Cyclopedia of Education

From Studyplace

Monroe's Cyclopedia^[1] provided a useful compendium of pedagogical knowledge to educational scholars in the early 20th century. Paul Monroe, Professor of the History of Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, edited the Cyclopedia, assisted by thirteen departmental editors. The several hundred scholars who contributed to it were a Who's Who of the field, with several such as John Dewey putting great effort into numerous reflective articles.

StudyPlace contributors can draw from a selection of articles from A Cyclopedia. It was particularly strong in covering the basic concepts of pedagogy and the historical record of educational experience, especially in ancient, medieval, and modern Western history. In the context of StudyPlace, articles from the Cyclopedia can serve both as stubs and as models, for they were generally written for engaged educators to high standards by leading scholars of the time. In drafting new articles, contributors need to decide how much real advance in knowledge there has been in the past hundred years of scholarship. Does the current state of knowledge offer different, better educational concepts and a broader, deeper understanding of past and current efforts to educate? Or do current concepts and analyses of experience simply reiterate functional equivalents of the old through a different terminology and research apparatus? Pedagogical knowledge fails to be cumulative by jettisoning its past instead of building upon it.