SCHOOLS OF PHILOSOPHY

1. IDEALISM:
Doctrines:
a. It starts with the idea and ends with a
thing. Thought is prior to being. Idea is the
real thing.
b. Knowledge is independent of sense
experience.
c. Reality is composed of or closely related
to mind or ideas, and matter is only its
by-product.
d. Values and ethics are absolute and eternal
because they exist in the mind.
e. Knowledge acquired through the senses
must always remain uncertain and incomplete,
since the material world is only a distorted
copy of a more perfect sphere of being.
f. Idealist believes that the child is part of the
ultimately spiritual universe and that he has
spiritual destiny to fulfill in accordance with his
own potentialities.
g. The idealist teacher is supposed to be
embodied with the finest characteristics of
mankind and therefore to be worthy of
emulation.
EXPONENTS:
a. Socrates e. Plato
b. George Berkeley f. Herbert
c. Immanuel Kant g. David Hume
d. Friedrich Hegel
2. REALISM: “ESSE EST PERCIPI” The essence
of the thing is what is perceived to be real.
Doctrines:
a. Matter is the ultimate reality.
b. The material world is real and exists outside
the minds of those who observe.
c. Reality is both material and immaterial,
independent of the knower and is knowable.
d. Knowledge is derived through sense
experience.
e. There is primacy of object over subject.

f. Man is the fusion of the material and the

spiritual, with body and soul forming one
nature. (Dualism of Plato).

g. The world exists independently of man

and is governed by laws over which we
have little control.
h. The school should transmit a central
core of subject matter that will acquaint the
pupil with the world around him.

i. True knowledge is knowledge that

corresponds to the world as it is.

j. In education, it must be committed to a

stimulus-response type of learning and
human nature.
Exponents:
a. Aristotle f. St. Thomas Aquinas b.
John Amos Comenius
c. Rene Descartes g. Baruch Spinoza
d. John Locke h. William James
e. Immanuel Kant i. Herbart
3. PERENNIALISM: Permanence is more
real than change.

Doctrines/Principles/Dogmas:
a. Men are free but they must learn to
cultivate reason and control their appetite.

b. Knowledge and values are unchanging.

c. Education is universal and constant.
Hence, curriculum must be universal and
constant also. Subjects must be permanent.

d. Education encourages memorization,

drill, computation and reasoning
⚫ 4. PROGRESSIVISM:
Doctrines/Principles/Dogmas:
a. Education is based on the importance of
the child.
b. Reality is determined by sense
experience.
c. Values and truths are relative.
d. Everyone is unique, hence techniques
must be varied.

e. Change is the essence of reality.

Education is always in the process of
development. Education is a continual
reconstruction of experiences.

f. The teacher’s role is not to direct but to

advice.
g. Learning should be directly related to the
interest of the child.

h. Education should be a life itself, not a

preparation for living.

i. School should encourage cooperation

rather than competition.
Exponent: John Dewey
 5. ESSENTIALISM
Doctrines/Principles/Dogmas:
a. There are basic elements in culture
which are universal and fixed.
b. Education demands certain culture for
everyone.
c. The chief aim of education is to help the
child adjust to his world by equipping
him/her with some essential knowledge and
values.
d. The initiative in education should lie
with the teacher rather than with his/her
students.
e. The heart of the educational process is
the assimilation of the prescribed subject
matter.
f. The school should retain traditional
methods of mental discipline.
g. Teacher is the authority in the
classroom.
Exponent: William Bagley
 6. RECONSTRUCTIONISM
Doctrines/Principles/Dogmas:
a. Education must commit itself here and
now to the creation of new social order
that will fulfill the basic values of our
culture and at the same time harmonize
with the underlying social and economic
forces of the modern world.

b. Public and private schools should be the

direct instrument of world reformation.
c. Civilization now faces the possibility of
self-annihilation, hence education must lead
to a profound change in the minds of men.

d. Society must be transformed, not only

through political action, more
fundamentally, through the education of its
members to a new vision of their life in
common.
e. Socio-economic forces shape the
students and education itself.
f. The aim is to refashion education to
meet the demands of the times.

