4 Philosophies

The Idealist approach to education is looking at major accomplishments throughout history and looking at major leaders as role models (or as people to not be like). As a future history teacher, teaching through the idealist philosophy would involve presenting students with major historical events, creations, and people. Those three topics would drive most of the class in an idealist approach. You would want to go over things such as why was this event important, why was this person so significant to history, and how do these things model human nature (the goods and the bads). A big thing for the teacher to pass on to the students is cultural heritage and where and who that comes from.

The Realism approach tends to look a lot more at the scientific approach to education. For history, that would mean not only looking at what happened in the past, but how we know these things happened. A great thing to do with students in the Realism approach would be to look at primary documents. The students can use these documents to come to their own conclusion of what actually happened. Does it line up with what our textbooks tell us? Why or why not? Realism also consists of careful assessment of students knowledge, meaning that assessment would most likely be contained to testing and papers.

The Pragmatism approach looks at the changing reality and at the world as it is now. In history, you would want to relate historical events, people, etc to the present. The point of history is knowing what worked and what didn’t work in the past, so using Pragmatism would involve relating events from the past to what is going on in our world right now. Then, using this knowledge, attempting to come to a solution to the problems we face now.

The Existentialism approach looks a lot less at content and a lot more at the students themselves. Existentialism says that we can’t predict the students, so to me that means we shouldn’t be planning things out for the future like tests because we don’t know how these students are going to react because we don’t know them well enough yet. A lot of this approach is centered around you getting to know your students, and your students getting to know each other. This approach says that students need to learn about themselves, really learn who they are.

The approach that really sticks out to me is Pragmatism because I feel that approach lines up the best with what I want to do as a teacher. I really believe that the point of understanding history is to help us make decisions in the present. So as a teacher my main goal is to link historical events to current events. I don’t just want my history students to be able to recite things that happened in the past, I want them to understand why those things were important and how we can use that knowledge to our advantage today. To me, history is about a lot more than just memorizing dates and facts, and that’s what the Pragmatism approach does.