Read the text about Friedrich Froebel

Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852) was the founder of the kindergarten, or the children garden. He was largely self-educated, but studied for a few years at different European universities. From 1806 to 1810 he worked and studied with famous Swiss educational reformer Pestalozzi at Yverdon, Switzerland. He accepted certain aspects of Pestalozzi’s method. He wanted to improve the educational methods of teaching. He wanted the teacher to become an active instructor.

In 1837 Froebel founded the kindergarten in the city of Blankenburg. Its curriculum cultivated child’s self-development, self-activity, and socialisation. It stressed the social and emotional growth of a child. The kindergarten had prepared environment. The kindergarten teacher was to be a moral and cultural model. He provided educational materials (e.g. geometrical shapes) for young children to encourage education through play. Children learned songs, stories, and games. They were introduced to the customs, heroes, and ideas of the cultural heritage. He spent the rest of his life organising kindergartens.

Froebel influenced modern technique in pre-school education.

TERM 3

THE FACULTY OF PRIMARY SCHOOLING

THE FACULTY OF PRE-SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGY AND PEDAGOGICS

Higher Education

The American ideal of mass education for all is matched by an awareness that America also needs highly trained specialists. In higher education, therefore, and especially at the graduate schools (those following the first four years of college), the U.S. has an extremely competitive and highly selective system. This advanced university system has become widely imitated internationally, and it is also the one most sought after by foreign students. Of the 438,000 foreign students enrolled in institutions of higher education in the United States in the 1992/93 academic year, 44 percent were enrolled in graduate programs.

While the American education system might put off selecting students until much later than do other systems, it does nonetheless select. And it becomes increasingly selective the higher the level. Moreover, because each university generally sets its own admission standards, the best universities are also the most difficult to get into.

Some universities are very selective even at the undergraduate or beginning levels. In 1991, for example, some 13,500 individuals sought admission to Stanford University, a private university south of San Francisco. Because these individuals must pay a fee to even apply for admission, these were "serious" applications. Of that number, only 2,700 (20 percent) were admitted for the first year of study. It is interesting to note that the great majority of those who were accepted had attended public - not private -schools. Many state-supported universities also have fairly rigid admission requirements. The University of California at Berkeley, for example, admitted only 40 percent of all qualified applicants in 1991. For Harvard, the figure is 17.2 percent (1991). Admission to law or medical schools and other graduate programs has always been highly selective. It is true, as often stated, that children who wish someday to go to one of the better universities start working for this goal in elementary school.

Needless to say, those children who have attended better schools, or who come from families with better-educated parents, often have an advantage over those who don't. This remains a problem in the U.S., where equality of opportunity is a central cultural goal. Not surprisingly, the members of racial minorities are the most deprived in this respect - with the notable exception of the Asian-Americans.

In 1990, for instance, 23 percent of all Americans 25 years and older had completed four years of college or more. However, the figure for Blacks was 12 percent and for Hispanics 10 percent. Compared with the figures from 1970, when the national average was only 10.7 percent (with 11.3 percent for whites, 4.4 percent for Blacks, and 7.6 percent for students of Hispanic origin), this does reveal a considerable improvement within two decades. The number of students who fail to complete high school, too, is much larger among minority groups. The national average of all 14 to 24-year-olds who did not graduate from high school was 10.5 percent in 1991. For white students it was 10.5 percent, for Blacks 11.3 percent, and for Hispanics the figure was as much as 29.5 percent. Yet, it is still a fact today, as the ВВС commentator Alistair Cooke pointed out in 1972, that "a Black boy has a better chance of going to college here than practically any boy in Western Europe." Today it would also be true of a Black girl.

The educational level is still relatively lower for women than for men. While 24.5 percent of male Americans had four years of college or more in 1989, only 18 percent of women had. But as indicated in the table above, there have been some recent improvements.

A large number of different programs aimed at improving educational opportunities among minority groups exist at all levels - local, state, and federal. They have met with some, even if moderate, success. These programs along with the figures above point to one aspect, which is critical to understanding American education (and, for that matter, American society in general). Americans could conclude that they have been more successful than most other nations in including large proportions of their minorities at all levels of education. And they could conclude that enormous progress has been made in the past decades. But, in fact, few Americans do either. Rather, they concentrate on the fact that within the United States, minorities are still not equally represented in the number of high school graduates, or the numbers of engineers, doctors, lawyers, and university professors.