Skip to main content

Four educational reformers and their pedagogical methods




Célestin Freinet, Paolo Freire, Maria Montessori and John Dewey are probably the most popular or well-known reformer of education and school systems. If you haven’t heard from this people, then you should definitely read this text.
Célestin Freinet was a French elementary school teacher and a pedagogical reformer. He is best known for the „Modern School Movement“, for which he is responsible. His main idea was that the teacher has to organize his lessons in such a way that the students want to learn. If not, he has to change his teaching. He also wanted to pay special attention to the interests of the children.
The Brazilian educator and philosopher Paolo Freire is especially known for his work „Pedagogy of the Oppressed“. As a leading advocate of critical pedagogy he was shocked that approximately 70 percent of the Brazilian population were illiterate. In his opinion education should enable the oppressed to regain their sense of humanity.
The only woman, but probably the most famous person in this text is Maria Montessori. She was an Italian physician and educator and is responsible for the „Montessori-method“. However, let’s see how this all started. So, in 1906 she was invited to create a childcare center in San Lorenzo, a poor district of Rome. There, she worked with some of the most disadvantaged, and previously unschooled, children. And it worked. Back to the Montessori Method. This method allows working in mixed age groups. For example, educator are teaching 2-2.5 year old, 2.5-6 year olds and 6-12 year olds. 
His ideas has been influential in education and social reform. The American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer John Dewey is known for his publications about education. Learning by Doing is actually the same as learning be Dewey-ing. His main idea is that students should learn from practical examples from their own experience.
In my opinion, all of the named persons improve our school system with their ideas. I especially like John Dewey’s and Célestin Freinet’s methods.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The gaps that we need to fill

  I presume that I need not introduce anyone to COVID-19 . It is the reason why you cannot see your friends and also why you can wake up at 9 am on weekdays. And this is precisely the premise of today's blog post. How did the lack of regular lessons influence us, and did we indeed waste a year of education?  We are not going to lie to ourselves:  this school year has been extremely overwhelming . The back and forth between going to school and switching to distant learning left not only me but a lot of others very confused. Until November we were all together as a class, and then we had to shift to online education. After that, it was just a mix of online lessons and  class attendance, with only half of the students present.  Nonetheless, I can tell from my own experience that when it comes to new skills, this year has been very productive. I think that the most important one is becoming  a more independent learner. It is difficult for teachers to check on t...

Covid – A student’s dream or educational disaster?

  As we surely all have understood by now the past year has been drastically different due to the global pandemic, for adults as well as for students. In this blog post I will show you the viewpoint of an affected student from Austria. First of all, schools only partially closed down. For the most time online classes were held, then when things got better the government decided to switch to a system with half of the students physically going to school every other day. Unfortunately, this led to more covid-cases, resulting in a back and forth between online classes and “real” classes. One of the major differences was in the amount of work that we got assigned. Not only were the teachers much more generous with homework but as a student I had a lot more time to manage, and efficiently do, all the tasks. This might seem like a big advantage for everyone, but the actual online meetings were much more stressful than I could’ve ever imagined. Over time, however, things changed. Teachers ...

The status of our environment is getting worse and worse!

  Don’t you think our environment is in big trouble? Because I do! There is this huge hole in the ozone layer which has to close again for example. But this only works if we finally decide to do something for it. Planting trees would be optimal. But this hole isn’t our only problem. There are many other problems like the pollution of oceans and seas. Many fishes are dying because of that. But the list of bad things doesn’t stop here. There are many other disasters we have to do something about as well. To fix those things we need every help we can get. So why don’t you or your school contribute something good for the environment? For example, by going to demonstrations. Starting an environmental-protection school project would also be a great idea. There are many other options to do something good for nature as long as something changes. Even if you only start separating waste. But to start helping the environment people have to know what they can do about it. Therefore, it would b...