Objectives:

When you finish studying this chapter, you should be able to:

1. Identify significant historical, cultural, global, and educational forces that have shaped education.
2. Identify how leading educators in the past defined knowledge, education, schooling, teaching, and learning.
3. Identify and assess the contributions to education made by significant theorists.
4. Trace the development of formal school in relation to general historical trends, including changes in educational goals, students served, instructional methods, curriculum, and agents of schooling.
5. Relate the development of American education to non-Western and Western cultural contexts.
6. Identify and analyze persistent issues in education, such the controversy between liberal education and technical training.
7. Analyze who received formal education during each time period and in each culture.
8. Compare and contrast the purposes and forms of education in the varying historical periods and regions examined in the chapter.

Focus and Refocus Questions:

When you finish studying this chapter, you should be able to answer the following questions from your textbook:

Focus Questions

• How were knowledge, education, schooling, teaching, and learning defined in the major historical periods?
• What concepts of the educated person were dominant during each period of history discussed in this chapter?
• How did racial, gender, and socioeconomic factors limit educational opportunities in the past?
• Historically, has schooling been used for cultural transmission or change?
• What curriculum (the content of education) and what teaching methods were used in the various historical periods?
• How did the ideas of leading educators contribute to modern education?

Refocus Questions

• Think back to the Focus Questions listed at the beginning of this chapter. What would your answers for those questions be if you were asked to summarize education in ancient China? In what ways would national examinations in U.S. schools affect your teaching?
• Think back to the Focus Questions listed at the beginning of this chapter. What would your answers for the first five of those questions be if you were asked to summarize education in ancient India? What similarities and differences exist in the Indian and the American approaches to cultural pluralism?
• Think back to the Focus Questions listed at the beginning of this chapter. What would your answers for all of those questions be if you were asked to summarize educational contributions from ancient Greece and Rome? Which contributions from these periods are you glad you will inherit, as a teacher? Which ones will you work to modify?
• Think back to the Focus Questions listed at the beginning of this chapter. What would your answers for all of those questions be if you were asked to summarize educational contributions from the Arabic tradition? How can you combine contributions from diverse sources in your teaching?
• Think back to the Focus Questions listed at the beginning of this chapter. What would your answers be if you were asked to summarize educational contributions from medieval Europe?
• Think back to the Focus Questions listed at the beginning of this chapter. What would your answers for all those questions be if you were asked to summarize educational contributions from the Renaissance? What elements of the humanist position do you see in schools today?
• Think back to the Focus Questions listed at the beginning of this chapter. What would your answers for all of those questions be if you were asked to summarize educational contributions from Europe during the Reformation? What do you believe would be the role of a popular Reformation technique, memorization, in your classroom?
• Think back to the Focus Questions at the beginning of this chapter. What would your answers for all of those questions be if you were asked to summarize educational contributions during the Enlightenment? In particular, identify the trends that had the greatest impact on American education.