Chapters 1-4 Notes
Chapter 1: The Guidance Tradition: Foundations of thought & historical significance
Early Pioneers from the field of Education
John Comenius: “the desire to learn can be excited by teachers if they are gentle and persuasive and do not alienate their pupils from them by roughness, but attract them by fatherly sentiments and words” The Great Didactic (Wolfe,2002 p.56)
Johann Pestalozzi: I wish to wrest education from the outworn order of doddering old teaching hacks as well as from the new-fangled order of cheap, artificial teaching tricks, and entrust it to the eternal powers of nature herself, to the light which God has kindled and kept alive in the hearts of fathers and mothers, to the interests of parents who desire their children grow up in favour with God and with men. (Pestalozzi quoted in Silber 1965: 134)
Fredrich Froebel: “There are many faults…. which arise simply through carelessness. When children act on impulse, which in itself may be harmless or even praiseworthy, they can become so entirely absorbed that they have no thought for the consequences and indeed from their own limited experience can have no knowledge of them………
Moreover it is certainly true that is as a rule the child is first made bad, often by the educator himself. This can happen when everything which the child does out of ignorance or thoughtlessness or even from a keen sense of right and wrong is attributed to an intention to do evil. Unhappily there are among teachers those who always see children as mischievous, spiteful, ...whereas others see at most an over exuberant sensed of life or a situation which has got out of hand.” Lilly,
Turn of the Century
Maria Montessori: “We know only too well the sorry spectacle of the teacher who, in the ordinary schoolroom, must pour certain cut and dried facts into the heads of the scholars. In order to succeed in this barren task, she finds it necessary to discipline her pupils into immobility