Education News
Prominent Educationalists
| F. Matthias Alexander | Frederick Matthias Alexander (January 20, 1869–October 10, 1955) was an actor who developed the educational process that is today called the Alexander Technique—a method of helping people learn to free habitual reactions of moving, learned by improving one's kinesthetic judgment. He was born in Tasmania, later moved to Melbourne, Australia, and finally settled in London in 1904. |
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| Catherine Baker | Catherine Baker (born July 1948) is French journalist and home schooling essayist. Bibliography
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| Benjamin Bloom | Benjamin Bloom (1913 - 1999) was an educational theorist and a teacher who developed a 6-level classification for intellectual development. The systems levels are knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. His theory, known as Bloom's Taxonomy, incorporates cognitive, psychomotor, and affective spheres of knowledge into the learning hierarchy. While working at the University of Chicago in the 1960s, he wrote two important books, Stability and Change in Human Characteristics and Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. His theories were adopted by many public school districts, particularly in Chicago and Boston, during the 1970s and 1980s, but have since then been widely criticized as being ineffective, and in many places they are no longer practiced. His theory can be summarized by the following quote by Bloom: "The purpose of education is to change the thoughts, feelings and actions of students." |
| Garth Boomer | Garth Boomer (died 1993) was an influential educationalist working in Australia. Since 1995 there has been a Garth Boomer Memorial Lecture in his honour. He was particularly influential in the teaching of English, and he was President of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English for a time. His works include:
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| Jim Cummins | Dr. Jim Cummins is a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto where he works on language development and literacy development of learners of English as an additional language. In 1979 Cummins coined the acronyms BICS and CALP to refer to processes that help a teacher to qualify a student's language ability. |
| Obeng de Lawrence | Obeng de Lawrence is one of Britain's leading educationists, from the minority ethnic community. He was born in Ghana and educated in the United Kingdom . Obeng de Lawrence spent several years teaching in the London Borough of Newham. De Lawrence has been hailed as an educational innovator in the United Kingdom after he launched the first ever Teachers Adaptation course aimed at helping highly qualified individuals from abroad to overcome traditional barriers and gain essential skills to work wherever they chose. He launched Dream Harvest College based in Stratford, East London , in 2001, offering the first Adaptation course in the United Kingdom. Since then hundreds of people have gone on to careers in teaching in the United Kingdom and all over the world. Dream Harvest College is now one of the most successful educational, institutions from the minority ethnic community. 'At Dream Harvest, we try to prepare teachers from overseas so they can overcome their fears related to teaching in a foreign country,' said Obeng de Lawrence. Dream Harvest College is held up as an example of good practice. |
| John Dewey | John Dewey (October 20, 1859 - June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer, whose thought has been greatly influential in the United States and around the world. |
| Hermann Ebbinghaus | Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850 - 1909) was a German psychologist who pioneered experimental study of memory, and discovered the forgetting curve. Ebbinghaus was born in Barmen, Germany. At 17 he entered the University of Bonn. His first and foremost interest was psychology. His studies were interrupted in 1870 due to the Franco-Prussian War. He enlisted in the Prussian army. He resumed his studies and received a Ph.D. in 1873. In 1885, he published his ground-breaking On Memory in which he described experiments he conducted on himself to describe the process of forgetting. He was professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin, and later in Breslau (now Polish Wroclaw). He died of pneumonia in Breslau at the age of 59. His contributions are multiple. His famous work on memory initiated experimental psychology. He pioneered precise experimental techniques used in the research on learning. In addition to his research and lecturing, he established two psychology laboratories in Germany, and founded a major psychology journal. |
| Moshe Feldenkrais | Dr. Moshé Pinhas Feldenkrais (May 6, 1904 - July 1, 1984) was the founder of the Feldenkrais Method of movement education designed to improve human functioning by increasing self-awareness in movement. |
| Paulo Freire | Paulo Freire (Recife, Brazil September 19, 1921 - São Paulo, Brazil May 2, 1997) was a Brazilian educator and influential theorist of education. |
| Robert M. Gagne | Robert M. Gagné (1916 - 2002) is best known for his "Conditions of Learning". Gagné pioneered the science of instruction during WWII for the air force with pilot training. Later he went on to develop a series of studies and works that helped codify what is considered to be 'good instruction' today. He also was involved in applying concepts of instructional theory to the design of computer based training and multimedia based learning. A major contribution to the theory of instruction was the model "Nine Events of Instruction". |
| John Taylor Gatto | John Taylor Gatto is a retired school teacher of 30 years, and author of several books on education. He is an activist against compulsory schooling. |
| Ivan Illich | Ivan Illich (Vienna, September 4, 1926 - Bremen, December 2, 2002), polymath, polemicist, was an example of a true free thinker. |
| Ivan Pavlov | Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (September 14, 1849 - February 27, 1936) was a Russian physiologist who first described the phenomenon now known as conditioning in experiments with dogs. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1904. |
| Jean Piaget | Jean Piaget (August 9, 1896 - September 16, 1980), a professor of psychology at the University of Geneva from 1929 to 1975, was a francophone Swiss developmental psychologist who is most well known for organizing cognitive development into a series of stages - that is levels of development corresponding to infancy, childhood, and adolesence |
| Plato | Plato (Greek: ???t?? Pláton) (c. 427 BC – c. 347 BC) was an immensely influential classical Greek philosopher, student of Socrates, teacher of Aristotle, writer, and founder of the Academy in Athens. |
| Jean-Jacques Rousseau | Jean Jacques Rousseau (June 28, 1712 - July 2, 1778) was a Swiss-French philosopher, writer, political theorist, and self-taught composer of The Age of Enlightenment |
| B.F. Skinner | Burrhus Frederic Skinner (March 20, 1904 - August 18, 1990) was an American psychologist and author. He conducted pioneering work on experimental psychology and advocated behaviorism, which seeks to understand behavior entirely in terms of physiological responses to external stimuli. |
