Category: Education Essay Examples
See our collection of education essay examples. These example essays are to help you understanding how to write an essay on education essay topics. Modern education is an interdisciplinary field, including disciplines (to name just a few) such as history and sociology, as well as topical areas such as globalization and technology. Education essay examples below include essays on many disciplinary areas such as curriculum in education, educational policy and law, theories of education, the history of education, and the philosophy of education.
Referred to as the French Socrates, Renaissance humanist thinker Michel de Montaigne ranks among the more influential philosophers in the Western world. His writings, called essays, are central contributions to philosophy and education. Born February 28, 1533, he was given a classical education and then studied law. He …
Maria Montessori was a physician, an educational reformer, and an advocate for children and peace. She is best known for designing the educational system known as the Montessori Method, which flourishes today in more than 8,000 schools on five continents. The first Montessori School, known as the Casa …
John Henry Newman was a priest, a theologian, and an educator. First an Anglican priest and eventually a Roman Catholic cardinal, Newman wrote on the relationship between faith and reason, and his The Idea of a University continues to be an important work on higher education. Newman was …
Sonia Nieto’s research has focused on the education of culturally and linguistically diverse students, multicultural education, bilingual education, teacher education, educational equity, and curriculum reform. A graduate of the New York City public schools, she began her career as a fourth-grade teacher in the Northeast’s first completely bilingual …
Nel Noddings is among the leading philosophers of education in the United States. At a practical level, and in books such as The Challenge to Care in Schools, she argues that schools need to become more caring places. Noddings began her career as a sixth-grade teacher and then …
John Uzo Ogbu was an anthropology professor known for his theories on race and intelligence and their relationship to academic and economic achievement. Born in the village of Umudomi in the Onicha Government Area of Nigeria, he taught at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1970 until his …
José Ortega y Gasset was a Spanish professor, philosopher, publisher, editor, essayist, and political leader. A passionate, uncompromising, and complex thinker, he was the most significant person to come from Spain in the first half of the twentieth century. Ortega y Gasset was a prolific writer; his work …
Robert Owen, a wealthy cotton manufacturer turned Utopian visionary, had an important influence on schooling in early nineteenth-century Britain. Convinced that character was determined by the social environment, he instituted disciplinary practices designed to regulate habits and improve industrial efficiency. His success in shaping behavior convinced him that …
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody was an American transcendentalist, lecturer in the Concord School of Philosophy, and the leader of the campaign to establish kindergartens in the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century. Committed to reform and highly erudite, Peabody wrote essays on social and educational …
Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi was a Christian humanist concerned about the debilitating effects of the Industrial Revolution on the traditional family. He attempted to use the school as a tool for self-fulfillment but, politically astute, sought to balance freedom with the role of the citizen. His work was influenced …
Jean Piaget was a Swiss-born biologist, psychologist, and philosopher who developed the theory of cognitive development for children. Piaget was the codirector of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute in Geneva, Switzerland; director of the International Office of Education; and on staff at the Universities of Paris and Geneva. Piaget’s …
The first Superintendent of Public Instruction in the state of Michigan, the Reverend John Davis Pierce was among the vanguard of educationalists in nineteenth century America. Pierce combined his unique educational vision with Victor Cousin’s writings on the Prussian system of public education to create a comprehensive system …
William F. Pinar has been the key scholar to transform much of the scholarship in curriculum studies from issues of design and development to a field focused on understanding through the use of phenomenology and existentialism. Since the publication of his seminal work, Curriculum Theorizing: The Reconceptualists in …
Plato was a thinker in ancient Greece who often wrote in a dialogue format that featured his own teacher, the philosopher Socrates. Plato’s legacy, which includes ideas about education and knowledge, has influenced Western thought from his lifetime to the present. Plato was born into a patrician, Athenian …
Neil Postman was a teacher, a scholar, a journal editor, a general semanticist, a social and cultural critic, a time-binder, a media ecologist, and a public intellectual. Time-binding, which Postman both studied and practiced, refers to humanity’s ability to connect to the past, present, and future via language, …
Caroline Pratt built an educational philosophy on observations of children and is remembered as a visionary in the education of young children and the inventor of unit blocks. Born and raised in Fayetteville, New York, Pratt began her career in education at seventeen, teaching in a one-room rural …
Diane Ravitch is a historian of education and educational reformer who has written extensively on all aspects of American culture that relate to education. She was born the third of eight children in Houston, Texas, where she attended public elementary and secondary school. She completed her BA degree …
Joseph Mayer Rice, born in Philadelphia, was a pediatrician and school reformer of the 1890s who wrote a series of articles on teaching methods used in urban school systems. Educational historians describe him as a pioneer of educational measurement and the progressive movement in education. Others have argued …
Julia Richman was a nationally recognized nineteenth-century educator and reformer in the New York City school system, the first female and first Jew to be appointed a district superintendent in the city’s schools. Richman’s reform efforts focused on the Americanization of immigrant children, as she believed strongly in …
Carl R. Rogers was an American psychologist, psychotherapist, and the acknowledged father of humanist psychology, which he named both client centered and later person-centered psychotherapy. Rogers developed his theories of psychotherapy as a professor at a series of universities that included Ohio State, the University of Chicago, and …
