At the very least, the history and philosophy of education provide a context in which to understand and talk about contemporary educational issues. The history of American education, for instance, explains the evolution of public schools from small, independently owned and operated training grounds for tomorrow's leaders into overcrowded, centrally controlled institutions available at no cost to any person in the country. Philosophies of education serve to supplement historical knowledge with reflective, idealistic and often optimisitc visions of the what education should be. Every teacher must have a vision of what's she's working towards to keep her moving forward, while at the same time understanding the factual and historical circumstances. In short, the problems with the state of education in the present can be solved with knowledge of what education was like in the past and what it should be like in the future.

My knowledge of the history of education is concentrated around the evolution of schools in the United States. The schools established during colonial times were exclusively private, and if you could not pay to attend than you simply could not go. Schools did not become public or funded by the government until the 1850's, when education reformers like Horace Mann argued in favor of common schools for all. Mann and others believed everyone was entitled to the same content of education. From this evolved today's public schools, which I believe should be restructured into smaller schools with specific and unique purposes, much like a private school, but with the same amound of financial funds already collected for education purposes. In other words, you get the quality of private school at the cost of a public school.

Insofar as the way knowledge has influenced my teaching, I have let numerous teachers and thinkers inspire me. One of my all-time favorites is Levy Vygotsky, pictured on the right, a Russian psychologist and social construtivist who invented the idea of a zone of proximal development--that is, the difference between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can do with help. Without knowing these two fundamental pieces of information--the starting point and the end point--the teacher could not build a bridge.

Many of the other educational philosophers and psychologists that I like speak of education in architectural terms such as constructivists Jean Piaget and Jerome Bruner. More about my influences can be seen in my own Philosophy of Education.