TRADITIONAL PEDAGOGICAL MODEL: ORIGIN AND CHARACTERISTICS - CULTURE VOCABULARY - 2025

The traditional pedagogical model or traditional education is the predominant way of approaching education from the Industrial Revolution to the present. It stands out for being the one practiced in most colleges, institutes and universities. This pedagogical model is based on the idea that students should be passive receivers of information.

In this way, teachers must expose their knowledge to students, and they will acquire knowledge by being exposed to them. The learning process is seen within this model as something not very predictable. Therefore, teachers must be experts in the subject they are explaining.

The transmission of information is considered an art, so each teacher has their own approach and way of treating students. One of the reasons for the success of the traditional model of education is that it is a very simple way of educating to implement; This is why it has expanded so much.

When a teacher can teach a large number of students at the same time, it is easier to standardize the knowledge they acquire in the formal education system.

History and authors of the traditional pedagogical model

High Middle Ages

The traditional pedagogical model has its origins in the schools of the High Middle Ages. Most schools at this time were founded on a religious basis, and their main objective was to train monks.

Most modern universities also have Christian traditions. For example, the University of Paris was originally religious, although it was later secularized.

Century XVIII

Due to these religious origins, the way of educating did not change practically anything for several centuries. However, in the 18th century the scientist and educator John Amos created an educational reform that spread rapidly throughout Europe.

The main result of this reform was a greater interest of governments in the education of their citizens.

In 1770, the first chair of pedagogy in history was created at the University of Halle (Germany). This was due to an attempt to unify teaching methods and universalize them.

Some important authors of this period were Johan Heinrich Pestalozzi and Joseph Lancaster.

Industrial Revolution

The modern university model arose from the hand of Wilhem von Humboldt, who had a great influence on the founding of the University of Berlin. This model was later standardized.

During the time of the Industrial Revolution, governments set themselves the goal of creating universal education in such a way that "better soldiers and more obedient citizens" would be produced.

By the end of the 19th century, the traditional education system had been standardized and the majority of the population had been educated in subjects such as reading, mathematics and writing.

Characteristics of traditional education

The traditional pedagogical model is also known as the "transmission model" or the "transmission-reception model."

This is so because within this approach, education is understood as the direct transmission of knowledge by the teacher. Still, the student is the focus of this teaching method.

The theorists of this educational model thought that students are a "blank slate."

That is, students are simply passive receivers of teaching, and the teacher's role is to shape their knowledge and ideas by exposing what they know.

The most important characteristics of this educational model are the following: the relationship between the teacher and the students, the importance of memory in learning and the effort as the main technique to acquire knowledge.

Relationship between teacher and students

In the traditional pedagogical model, the teacher must be an expert in his field, so that students have the best chance of understanding and memorizing the knowledge.

In addition, the teacher has to be an expert transmitting the information, something that in this model is practically considered an art.

Within the traditional pedagogical model, two main approaches can be found. Although at first glance these approaches seem very similar, they present some differences:

The first is an encyclopedic approach. The teacher in this model has great knowledge about the subject to be taught, in such a way that teaching is nothing more than the direct transmission of this knowledge.

The greatest risk of this model is that the teacher is not able to adequately transmit their knowledge.

The second model is the comprehensive one. In this model, instead of transmitting information in the form of pure data, the teacher tries to teach the internal logic of his knowledge.

In this way, students learn about the subject in a slightly more active way, using logic apart from memory.

As can be seen, in both approaches within the traditional pedagogical model, the most important element is the relationship established between the teacher and the student.

In this sense, the role of the teacher is to put their knowledge and experiences at the service of their students, so that they can come to understand them in the best way. The main way in which the teacher communicates with his students is through speech.

Although in modern environments teachers can support their presentations with audiovisual material, such as images or slides, the bulk of the information is transmitted orally.

Therefore, this model is not entirely effective for people who learn best through senses other than hearing. However, it has the advantage that a single teacher is able to transmit his knowledge to a very large number of students.

Due mainly to this last advantage, the traditional pedagogical model continues to be the predominant one in the majority of educational centers in the world.

Importance of memory in learning

Unlike other more modern educational models, the main method that students are expected to use to learn is memory.

Teachers are responsible for transmitting the so-called "raw data": concepts and ideas that are mostly unrelated, and that students must memorize through repetition.

This is especially true of the first type of transmission model, the encyclopedic approach.