Exponents:
Theodore Brenald and Martin Luther
 7. EXISTENTIALISM

A philosophy which emphasizes on freedom

and extreme individualism.
Doctrines/Principles/Dogmas:
a. Reality is a matter of individual existence.
That is, each human being exists in a world
that is without purpose and fundamentally
absurd.
b. It gives the primacy to the individual, the
living person and voices protest against which
dehumanizes the person.
c. Significance of living is found in the
meaning each human being freely chooses
for himself.
d. Existence precedes essence.
e. Values are determined by the free
choices of the individual.
f. An individual has no essential nature, no
self-identity. He creates himself by his own
free choice.
g. Truth is subjectivity.
h. The universe does not provide moral
rules. Moral principles are constructed by
humans in the context of others.
i. An individual can become completely
other than what he is.
j. Education is to serve the individual to
realize the significance of his existence.
k. Existentialism is the broad philosophical
movement postulating that individual human
beings create the meaning and essence of their lives
as persons.
“Be that self which one truly is”.
Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
l. Human beings are to make their own choices in
life and find their own meaning, with or without
God.
m. Existential philosophers range from the religious
(Kierkegaard) to the anti-religious (Nietzsche and
Sartre).
EXPONENTS: Edmund Husserl, Martin
Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean Paul
Sartre.
 8. NATURALISM
Doctrines/Principles/Dogmas:
a. Truth is verifiable and that things are
observable by the senses.

b. There is an utter denial of the

miraculous and supernatural. Truth can
only be discovered through nature.
c. To the naturalist, the ultimate
explanation of all reality is to be found in
nature.

d. To educate means to return to the

natural as opposed to the artificial.
 EXPONENTS
The forerunner of naturalism in
Education was Montaigne; its father was
John Locke, its theorist was Jean
Jacques Rousseau, the one who brought
naturalism into the school was Basedow,
among its exponents were Spencer in
England, Dewey in the U.S. and Orata in
the Philippines.
 9. PRAGMATISM
*Doctrines/Principles/Dogmas:
a. This is a philosophy of practical
consequences. Practical consequence is the
test to the validity and value of an idea.
b. An idea, thing or whatever is TRUE it
works and useful.
c. Teaching must stimulate thinking and
reasoning.
d. Teachers must introduce strategies that
lead students to understand others and his
environment.
EXPONENTS: Francis Bacon, August Comte,
John Dewey, William James and Charles
Sanders Pierce.
 10. SCHOLASTICISM
*Doctrines/Principles/Dogmas:
a. It believes in the use of reason and faith
in accomplishing the truth.
b. The child should grow morally and
intellectually.
c. Education is to aid the individual to be
true, beautiful and good.
EXPONENT: St. Thomas Aquinas
 11. HUMANISM
⚫ *Doctrines/Principles/Dogmas:
⚫ a. Humanism is a philosophical and
ethical stance that emphasizes the
value and agency of human beings,
individually and collectively, and
generally prefers critical thinking and
evidence (rationalism, empiricism) over
established doctrine or faith (fideism)
b. It stresses that all persons have dignity
and worth.

