Traditional education, also known as back-to-basics, conventional education or customary education, refers to long-established customs that society has traditionally used in schools. Some forms of

education reform Education reform is the name given to the goal of changing public education. The meaning and education methods have changed through debates over what content or experiences result in an educated individual or an educated society. Historically, t ...

promote the adoption of

progressive education Progressive education, or protractivism, is a pedagogical movement that began in the late 19th century and has persisted in various forms to the present. In Europe, progressive education took the form of the New Education Movement. The term ''p ...

practices, and a more holistic approach which focuses on individual students' needs; academics, mental health, and social-emotional learning. In the eyes of reformers, traditional teacher-centered methods focused on rote learning and memorization must be abandoned in favor of student centered and task-based approaches to learning. Depending on the context, the opposite of ''traditional education'' may be progressive education, modern education (the education approaches based on

developmental psychology Developmental psychology is the scientific study of how and why humans grow, change, and adapt across the course of their lives. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to include adolescence, adult developme ...

), or

alternative education Alternative education encompasses many pedagogical approaches differing from mainstream pedagogy. Such alternative learning environments may be found within state, charter, and independent schools as well as home-based learning environments. ...

Purposes

The primary purpose of traditional education is to continue passing on those skills, facts, and standards of moral and social conduct that adults consider to be necessary for the next generation's material advancement. As beneficiaries of this plan, which educational progressivist

John Dewey John Dewey (; October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the fi ...

described as being "imposed from above and from outside", the students are expected to docilely and obediently receive and believe these fixed answers. Teachers are the instruments by which this knowledge is communicated and these standards of behavior are enforced. Historically, the primary educational technique of traditional education was simple oral recitation: In a typical approach, students spent some of their time sitting quietly at their places and listening to one student after another recite his or her lesson, until each had been called upon. The teacher's primary activity during such sessions was assigning and listening to these recitations; students studied and memorized the assignments at home. A test or

oral examination The oral exam (also oral test or '; ' in German-speaking nations) is a practice in many schools and disciplines in which an examiner poses questions to the student in spoken form. The student has to answer the question in such a way as to demonst ...

might be given at the end of a unit, and the process, which was called "assignment–study–recitation–test", was repeated. There was also a reliance on rote memorization (memorization with no effort at understanding the meaning). It is believed that the use of recitation, rote memorization, and unrelated assignments is inefficient and an extremely inefficient use of students' and teachers' time. This traditional approach also insisted that all students be taught the same materials at the same point; students that did not learn quickly enough failed, rather than being allowed to succeed at their natural speeds. This approach, which had been imported from Europe, dominated American education until the end of the 19th century, when the education reform movement imported progressive education techniques from Europe. Traditional education is associated with much stronger elements of coercion than seems acceptable now in most cultures.It has sometimes included: the use of corporal punishment to maintain classroom discipline or punish errors; inculcating the dominant religion and language; separating students according to gender, race, and

social class A social class is a grouping of people into a set of hierarchical social categories, the most common being the upper, middle and lower classes. Membership in a social class can for example be dependent on education, wealth, occupation, inc ...

, as well as teaching different subjects to girls and boys. In terms of curriculum there was and still is a high level of attention paid to time honored academic knowledge.

Current status

In the present, it varies enormously from culture to culture, but still tends to be characterized by a much higher level of coercion than

. Traditional schooling in Britain and its possessions and former colonies tends to follow the English Public School style of strictly enforced uniforms and a militaristic style of discipline. This can be contrasted with South African, US and Australian schools, which can have a much higher tolerance for spontaneous student-to-teacher communication.

Instruction centre

Marking

Subject areas

Notes