindu precepts of abstinence from meat, alcohol, and promiscuity. Although Gandhi experimented with adopting "English" customs—taking dancing lessons for example—he could not stomach his landlady's mutton and cabbage. She pointed him towards one of London's few vegetarian restaurants. Rather than simply go along with his mother's wishes, he read about, and intellectually embraced vegetarianism. He joined the Vegetarian Society, was elected to its executive committee, and founded a local chapter. He later credited this with giving him valuable experience in organizing institutions. Some of the vegetarians he met were members of the Theosophical Society, which had been founded in 1875 to further universal brotherhood, and which was devoted to the study of Buddhist and Hindu literature. They encouraged Gandhi to read the Bhagavad Gita. Not having shown a particular interest in religion before, he read works of and about Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam and other religions. He returned to India after being called to the bar of England and Wales by the Inner Temple but had limited success establishing a law practice in Mumbai. Later, after applying and being turned down for a part-time job as a high school teacher, he ended up returning to Rajkot to make a modest living drafting petitions for litigants, a business he was forced to close when he ran afoul of a British officer. In his autobiography, he refers to this incident as an unsuccessful attempt to lobby on behalf of his older brother. It was in this climate that, in 1893, he accepted a year-long contract from an Indian firm to a post in Natal, South Africa, then part of the British Empire.
Truth:Gandhi dedicated his life to the wider purpose of discovering truth, or Satya. He tried to achieve this by learning from his own mistakes and conducting experiments on himself. He called his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth.
Gandhi stated that the most important battle to fight was overcoming his own demons, fears, and insecurities. Gandhi summarized his beliefs first when he said "God is Truth". He would later change this statement to "Truth is God". Thus, Satya (Truth) in Gandhi's philosophy is "God".
Nonviolence:Although Mahatama Gandhi was in no way the originator of the principle of non-violence, he was the first to apply it in the political field on a huge scale. The concept of nonviolence (ahimsa) and nonresistance has a long history in Indian religious thought and has had many revivals in Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Jewish and Christian contexts. Gandhi explains his philosophy and way of life in his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth. He was quoted as saying:
Vegetarianism:As a young child, Gandhi experimented with meat-eating. This was due partially to his inherent curiosity as well as his rather persuasive peer and friend Sheikh Mehtab. The idea of vegetarianism is deeply ingrained in Hindu and Jain traditions in India, and, in his native land of Gujarat, most Hindus were vegetarian and so are almost all Jains. The Gandhi family was no exception. Before leaving for his studies in London, Gandhi made a promise to his mother, Putlibai and his uncle, Becharji Swami that he would abstain from eating meat, taking alcohol, and engaging in promiscuity. He held fast to his promise and gained more than a diet: he gained a basis for his life-long philosophies. As Gandhi grew into adulthood, he became a strict vegetarian. He wrote the book The Moral Basis of Vegetarianism and several articles on the subject, some of which were published in the London Vegetarian Society's publication, The Vegetarian. During this period, the young Gandhi became inspired by many great minds and was befriended by the chairman of the London Vegetarian Society, Dr. Josiah Oldfield.
Brahmacharya:When Gandhi was 16 his father became very ill. Being very devoted to his parents, he attended to his father at all times during his illness. However, one night, Gandhi's uncle came to relieve Gandhi for a while. He retired to his bedroom where carnal desires overcame him and he made love to his wife. Shortly afterward a servant came to report that Gandhi's father had just died. Gandhi felt tremendous guilt and never could forgive himself. He came to refer to this event as "double shame." The incident had significant influence in Gandhi becoming celibate at the age of 36, while still married. Simplicity:Gandhi earnestly believed that a person involved in social service should lead a simple life which he thought could lead to Brahmacharya. His simplicity began by renouncing the western lifestyle he was leading in South Africa. He called it "reducing himself to zero," which entailed giving up unnecessary expenditure, embracing a simple lifestyle and washing his own clothes. On one occasion he returned the gifts bestowed to him from the natals for his diligent service to the community.
Gandhi spent one day of each week in silence. He believed that abstaining from speaking brought him inner peace. This influence was drawn from the Hindu principles of mauna (silence) and shanti (peace). On such days he communicated with others by writing on paper. For three and a half years, from the age of 37, Gandhi refused to read newspapers, claiming that the tumultuous state of world affairs caused him more confusion than his own inner unrest.
Faith:Gandhi was born a Hindu and practised Hinduism all his life, deriving most of his principles from Hinduism. As a common Hindu, he believed all religions to be equal, and rejected all efforts to convert him to a different faith. He was an avid theologian and read extensively about all major religions.
