Test Your Understanding About the Philosophy (Reflection #3)

          The five major Philosophies of Education has been taught to us by Dr. Olga Alonsabe and made it more active by letting us group ourselves to which philosophy we truly believed. After the very good and active participation of each group, we were given another activity containing 6 members each group and let us answer page 12 of The Teaching Profession book, Test Your Understanding of the Philosophies, wherein YES or NO is the answer to each question.  Each Philosophy has 4 questions and we got 2 wrong answers on the Progressivism and 1 wrong answer on Perennialism.

            Same with my group mates, I thought that Progressivist teachers look at education as preparation for adult life, believing that preparing for adult life is the same as coping with the changes of life, which the progressivist really adheres to. Another wrong answer is we say No to the question “Are the students’ interests and needs considered in a progressivist curriculum?” Again, we were able to miss conceptualizing that Progressivist is a student-centered philosophy and thus be answered as Yes.  Another wrong answer is the question from Perennialism, “Are the perennialist teachers concerned with the student’s mastery of the fundamental skills?” We gave a Yes answer. Supposed to be a big No because it is the belief of Essentialism. Perennialism, which is more related to Essentialism, teaches on principles and not facts. It is very concern on the reasoning ability of every person and not on the essential skills. So, all in all, we had a score of 17/20.

            Testing one’s understanding like that of page 12 of The Teaching Profession book helps every future educator to evaluate himself to how far where he able to go and understand the ideas previously discussed. For me, it is really a big help because like what we have done with our group, there was an exchange of ideas to every member and eventually allowed us to identify our understanding on each philosophy. It broadened my knowledge about some facts a philosophy holds which I think is not. It is a tool in measuring how deep my understanding on every ideas, and personally I would really want to know more about the philosophy because I know this will be my guide to my future teaching career. Besides, I don’t want to be a teacher without even understanding fully the major philosophies of education. I want to be a part of teachers’ community who is ready to serve and has a very good disposition on handling diversity.