Figures in Education - 19th and 20th Centuries

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827) developed his theories of education in response to his experiences as a pupil and teacher. He followed the ideas of Rousseau, in particular that education was gained from nature and attempted to bring up his own son using the style endorsed by Rousseau in Emile. He rejected the formal and severe education that he had received as a schoolboy. Instead, he argued that children should learn through experience and activity in order to educate themselves.  Pestalozzi viewed a child's education just like the blossoming of a flower and compared a child to a bud not yet opened  believing that children had great potential to grow. He saw education as central to the improvement of social conditions. His aim was to educate the child as a whole, keeping the focus equal on hands (doing), heart (feeling) and head (thinking).

Friedrich Froebel

Best known as the creator of the kindergarten, Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852) started his career by studying Pestalozzi's work and methods. He went on to develop his own original educational methods, with play at the centre of his theory. Froebel believed that play was a spiritual activity for children. He valued the role of play in early childhood, taking the 'natural elements' of children's play and developing them into systematised activities. These activities he named 'Occupations' and 'Gifts'. The Occupations involved playing with natural elements, such as sand, water and mud to help develop practical and manual skills and encourage creativity. Gifts were a series of precisely-made blocks in shapes such as cubes, balls and cylinders to help children learn about structure. He considered them to be a gift from God and an aid to the development of children, with the specific aims of teaching the child to use his or her environment to help demonstrate the connection between human life and nature., the more the child played with the gift, the more objects he would create, the more connections he would make, and the greater his own treasure of ideas would become.

Froebel promoted organised play as well as the study of the natural world in schools. Encouraging children to use their imaginations, he helped them to practice grown-up activities. For example, a child might make mud pies, putting their imagination into action at the same time as preparing for the adult activity of cooking

John Dewey

The American John Dewey (1859-1952) strongly believed that teaching should not just be the imparting of facts to children, but that children should learn and put to use, skills, such as critical thinking and problem solving, in order to fulfil their potential as human beings. He believed in learning by doing and used to teach children the beginnings of chemistry and physics by exploring the methods of cooking breakfast. 

He was a champion of experiential (progressive) education. He wanted teachers to understand that what they taught had to reflect the fact that their pupils would have had very different experiences in the past.

Rudolf Steiner

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) was born in what is now known as Croatia. He believed that education should be designed to suit the changing needs of a child as they develop mentally, physically and emotionally. He believed that education should aim to help children fulfil their own potential and that children should not be urged towards fulfilling the goals of adults and society in general.

His approach to learning was rooted in his study of anthroposophy, a type of spiritual philosophy that he himself helped to develop. His approach to education was systematic, some of the main points being: allowing children to focus on play, drawing and storytelling until the age of seven; allowing children to be taught by the same teacher for up to seven years at a time; treating children as individuals; allowing children to approach learning at their own pace; and encouraging learning for its own sake, not just as a tool to pass exams.

Margaret and Rachel McMillan

Margaret McMillan (1860-1931) and Rachel McMillan (1859-1917) were two sisters who fought for the education of young children to emphasise physical care and development. They campaigned and were successful in introducing free school meals under the 1906 Provision of School Meals Act and they introduced regular medical inspections for school children by opening the first clinic especially devoted to school children in 1908.

In her book entitled Education through the Imagination, Margaret McMillan addressed what she considered a popular belief that imagination:was not considered to be important. She recognised that imagination is good for society as a whole, an idea that is seen in the educational reforms of the 20th century.

Maria Montessori

Maria Montessori (1870-1952) was the first woman to qualify as a doctor in her native country, Italy. Montessori started her career looking at children's diseases and was involved in the education of 'defective' children at her Casa dei Bambini or Children's House in the slums of Rome in 1907. During this time she developed interesting and innovative theories on how children learn.

Montessori believed all activities were meaningful for children. She did not differentiate between work and play. She believed children learn by using their senses and that they learn everything from their surroundings. She was the first educator to develop child-size furniture and real equipment, even designing the staircase in her school to be suitable for children's feet. Montessori wanted children to learn at their own pace and encouraged children to choose their own activities. She wanted children to be responsible for their own learning and described her method as a reversal of roles of the adult and child. She saw the role of the teacher as someone to guide and observe and believed that children learnt best through experience and repetition.

Montessori set out her teaching methods in her book ' Scientific Pedagogy as Applied to Child Education in the Children's Houses'. She developed and patented what she called her didactic apparatus for use in her schools. A measure of her and their success is that Montessori teaching methods are still followed all over the world.

Jean Piaget

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) was a Swiss developmental psychologist who believed that children learn more through play than by sitting formally in rows, learning lessons off by heart. He is best known for his theory of cognitive development which divided the learning process into separate, sequenced stages, such as the sensorimotor stage (the child exploring their world through the senses) which begins at birth and is complete around the age of two. Piaget won the Erasmus Prize in 1972 for the development of this theory. He believed that children store and process facts in order to  build a model of the world in their minds. For this reason Piaget recommended first hand experimentation in the classroom.

The Parents and Teachers of Reggio Emilia

Reggio Emilia is an town in northern Italy which is famous for its innovative approach to education. In the late 1940s, after the Second World War, the parents of the town, in a show of shared responsibility, and with the desire to create a better society for their children, converted a derelict building into the town's first nursery school. The effort and will of the parents was given direction through the extraordinary vision of the teacher, Loris Malaguzzi, who dedicated his life to the development of the philosophy now known as the Reggio Approach. This includes factors such as community and parental support, teachers as learners, the use of an open physical environment, and the exploration of the different languages of children including drawing, sculpture, dramatic play and writing.