Humanistic education

History of Humanistic Education

The Humanist pedagogy stands in a millennia-old tradition begun in ancient times on the European forms from the 12th century to the neo-humanistic approaches in the late 19th century. As an example, some representatives are listed here.

• Plato ( 427-347 BC) advocated an unprejudiced attitude to new, insightful questions and promoting the exploration of the ideas behind the images. The goal of the entire personality to be the pursuit of truth, beauty, goodness, and wisdom and reason.

• Erasmus of Rotterdam ( 1465 or 1469-1536 ) turned against the spread in education, bad habits, learning material to complicate unnecessarily overloading and thereby create an atmosphere of anxiety and stress. For the pioneer of humanism is a freedom from such negative factors, a fundamental condition of learning. He also developed creative educational content that appealed to possible multiple senses of the students and were not designed for the purely cognitive learning. Today, find parallels in the Freinet pedagogy and in the humanistic pedagogy according to Rogers.

• Jean -Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) emphasized the natural curiosity of children and used this in a playful learning within a real environment for acquiring problem solving abilities. Here are common with the project work set in today's pedagogy determine. Rousseau assumed that the disability of learning rather result from negative effects of school and their internal development and therefore the students were rid of these.

• Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827) was based on his model Rousseau. But in contrast to this, he looked at the human traits not in principle as well. Negative assessments such as lack of motivation were factored into the educational efforts with. Basically stood the naturalness in the center of the teaching even at Pestalozzi. The whole person should be taken into account in his idea of the elementary education so that head, heart and hands to be addressed in training. His findings on the teacher -student relationship can be considered as a template for Rogers approach of " helping relationship ".

Newer approaches since the 20th century

In the sixties of the 20th century, various movements of humanistic pedagogy emerged in response to the perceived as authoritarian education system. The so-called "Free Schools" found at this time a considerable public attention. Here you can connect to the founded by Alexander Sutherland Neill 1921 Summerhill boarding school in England to be seen.

In response to this movement and its lack of scientific approaches the modern humanist education, who took their basic approaches of humanistic psychology emerged. As an important representative of this tendency Carl Rogers, Charlotte Buhler, Abraham Maslow and Paul Goodman should be mentioned.

The humanistic education is person-centered. It deals with the behavior, but also the values ​​and feelings of the learner and is based on value-based principles of pedagogical action.

The goals of humanistic education were from the ASCD ( Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development ) formulated in 1978 as follows:

Various therapeutic approaches that developed in the humanistic psychology, also found more and more input into the educational work, especially in adult education: Client-centered interviewing, Gestalt therapy, transactional analysis, psychodrama and theme-centered interaction.