c. Learning starts with the concrete and

particular not abstract and universal.
d. Education is for the formation of the
society based on the recognition of natural
rights.
e. The term Humanism freely applied to
a variety of beliefs, methods, and
philosophies that place central
emphasis on the human realm. Most
frequently, however, the term is used
with reference to a system of education.
Exponent: David Hume
 12. EXPERIMENTALISM
*Doctrine
a. This places emphasis upon the
importance of experiment or scientific
method in achieving the truth.
b. Experimentalism is defined as the
practice of conducting studies, or a love for
new experiences.
 13. Instrumentalism
a. In the philosophy of science, it is the
view that the value of scientific concepts
and theories is determined not whether
they are literally true or they correspond
to reality in some sense but by the
extent to which they help to make
accurate empirical predictions or to
resolve conceptual problems.
b. Instrumentalism is thus the view
that scientific theories should be thought
of primarily as tools for solving practical
problems rather than as meaningful
descriptions of the natural world.
c. Ideas are for the reconstruction of
experience.
 14. COMMUNISM
*Doctrines/Principles/Dogmas:
a. Human nature is materialistic. Everything is
material.
b. Teachers are soldiers for the battle of
communism.
c. Classroom serves as a vehicle for
indoctrination and advocacy of communistic
ideas.
d. Education cannot tolerate freedom and
individuality.
 15. UTILITARIANISM
*Doctrines/Principles/Dogmas:
a. It is better to be a human being
dissatisfied, than a pig satisfied; better to
be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool
satisfied.
b. It is an ethical doctrine that the moral
worth of an action is solely determined by
its contribution to overall utility.
c. It is a form of consequentialism, meaning
that the moral worth of an action is
determined by its outcome – the ends
justify the means.
⚫ c. Utilitarianism was first theorized by
Jeremy Bentham who declared that
‘good’ was whatever brought the greatest
happiness to the greatest number of
people. However, the philosophy is most
associated with John Stuart Mill and his
book Utilitarianism (1863).
⚫ EXPONENT: John Stuart Mill
(1806-1873), Jeremy Bentham
⚫
 16. DETERMINISM
*Doctrines/Principles/Dogmas:
a. Everything is determined, the
beginning as well as the end, by forces
over which we have no control. It is
determined for the insect as well as the
star. Human beings, vegetables, or
cosmic dust, we all dance to a
mysterious tune, intoned in the distance
by an invisible piper.
– Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
b. Determinism is the philosophical theory
that every event, including human
cognition and behavior, decision and
action, is determined by an unbroken chain
of prior occurrences.
c. Determinists generally believe in only
one possible future, though deny that
humans lack free will.
d. Determinism can take many forms,
from theological determinism, which
suggests that one’s future be
predetermined by a god or gods, to
environmental determinism, which
suggests that all human and cultural
development be determined by
environment, climate and geography.
 17. POSITIVISM
*Doctrines/Principles/Dogmas:
a. The deepest sin against the human mind
is to believe things without evidence.
Thomas H. Huxley (1825-1895)
b. Positivism states that the only authentic
knowledge is scientific knowledge and that
such knowledge can only come from
positive affirmation of theories through
strict scientific method.
It is closely associated with empiricism
and rationalism.
c. It was first theorized by Auguste
Comte in the mid 19th century, and
developed into a modern philosophy
favored by scientists and technocrats.
 18. ABSURDISM
*Doctrines/Principles/Dogmas:
a. You will never be happy if you
continue to search for what happiness
consists of. You will never live if you are
looking for the meaning of life.
– Albert Camus (1913-1960)
⚫ b. Absurdism is a philosophy stating
that the efforts of humanity to find
meaning in the universe will ultimately
fail (and, hence, are absurd) because
no such meaning exists, at least in
relation to humanity.
⚫ c. Absurdism believes that, although
such meaning may exist, the pursuit of
it is not essential.
d. It is distinguished from nihilism by its
subjective view of humanity, theology
and meaning. It is best to think of it as
the ‘agnostic’ stage between
existentialism and nihilism.
e. Soren Kierkegaard wrote extensively on
absurdism in the mid 19th century, but the
philosophy is most associated with Albert
Camus and his novels “The Stranger and
The Myth of Sisyphus”.
 19. OBJECTIVISM
*Doctrines/Principles/Dogmas:
a. Man has been called a rational being,
but rationality is a matter of choice –
and the
alternative his nature offers him is: rational
being or suicidal animal.
b. Man has to be man – by choice; he has
to hold his life as a value — by choice; he
has to learn to sustain it – by choice; he
has to discover the values it requires and
practice his virtues – by choice.
Ayn Rand (1905-1982)
b. Objectivism is a philosophy developed by
Ayn Rand in the 20th century that
encompasses positions on metaphysics,
epistemology, ethics, politics, and aesthetics.

c. Objectivism holds that there is mind-an

independent reality; that individual persons
are in contact with this reality through
sensory perception; that human beings gain
objective knowledge from perception by
measurement and form valid concepts based
on such perceptions.
d. It claims that the meaning of life is the
pursuit of one’s own happiness or “rational
self-interest,” and that the only social
system consistent with this morality is full
respect for individual rights, embodied in
pure, consensual laissez-faire capitalism, or
libertarianism.
 20. Secular Humanism
1. There is not sufficient love and
goodness in the world to permit us to
give some of it away to imaginary
beings.
– Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
2. It is an atheistic philosophy that upholds
reason, ethics and justice as the principles
of life.
3. It rejects the concept of a supernatural
creator, and says that the meaning of life is
to be found purely in human terms. It
upholds that there is no absolute truth or
absolute morality, and that truth, meaning
and morality are unique to each person.
3. Thinkers associated with secular
humanism include Friedrich Nietzsche,
Bertrand Russell and Richard Dawkins.
 21. Nihilism
1. Nihilism is a philosophical view (or
anti-philosophical as some call it) that
life is without objective meaning,
purpose, value or truth.
2. They reject the belief in a higher
creator and claim that objective secular
ethics are impossible.
3. Nihilism is often associated with
pessimism, depression and immorality.
To them, life is literally “pointless.”
⚫THE END