History Of ECE & Theories

Providing the care, guidance, and education for children aged from zero to eight years old outside the home, early childhood education is the basic foundation for young children to be ready to learn, ready to build up personality, and ready to gain knowledge and experiences of life and environments. Early childhood curriculum today have become the most important education in children’s life and educating young children within the family have started for many years before. It is the theories and facets that have been evolving.

People often questioned which theories or methods are more appropriate and applicable to children’s development. Well, there are several theorists that are well known to people and their theories and methods are commonly used by early childhood educators.

According to the Community Playthings, the philosophical foundations of early childhood education were provided by John Amos Comenius, John Locke, and Jean Jacques Rousseau. Its curriculums and methodology were created by Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Friedrich Wilhelm Froebel, Maria Montessori, and Rudolf Steiner. Most recently, the theories that have been used in several countries are The Montessori Method, Jean Piaget’s Cognitive Theory, Reggio Emilia Approach, and Lev Vygotsky’s Theory. In here, we will see about Montessori Method and Piaget’s Cognitive Theory.

The Montessori Method

Montessori Method was founded by Maria Montessori, the woman in Italy that earned a medical degree and became the country’s first woman doctor. Maria Montessori (1870-1952) began her work with children during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After her graduation, she became interested toward developmentally disabled children. She felt that they were not taught properly and schools should be established for these children.

Due to her desire to put her knowledge and work into practices, in 1907 Maria Montessori opened the ‘Children’s House’ in Rome for young children with working mothers. Just as Froebel, Montessori focused on fulfilling the needs of the child to their fullest potential and placed them as the centre of learning. Using her experiences with developmentally challenged children, she believes that with the right educational approaches, all children are allowed to be free to explore, play with their environment, learn, and grow.

In her center, she also emphasized the relationship between motor skills and sensory function and children’s physical and mental abilities developments. To advocate these abilities, she creates self-paced activities where some materials were designed to prepare children’s sense of formalized and practical life skills. Examples like getting dress, buttoning shirts, pouring milk, writing, and reading.

In addition, Montessori Method is requiring teachers to prepare the environment then leave the children to use the materials without interference and any help from other children happens spontaneously. Furniture for the classroom were designed in child-size and placed where children are able to reach them. The purposes for these kinds of approaches were meant to make children to develop self-direction and concentration.

Piaget’s Cognitive Theory

Jean Piaget, born in 1896 had a strong influence in early childhood curricula and practices. He discovered that children of different ages had their own system of logic or ways of conceptualizing the world. He believes that intelligence develops over time and considered children are like scientist, always experimenting and explore the world with their own thinking in constructing their knowledge.

Using children’s age, after several experiments, observations and interviews, he comes up with a theory of four stages of cognitive in children’s developments. In Table 1.0, stage four applies to older children and adults.

  

Age	Stage	Characteristic	Children’s Learning
0 – 24 months	Sensorimotor	Infant constructs an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences with physical actions.	Object Permanence – objects continue to exist even when out of sight.
2 – 7 years	Preoperational	Words and images reflect increase symbolic thinking and go beyond the connection of sensory information and physical action. Egocentrism is present.	Three mountain task.
7 – 11 years	Concrete Operational	Child can now reason logically about concrete events and classify objects into different sets.	Conservation - altering substance’s appearance does not change its basic properties.
11 – adulthood	Formal Operational	Child reasons in more abstract, idealistic and logical ways. Adolescents begin to think more as a scientist thinks.	Devising plans to solve problems and systematically testing solutions.

                              Table 1.0 Piaget’s Stages of Development