Teachers’ opinions on the philosophical foundations of the elementary teaching curriculums

Abstract

Education is a system that hands down cultural values and accumulatedknowledge of societies to the next generations and that grows citizens in line withthe structure of the society. In this system, such issues as purpose of education, howto educate individuals, what to teach and why, and upon which values the educationsystem should be built are associated with the philosophy which form the basis ofthe education. Each society, therefore, designs their teaching curriculums accordingto their wishes as to “what kind of individuals societies grow”, and theseprogrammes are updated in line with the information and technologicaldevelopments as well as societal regulations. Further, there have also been severaleducational reforms in Turkey, and the philosophy of education has been clearlydefined. However, the most important role in transmitting the educationalphilosophy of teaching curriculums to the next generations belongs to teachers whoconduct activities through the curriculum with students. In this sense, the corepurpose of this paper was to determine elementary school teachers’ opinions on thephilosophical foundations of the teaching curriculums. Further, this study was toexamine if there were statistically differences inb terms of the teachers’ sociodemographic characteristics such as gender, age, work experience, workplace, andeducational background. A descriptive survey model was used in this study. Thedata were collected through “the Educational Philosophy Scale”, which includes sucheducational philosophies as perennialism, essentialism, progressivism, andreconstructionism. A total of 239 teachers from different branches teach in primaryand elementary schools affiliated to Ministry of Education in Bayburt Province ofTurkey were recruited in this study. The data were analyzed via descriptivestatistics, including frequency, percentage mean, t-test and ANOVA. The resultsshow that teachers have positive opinions on such educational philosophies asprogressivism and reconsructionism. There were also statistically meaningfuldifferences in terms of gender and age variables