In the comprehensive approach, students can also rely on their own logical processes, although memory remains their main tool.

The main advantage of this memory-based learning is that many different subjects can be viewed very quickly.

On the contrary, in other educational models based on discovery learning, each topic must be developed by the students, so the learning time is much longer.

Furthermore, the effort required by teachers is less due to the use of memory as the main tool.

Their only mission is to convey the information in the best possible way, unlike in other educational models, in which they have to guide students to create their own knowledge.

However, because human memory is not particularly well suited to memorizing raw data, this type of learning can be very difficult for some students.

For a long time it was believed that there were people who did not have the sufficient capacity to learn due to this problem. Fortunately, in recent years, models have been developed to solve this.

Today it is known that the vast majority of people can learn adequately by using a teaching model that is consistent with their own abilities.

Another problem with relying solely on memory is the total lack of innovation in the educational process.

Students must only memorize the knowledge that is transmitted to them, so creativity is totally excluded from the process.

Effort as the main technique for acquiring knowledge

The last of the main characteristics of the traditional pedagogical model is the focus that is placed on effort as the most important learning technique.

Students are expected to memorize it through repetition and study after receiving the knowledge from the teacher until they are able to recall it without problems.

For this reason, this model greatly enhances the importance of self-discipline; that is, the ability to carry out an unpleasant task to achieve a desired result in the future.

For this reason, proponents of this system say that it is very helpful in reinforcing the character of students.

To check whether students have made the effort required to memorize knowledge, most institutions that use this system take exams and other types of tests.

In theory, this would allow the teacher to help students who have failed to learn in a more personalized way.

However, in most cases this type of knowledge test does not achieve the desired effect.

For many students they become real sources of stress, and those who do not achieve good results tend to remain stuck and feel worse about themselves in the long term.

On the other hand, the existence of tests with numerical results can generate a great competition within the classroom.

This will be beneficial for the most competitive students, but very detrimental for those who are not so competitive. This fact has caused that the exams are being eliminated from more modern educational methods.

In addition, numerous studies have shown that human memory does not work especially well when it comes to memorizing data directly.

According to new theories of learning, it is much more helpful for students to generate their own knowledge through exploration and experimentation.

For all this, the traditional pedagogical method is considered ineffective for most situations. However, it is still the most useful in some specific contexts, such as learning laws or very specific data.

Advantages and disadvantages

Although the traditional pedagogical model is still the one used in most educational institutions in the world, in recent times alternatives more in line with the new discoveries about human learning and how it works have emerged.

In many ways, the traditional pedagogical model is out of date.

It was created during a time when there was little knowledge about how the learning process works, and it has been perpetuated over time despite the fact that it is amply proven that it is not especially useful.

However, like all models of learning, the traditional pedagogical method has its advantages and disadvantages. Here are some of the most important ones.

Advantage

- Allows a teacher to instruct many students at the same time, thus saving on educational resources.

- Teaches students the value of personal effort, since most of the learning must be done on their own.

- It is the most effective method to transmit pure data such as dates or laws.

- It is the way of teaching that most people are used to, so it does not require an adaptation process to start learning.

- Teachers should only be experts in their subject and not in learning processes, which makes their work easier.

- Students develop memory during the learning process.

Disadvantages

- It is a very inefficient way of acquiring knowledge, so it requires a much greater effort on the part of the students than normal.

- It generates a lot of frustration in most of the students.

- This way of learning is not closely related to the skills necessary to succeed in the real world.

- Fundamental aspects of learning such as curiosity, innovation or exploration are left out.

- Competition among students is encouraged, and the focus is placed on external validation through exams and numerical marks. This has been proven to have a very negative effect on students' self-esteem.

- Most of the knowledge acquired during the educational process is forgotten in a very short time by the students.

References

1. "History of education" in: Wikipedia. Retrieved on: February 7, 2018 from Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org.
2. "Traditional education" in: Wikipedia. Retrieved on: February 7, 2018 from Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org.
3. "Traditional and modern methods of teaching in kindergarten" in: McGraw Hill Education. Retrieved on: February 7, 2018 from McGraw Hill Education: mheducation.ca.
4. "Teaching models" in: Wikipedia. Retrieved on: February 7, 2018 from Wikipedia: es.wikipedia.org.
5. "Teaching methods" in: Teach. Retrieved on: February 7, 2018 from Teach: teach.com.