PHYSICAL EDUCATION

PHYSICAL EDUCATION
Physical education, training in physical fitness and in skills requiring or promoting such fitness. Many traditional societies included training in hunting, ritual dance, and military skills, while others—especially those emphasizing literacy—often excluded physical skills.

The spread of literacy in the West between 1500 and 1800 coincided with a new awareness that fitness helps the mind. Gymnasiums opened across Europe, the first in Copenhagen in 1799. The German Turnverein movement grew, expanding to the United States with immigration. Per Ling developed a teaching system for physical education in Stockholm in 1814, and Otto Spiess (1810–1858) popularized another system in Germany. As public schools in Germany, Denmark, and the United States tried these systems, physical education joined baccalaureate curricula, becoming a major at Columbia University in 1901 and elsewhere later.

Japan's schools have linked physical and mental training since the 17th century. Public schools with compulsory physical education were founded in 1872; the trend since 1945 has been toward individual physical and mental development. The Soviet Union, after 1917, placed great emphasis on physical education, both in schools and in special physical education institutes.

Today, physical education is a required course in most primary and secondary schools in countries with compulsory education. Most teaching takes place inside gymnasiums or other facilities built specifically for physical education activities, although outdoor sports are also emphasized.

DISTANCE EDUCATION

DISTANCE EDUCATION
Distance Education is the methods of instruction that utilize different communications technologies to carry teaching to learners in different places. Distance education programs enable learners and teachers to interact with each other by means of computers, artificial satellites, telephones, radio or television broadcasting, or other technologies. Instruction conducted through the mail is often referred to as correspondence education, although many educators simply consider this the forerunner to distance education. Distance education is also sometimes called distance learning. While distance learning can refer to either formal or informal learning experiences, distance education refers specifically to formal instruction conducted at a distance by a teacher who plans, guides, and evaluates the learning process. As new communications technologies become more efficient and more widely available, increasing numbers of elementary schools, secondary schools, universities, and businesses offer distance education programs.

Nearly every country in the world makes use of distance education programs in its education system. Britain’s nationally supported Open University, based in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, England, has one of the best-known programs. A vast majority of the school’s 133,000 students receive instruction entirely at a distance. More than 20 other countries have national open universities in which all instruction is provided by distance education methods. This method of education can be especially valuable in developing countries. By reaching a large number of students with relatively few teachers, it provides a cost-effective way of using limited academic resources. Many businesses use distance education programs to train employees or to help them update skills or knowledge. Employees may take such programs in the workplace or at home in their spare time.

THE NEED FOR REMEDIAL EDUCATION

THE NEED FOR REMEDIAL EDUCATION
Many students need additional instructional support in a particular subject at some point in their school years. Some students need more remedial support than others.

Many educators consider remedial education necessary to overcome the ill effects of poverty. Schools always have had difficulty educating children who live in economically disadvantaged households. Educational researchers note that relatively few low-income households are able to afford educational resources that could help create a rich, supportive learning environment in the home. For instance, families living in poverty are less likely to be able to afford books, computers, encyclopedias, and other learning resources. Children in such households often have difficulty matching the academic achievement of more advantaged children who live in homes and communities that provide greater access to educational resources. In addition, parents with low incomes typically have lower levels of educational attainment themselves. These parents often find it difficult to offer their children the same sort of academic advice and support that wealthier and better-educated parents can provide their own children.

Schools in lower-income communities are typically funded less than schools in higher-income communities. On various measures, such as class sizes, teacher qualifications, access to curriculum materials, and library facilities, schools in lower-income communities rank below those in higher-income communities. The result is that often students in lower-income communities receive a lower-quality education. This problem produces a greater need for remedial education programs.

There are many other reasons why students may fall behind academically and need remedial instruction. Teachers differ in their expertness for teaching math, reading, and other subjects. Thus, a student might need remedial help if he had teacher A in first grade but not if he had been lucky enough to have teacher B. School systems also differ in their support for teachers. In a school district with overcrowded classrooms, the same teacher B might be overwhelmed with work and not be able to attend to individual needs as well. Finally, parent involvement plays an important role in a student’s learning. Students whose parents are highly involved in their education are less likely to need remedial help than students whose parents are not involved...

REMEDIAL EDUCATION

REMEDIAL EDUCATION
Remedial Education is the special instruction designed to help students catch up to a desired level of academic achievement. In the United States and Canada, remedial education is common at all levels of schooling, from preschools through colleges and universities. The most common remedial education programs focus on developing students’ basic skills in reading, writing, and mathematics.

Some remedial education programs attempt to remedy insufficient learning in previous academic settings. These programs typically involve reteaching subjects or redesigning lessons to make the instruction clearer or more personalized for individual students. Remedial programs may also be designed to compensate for an educational disadvantage. For instance, a preschool program may provide learning opportunities designed to help children who are considered at risk of educational failure because of limited English proficiency. In higher education, a remedial math course may help some first-year college or university students compensate for inadequate preparation in math during high school.

