Key Influences of Isaac Leon Kandel - Essay Example

Isaac Leon Kandel was an education professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College where he established comparative education and greatly opposed progressive educational philosophy (Null, 2007). The democratic education that Kandel advocated for has resulted in the current reconstruction of American education. Throughout his career, he got numerous honors which included an honorary doctorate from the University of Melbourne. Kandel made major contributions in the history of education, educational theory, and, notably, comparative and international education.

He traced secondary education history and mainly concentrated on developments that affected education during those days. According to Kandel, liberal education was the “key tradition” with secondary education in Europe and the U.S as well. Kandel assessed the effect of contemporary development, which included expanding the knowledge, emerging social and economic conditions shaped by the industrial revolution as well as the increasing acceptance of democratic standards, on the tradition of liberal education within secondary education.

He acknowledged the role of education in endorsing national welfare in addition to economic development and the importance of accomplishing the complete development of the person in spite of their social background. More importantly, he identified the probable conflict between providing education to everyone and selection for social and also economic roles as a key problem in secondary education (Null, 2007). In terms of comparative and international education, Kandel’s view of comparative education was inclusive and did not merely major in administrative, curricular, or instructional practices in certain nations.

For example, descriptions and compiling information regarding national costs per student expenses, enrollment figures as well rate of school droppings were necessary but were not adequate tasks to fully understand educational structures. Kandel ascertained that comparative education had numerous limitations which included using statistical measures of student accomplishment to establish educational purposes in addition to the standard of student performance. According to him, the sociopolitical setting has a bigger effect on school practice when compared to educational theories; comparative education studied different ways that certain countries handled educational problems with respect to their social, political, and also cultural traditions (Kandel, 1930).

According to Kandel (1930), comparative education was based on understanding the social and economic life of the culture being studied. Kandel believed that the key significance of comparative approach to educational problems lays in the identification of the causes that created these problems in education, in comparing the differences between the diverse educational systems and the reasons underlying the problems and, eventually trying to find solutions to these problems; in the long run, the effective solutions should be tested and if successful, they should be implemented.

Comparative education involved separating common principles from variegated national frameworks and this finally contributed to the development of educational philosophy; this means an educational philosophy not purely based on metaphysical and ethical cogitations, but also on practical experimental foundations. Furthermore, Kandel promoted international understanding of national educational frameworks through comparative study. For educational theory, Kandel greatly criticized Progressive education.

He was against the trend of child-centered Progressives to promote a "nothing fixed-in-advance" approach to curriculum, where education started and ended according to the interests and preferences of the student at a particular time. Kandel supported instilling “common understanding, common knowledge, common ideals, and common values" through liberal education (Kandel, 1933). Kandel who was an acknowledged essentialist, perceived his view as an established source of values to steer social behavior and not as prospective substantiation for the decree of social problems.

Moreover, Kandel advocated for the predominance of the liberal arts curriculum. As a result, the dedication of Kandel to traditional liberal arts education also partly contributed to the reform in education through changing social, economic, and also political values and circumstances. In conclusion, Kandel offered American educators a practical option to the progressive education that dominated educational theory within the 1930s and also 1940s. He tackled real past as well as present educational issues.

Through Kandel, we learn that there is a need to reconsider our efforts in improving liberal, comparative, in addition to teacher education (Null, 2007).