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1. Improves the quality of education and strengthens the professional competence of the teacher.
There is a strong conviction that the study of the past has a crucial bearing on the quality of action in the present. Accordingly, many of the attitudes and approaches that teachers adopt as they study the past are relevant to the tasks that they face in becoming better practitioners. It is important to prepare teachers in a way that can enable them explore and critically examine alternative educational theories and practices. History of education will therefore contribute to the strengthening of both the personal and professional competence of teachers by encouraging them to:
a) examine, evaluate, accept, reject, or modify the cultural inheritance; and
b) become an educational critic and an agent responsible for cultural transmission and change rather than to blindly accept the status quo of unchallenged claims.
The study of the motivations and behaviors of other human beings who were engaged in educational aspects of concrete historical situations will help the educator to discern the various choices that were instrumental in shaping human activities in the past. A critical examination of the past action will help the educator illuminate the possibilities and alternatives of decision making in the present, that is, take a critical look at contemporary theories and practices.
Since the past illuminates the present, history is therefore important in learning about the evolution of things. Consequently, history of education will give us an account of the living growth of educational aims and methods of instruction, curricula and institutions, without which, they would appear static. History of education will therefore help us understand better; the aims, methods, pedagogy and existing structures and institutions.
2. Making comparisons within a historical context
The study of history of education can enable us compare the development of several different ideas or problems with one group of people or the same idea or problem with several groups of people. This approach is important in helping us formulate richer patterns and more comprehensive principles and provide a larger perspective than what is represented by a single culture. In addition, one is able to show the development of a particular theory and practice in a historical context, and explain the conditions out of which such a theory arose or the specific function that a practice was intended to serve. It will be possible for us to gauge accurately the relevance of a previous idea or practice to our own situation today once we understand both the present context and the original context from which the idea originated.
The examination of educational theories and practices in a historical context encourages a tendency to look critically at present theories and practices. The study of history of education is not meant to amass more data to answer old questions or bolster old beliefs, but to formulate new and better questions, generate new fruitful hypotheses or research questions and initiate or engage in unexplored lines of inquiry. The study will therefore help us use the power of contextual study to introduce innovation.
3. Develops our powers of thinking.
Historical study demands that we exercise all the essential aspects of intellectual activity. It excites curiosity and the spirit of inquiry, disciplines the faculty of reason among others. The historical study also helps us develop the attitudes of the mind, that is, skepticism and criticism thinking objectively, the power to assess or evaluate issues among others. For example the written documents on which we derive knowledge of the past must be used critically and skeptically since the contents were not only determined by fallible human beings but they also had to decide on what to write down and what to omit. The historical study of education can therefore help one give shape, form, organization, sequence and interrelationships and significance of ideas.
4. Exposure to other disciplines.
History of education is important because it forms the source upon which all other fields draw their material or content. Although history of education does not have a monopoly on the study of human affairs, it provides the raw record of what happened and sets the stage on which other forms of specialized inquiry must operate. In the same breath, it is impossible for historians of education to understand fully the nature of the phenomena being studied without being knowledgeable in the other social sciences such as sociology, psychology and anthropology to enrich the analysis of important educational ideas. These disciplines are useful to the historians of education since they have in recent past shed some important light on human motivation and human nature, so critical to historical studies.
marto answered the question on March 19, 2019 at 08:00