Remedial education is based on the presumption that a student underachieves because of extrinsic (environmental) factors, such as poverty or insufficient access to high-quality education. Remedial education thus differs from special education, where the source of the learning difficulty is generally viewed as intrinsic—that is, due to a disability or disorder that exists within the individual. To avoid a common misperception that students in remedial programs have an intrinsic learning difficulty, some educators in the United States prefer to use the term developmental education rather than remedial education. Most educators consider programs in English as a Second Language (ESL) to be neither remedial, developmental, nor special education but a separate category of educational support.

Historically, schools allowed children to fall behind academically if they had difficulty matching the achievement of their peers. Most students who found learning difficult eventually dropped out of school to find work in occupations that did not require high levels of educational achievement. However, as society has changed and work has become more complex, the accepted minimum levels of educational achievement have steadily risen, especially since the 1960s. Enrollment levels in remedial education programs have likewise risen.

MORAL EDUCATION

Moral education
Another set of problems and issues has to do with the proper educational approach to morality. Should education strive to instill particular moral beliefs and values in students? Or should it aim rather to enhance students' ability to think through moral issues for themselves? If the latter, how should educators distinguish between good and bad ways to think about moral issues? Should moral education focus on students' character—rather than on either the inculcation of particular beliefs and values or the development of the ability to think well about moral matters—and endeavour to produce particular traits, such as honesty and sensitivity? Or are all these approaches problematic in that they inevitably involve indoctrination (of an undesirable kind)? A related objection to the approaches mentioned is that moral beliefs and values are in some sense relative to culture or community; therefore, attempts to teach morality at least presuppose an indefensible moral absolutism and may even constitute a kind of moral “imperialism.” These large and complex questions are intimately connected with metaethics and moral epistemology—i.e., the part of moral philosophy concerned with the epistemic status of moral claims and judgments. Moral psychology and developmental psychology are also highly relevant to the resolution of these questions.

CLARIFICATION OF EDUCATIONAL CONCEPTS

Clarification of educational concepts

A perennial conception of the nature of philosophy is that it is chiefly concerned with the clarification of concepts, such as knowledge, truth, justice, beauty, mind, meaning, and existence. One of the tasks of the philosophy of education, accordingly, has been the elucidation of key educational concepts, including the concept of education itself, as well as related concepts such as teaching, learning, schooling, child rearing, and indoctrination. Although this clarificatory task has sometimes been pursued overzealously—especially during the period of so-called ordinary language analysis in the 1960s and '70s, when much work in the field seemed to lose sight of the basic normative issues to which these concepts were relevant—it remains the case that work in the philosophy of education, as in other areas of philosophy, must rely at least in part on conceptual clarification. Such analysis seeks not necessarily, or only, to identify the particular meanings of charged or contested concepts but also to identify alternative meanings, render ambiguities explicit, reveal hidden metaphysical, normative, or cultural assumptions, illuminate the consequences of alternative interpretations, explore the semantic connections between related concepts, and elucidate the inferential relationships obtaining among the philosophical claims and theses in which they are embedded.

AIMS OF EDUCATION

The aims of education
The most basic problem of philosophy of education is that concerning aims: what are the proper aims and guiding ideals of education? What are the proper criteria for evaluating educational efforts, institutions, practices, and products? Many aims have been proposed by philosophers and other educational theorists; they include the cultivation of curiosity and the disposition to inquire; the fostering of creativity; the production of knowledge and of knowledgeable students; the enhancement of understanding; the promotion of moral thinking, feeling, and action; the enlargement of the imagination; the fostering of growth, development, and self-realization; the fulfillment of potential; the cultivation of “liberally educated” persons; the overcoming of provincialism and close-mindedness; the development of sound judgment; the cultivation of docility and obedience to authority; the fostering of autonomy; the maximization of freedom, happiness, or self-esteem; the development of care, concern, and related attitudes and dispositions; the fostering of feelings of community, social solidarity, citizenship, and civic-mindedness; the production of good citizens; the “civilizing” of students; the protection of students from the deleterious effects of civilization; the development of piety, religious faith, and spiritual fulfillment; the fostering of ideological purity; the cultivation of political awareness and action; the integration or balancing of the needs and interests of the individual student and the larger society; and the fostering of skills and dispositions constitutive of rationality or critical thinking.

All such proposed aims require careful articulation and defense, and all have been subjected to sustained criticism. Both contemporary and historical philosophers of education have devoted themselves, at least in part, to defending a particular conception of the aims of education or to criticizing the conceptions of others. The great range of aims that have been proposed makes vivid the philosopher of education's need to appeal to other areas of philosophy, to other disciplines (e.g., psychology, anthropology, sociology, and the physical sciences), and to educational practice itself. Given that consideration of education's proper aims is of fundamental importance for the intelligent guidance of educational activities, it is unfortunate that contemporary discussions of educational policy rarely address the matter.