HPSC HCS 2021 · Question 167 of 177

Read the passage and choose the most appropriate option: Philosophy of Education is a label applied to the study of the purpose, process, nature and ideals of education, it can be considered a branch of both, philosophy and education. Education can be defined as the teaching and leaning of specific skill and the importin of knowledge, Judgement and wisdom, and is something broader than the societal institutions of education we often speak of. Many educationalists consider it a weak and woolly field, too far removed from the real world to be useful. But But philosophers dating back to Plato and the Ancient Greeks have given the area much thought and emphasis, and there is little doubt that their work has helped shape the practice of education the milennia. Plato is the earliest important educational thinker, and education is an essential element in The Republic' (his most important work on philosophy and political theory, written around 360 B.C.) In it, he advocates some rather extreme methods: removing children from their mother's care and raising them as wards of the state, and differentiating children suitable to the various castes, the highest receiving the most education, so that they could act as guardians of the city and care for the less able. He believed that education should be holistic, including facts, skills, physical discipline, music and art. Plato believed the talent and intelligence is not distributed genetically and thus is be found in children born to all classes although his proposed system of selective public education for an educated minority of the population does not really follow a democratic model. Aristotle considered human nature, habit and reason to be equally important forces to be cultivated in education, the ultimate aim of which should be to produce good and virtuous citizens. He proposed that teachers lead their students systematically and that repetition be used as a key tool to develop good habits, unlike Socrates' emphasis on questioning his listeners to bring out their own ideas. He emphasized the balancing of the thebretical and practical aspects of subjects taught, among which the explicitly mentions reading, writing, mathematics, music, physical education, literature, history and a wide range of sciences, as well as play, which he also considered important. During the Medieval period. the idea of perennialism was first formulated by st. Thomas Aquinas in his work 'De Magistro'. Perennialism holds that one should teach those things deemed to be of everlasting importance to all people everywhere, namely principles and reasoning, not Just facts (which are apt to change over time), and that one should teach first about people, not machines or techniques, It was originally religious in nature, and it was only much later that a theory of secular perennialism developed. During the Renaissance, the french skeptic Michel de Montaigne (15331592) was one of the first to critically look at education Unusually for this time, Montaigne was willing to question the conventional wisdom of the period calling into question the whole edifice of the educational system, and the implicit assumption that university educated philosophers were necessarily wiser than uneducated farm workers, for example. Why do educationists consider philosophy a 'weak and woolly' field?

Reading Comprehension

1. AIt is not practically applicable.Correct
2. BIts theoretical concept are easily understood.
3. CIt is irrelevant for education.
4. DNone of the above.