Educational philosophy
Mahathma Gandhi’s contribution to the field of educational theory and practice is really out standing. He has been consider to be a revolutionary educational thinker of modern India. Through his educational scheme usually known as basic education he wanted to bring about a social revolution in our country,that would result in creation of a new social order, that would reflect his philosophy of education and life. Gandhigi was at the same time an idealist, a naturalist, a pragmatist and a humanist.
Gandhi was a prolific writer. For decades he edited several newspapers including Harijan in Gujarati, Hindi and English; Indian Opinion while in South Africa and, Young India, in English, and Navajivan, a Gujarati monthly, on his return to India. Later Navajivan was also published in Hindi. In addition, he wrote letters almost every day to individuals and newspapers.
Gandhi also wrote a few books including his autobiography, An Autobiography of My Experiments with Truth, Satyagraha in South Africa about his struggle there, Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, a political pamphlet, and a paraphrase in Gujarati of John Ruskin's Unto This Last. This last essay can be considered his program on economics. He also wrote extensively on vegetarianism, diet and health, religion, social reforms, etc. Gandhi usually wrote in Gujarati, though he also revised the Hindi and English translations of his books.
Gandhi's complete works were published by the Indian government under the name The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi in the 1960s. The writings comprise about 50,000 pages published in about a hundred volumes. In 2000, a revised edition of the complete works sparked a controversy, as Gandhian followers argue that the government incorporated the changes for political purposes. The Indian government later withdrew the revised edition.
11. Sri Aurobindo Ghosh
LIFE SKETCH
Sri Aurobindo (August 15, 1872–December 5, 1950) was an Indian nationalist, scholar, poet, mystic, evolutionary philosopher, Yogi and spiritual master. After a short political career in which he became one of the leaders of the early movement for Indian independence from British rule, Sri Aurobindo turned to the exploration of the subtle realms of human existence and, as a consequence, developed a his own vision and philosophy of human progress and a spiritual path which he termed Integral Yoga.
The central theme of Sri Aurobindo's vision is the evolution of life into a "life divine".
pronounced and often written as "Ghosh" (or "Arabindo Ghosh"), in Kolkata (Calcutta), India, on 15th August, 1872. Aravind means Lotus (pronounced "Aurobindo" in Bengali). His father was Dr K. D. Ghose and his mother Swarnalata Devi.
Dr. Ghose (who had lived in Britain and studied medicine at Aberdeen University), was determined that his children should have an English education and upbringing free of any Indian influences. He therefore sent the young Aurobindo and his siblings to the Loreto Convent school in Darjeeling. Subsequently, at the age of seven, Aurobindo was taken (along with his two elder brothers Manmohan and Benoybhusan) to Manchester, England and placed in the care of a Mr and Mrs. Drewett—an Anglican clergyman and his wife—who tutored Aurobindo privately. Mr. Drewett, himself a capable scholar, grounded Aurobindo so well in Latin that Aurobindo was able to gain admission into St Paul's School in London. At St. Paul's Aurobindo learned Greek and Latin. The last three years at St Paul's were spent in reading literature, especially English Poetry. At St. Paul's he received the Butterworth Prize for literature, the Bedford Prize for history and a scholarship to King's College, Cambridge University. He returned to India in 1893.
Sri Aurobindo argues that humankind as an entity is not the last rung in the evolutionary scale, but can evolve spiritually beyond its current limitations associated with an essential ignorance to a future state of supramental existence. This further evolutionary step would lead to a divine life on Earth characterized by a supramental or truth-consciousness, and a transformed and divinised life and material form.
Educational philosophy
Aurobindo’s educational system can be summed up in to two words ‘Integral Education’. This system has two functions to serve. 1. It gives an integrated view of the universe to the pupil.2. Education attempts at an all-round balanced harmonious and integrated development of the individual.
Main publications
The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on The Gita, The Secret of The Veda, Hymns to the Mystic Fire, The Upanishads, The Foundations of Indian Culture, War and Self-determination, The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity, and The Future Poetry, Renaissance in India on Education, A System of National Education, etc. are his famous books.
REFERENCES
2. A new approach to teacher & educaTION IN THE EMERGING INDIAN SOCIETY B N DASH (NEELKAMAL PUBLICATIONS PVT.LTD.)
3. THE DOCTRINES OF THE GREAT INDIAN EDUCATORS YOGENDRA K. SHARMA (KANISHKA PUBLISHERS,DISTRIBUTORS)
4. education IN THE EMERGING INDIAN SOCIETY DR.K.SIVARAJAN(CALICUT UNIVERSITY,CENTRAL CO-OPERATIVE STORES)
5. THE DOCTRINES OF THE GREAT WESTERN EDUCATORS FROM PLATO TO BERTRAND RUSSELL YOGENDRA K. SHARMA (KANISHKA PUBLISHERS,DISTRIBUTORS)
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