Reflection 8: What is your educational philosophy?

As humans, we are bound to have different opinions and different approaches to a lot of things. I for one want to be a teacher and teachers all have their own perspectives and like teaching a certain way, this ties in to everyone’s own educational philosophy. There are 6 main educational philosophies: essentialism, perennialism, progressivism, existentialism, reconstructionism, and critical pedagogy. My educational philosophy is much entwined into all the different major philosophies. I agree with many aspects of some philosophies and disagree with some other aspects. Essentialism is based on the older methods of teaching and sticking to the basics which are teaching the main topics such as math reading and science. I like this method because I believe that all students should have at least some common knowledge over these main topics, but at the same time I think our current school system depends too much on this. Perennialism is almost like essentialism except that this method tries to brand students with the older methods of teaching, for example, in science they make sure that the child not only knows the facts of evolution but also understand the reasoning behind it. I don’t agree much with this philosophy because as I’ve said I think students should only be taught about common knowledge in these areas. Progressivism acknowledges that everyone has their own individual thinking but it goes deep into science. Science is a very important topic but I think that there are more important topics that should be taught such as ethics. Existentialism let’s each person think for themselves what they believe is right and wrong and it says that we all have free will to categorize things as we see fit. This is a good philosophy because I believe that everyone has free will and should use it to their extent but I also believe that in order to know right from wrong, one ust be taught what the world understanding is. In reconstructionism people want to change the existing culture on the flaws to what they think would be best. I agree with this philosophy in the sense that take the enviornment for example, if we realize we are causing pollution we can change our ways and go green but at the same time, reconstrucionists are more into forcing this onto students rather than the students being willing to cooperate. Last but not least is critical pedagogy; this is the students power to want to learn and problem solve and think critically. I completely 100% agree with this philosophy because I believe that all students should have the mentality and ability to critically problem solve. My philosophy might be a bit mixed up but I know that I want to be a good teacher and I know I will succeed.