Introduction
“There Is Nothing More Practical Than a Good Theory”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
Summary
“There is nothing more practical than a good theory,” a statement made by the famous psychologist Kurt Lewin in the 1950s, is especially relevant to the field of children’s education. Every educator adopts, implicitly or explicitly, a certain theory of child learning and development, which greatly determines what methods he or she uses when educating children. In the best seller of the 1970s, Future Shock, Alvin Toffler observes how a replacement of one fashionable theory by another resulted in a change of child rearing practices:
At the turn of the [20th] century in the United States, for example, the dominant theory reflected the prevailing scientific belief in the primacy of heredity in determining behavior. Mothers who had never heard of Darwin or Spencer raised their babies in ways consistent with the world views of these thinkers. Vulgarized and simplified, passed from person to person, these world views were reflected in the conviction of millions of ordinary people that “bad children are a result of bad stock,” that “crime is hereditary,” etc.
In the early decades of the [20th] century, these attitudes fell back before the advance of environmentalism. The belief that environment shapes personality, and that the early years are the most important, created a new image of the child. The work of Watson and Pavlov began to creep into the public ken. Mothers reflected the new behaviorism, refusing to feed infants on demand, refusing to pick them up when they cried, weaning them early to avoid prolonged dependency.
Similar shifts from one set of practices to another as a result of replacement of one fashionable theory of child learning and development by another take place in the field of instruction. For example, in the 1960s–1970s, growing disappointment with Watson’s and Skinner’s behaviorism and the embracing of Piaget’s constructivist theory resulted in many abandoning conditioning and advocating discovery learning instead as the major method of instruction.
If, as discussed, the theory of child learning and development that one has adopted significantly determines his or her educational practices, would it not be reasonable to assume that the better this theory, the more successful the educational practices will be? The most influential theories of child learning and development have been mentioned earlier; let us review them in more detail.
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- Information
- Vygotsky for Educators , pp. 1 - 12Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014