Horace Mann Research Paper

A paradigm shift is defined as a time when the usual and accepted way of doing or thinking about something changes completely. Today, most lessons are taught through experience and hands on learning, a drastic shift from the early 1900’s. Many believe in the 21st century that the classroom is not just divided between the teacher and students, but that everyone has the ability to bring new insights to lessons and that everyone in the classroom is learning from each other. In the early 1900’s, education focused on exchanging information between the teacher and the student, whereas today’s teaching method is taking information and applying so it can be understood. People who understood that education wasn’t just an exchange of information, like

John Dewey and Horace Mann, helped to change education and to create a paradigm shift.
John Dewey was a professor and writer who furthered change in education by seeing teaching as more than just a “banking of information”, or teaching information only to be put back out onto a test or quiz. This way of thinking was revolutionary during its time. During the 1920’s when Dewey made this claim teachers were teaching more to keep society going and less to grow society and make changes. Dewey, who believed that learning doesn’t happen in isolation, had five principles in his philosophy of education: interaction, reflection, experience, democracy, and the ultimate goal of societal change. These principles greatly differed from how people were taught and how teachers were taught to teach. Through things like experience, students could learn how the lessons that they had been taught applied to real life. Placing things, like working models that demonstrated erosion and science labs to do experiments, in schools helped children to better learn the material and see how it worked. Interaction taught students that learning didn’t have to come from an actual teacher in a school- it could come from anywhere like other students or experiences. Dewey stated that because learning is an interaction it is a social experience, which went against the teacher-student dynamic in early 20th century classrooms. He explained that these principles work because they are based on democracy and working towards change. Without democracy in classrooms teachers and students would have no connections to each other besides the person who taught the information and the person who received it. Lessons were not allowed to be questioned as to whether they were right, wrong, or accurate, limiting the student’s ability to question the world around them and ultimately leading them to not make any changes to their society. This shift from only passing information and not questioning it to actually understanding the information and seeing its flaws changed the way that students perceived education and what they were taught in class. Many students who went to school after Dewey were taught with his philosophies about education and were more encouraged to challenge the status quo of what they are taught. Students were also more inclined to learn about the world through experience, a change that may have not happened without Dewey’s philosophy of education. Dewey, like other progressive thinkers, helped to drastically shift the way education and society formed for the better.
Horace Mann was also a progressive thinker that helped to change the way education was seen.

Known as the Father of the Common School, Mann believed that to have a better, more intelligent society that citizens should be educated in even the most rural and poor of communities. Having schools that were public and paid by taxes was, “central to good citizenship, democratic participation and societal well-being,” (Horace Mann). The secretary of the Massachusetts board of education, Mann stated that political stability and social harmony depended on education, which would provide a basic level of literacy and inclination of common public ideas. This shift from having only higher class people being able to go to school to having almost all children going to school had a significant impact on society and how we view it. With more information about the world and the inner-workings of things like government and politics, more people were able to understand the events going on around them and in turn be able and willing to make changes in their society. With literary levels rising, more people could go and seek information for themselves. Not having to rely on other people giving them information meant that opinions were less likely to be skewed and people could form their own ideas as they read. Though Horace Mann did not live in the 20th century, his ideas about education and public schooling greatly impacted education in the 1900’s and how people think about education

today.
Though there are many ways of teaching in today’s society, the best teachers are often the ones who apply Dewey and Mann’s methods to their lessons and classrooms. These classrooms use experience, interaction, and democracy as part of their main teaching tools, giving students well-rounded lessons that they can apply to their lives. Public schools give all children the opportunity to learn no matter their social status and give them the knowledge to go on and become better citizens who are willing to make changes in their society. Progressive thinkers like Horace Mann and John Dewey helped to change how we think about education, giving teachers and students ways to experience education that they wouldn’t have had in the early 1900’s.