Julian Vasquez Heilig, Provost at Western Michigan University and founding board member of the Network for Public Education , here reflects on his personal connection to a comprehensive new review of prominent thinkers in education—of which he is one!
He begins:
The upcoming Palgrave Handbook of Educational Thinkers evokes a deep sense of connection with the lineage of educators and thinkers who have sculpted the contours of educational discourse and practice from antiquity onward. The roster of thinkers, whose work spans the spectrum of educational thought and action, represents a mosaic of visions and voices that have collectively pushed the boundaries of what education can and should be…
Then the Table of Contents:
The list of these thinkers, as featured in the handbook, reads as a roll call of transformative influence and enduring legacy:
Section I. Antiquity to 1200
1. Peter Abélard
2. Aristotle
3. Buddha
4. Cicero
5. Confucius
6. Horace
7. Isocrates
8. Plato
9. Plutarch
10. Pythagoras
11. Seneca
12. Socrates
13. St. Augustine
14. Thucydides
15. Virgil
16. Hipparchia
17. Akka Mahadevi
18. Gargi Vachaknavi
19. Hypatia
20. Hildegarde of Bingen
Section II. 1200 – 1900
1. Rodolphus Agricola
2. Louisa May Alcott
3. Thomas Aquinas
4. Matthew Arnold
5. Robert Ascham
6. Francis Bacon
7. Louis Braille
8. John Calvin
9. John Amos Comenius
10. Gabriel Compayre
11. Charles Darwin
12. Eugenio Maria De Hostos
13. Michel de Montaigne
14. Charles Dickens
15. Thomas Elyot
16. Ralph Waldo Emerson
17. Desiderius Erasmus
18. Johann Gotlieb Fichte
19. August Herman Francke
20. Benjamin Franklin
21. Valentin Friedland
22. Fredric Froebel
23. Nikolai Frederick Grundtvig
24. Francois Guizot
25. Valentin Hauy
26. Georg Wilhelm
27. Johann Friedrick Herbart
28. Thomas Jefferson
29. Immanuel Kant
30. Arthur F. Leah
31. John Locke
32. Ignatius Loyola
33. Martin Luther 34. Horace Mann
35. Phillip Melanchthon
36. John Stuart Mill
37. Richard Mulcaster
38. John Henry Newman
39. Friedrich Nietzsche
40. Robert Owen
41. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi
42. Wolfgang Ratke
43. Charles Rollin
44. Jean Jacques Rousseau
45. John Ruskin
46. Egerton Ryerson
47. Herbert Spencer 48. Johannes Strum
49. Juan Luis Vives
50. Wilhelm Von Humboldt
51. John Wesley
52. Mary Wollstonecraft
Section III. 1900 – 1970
1. Jane Addams
2. Hannah Arendt
3. Margaret Bancroft
4. Alfred Binet
5. Benjamin Bloom
6. Harry Broudy
7. Jerome Bruner
8. Martin Buber
9. Cyril Lodovic Burt
10. Noam Chomsky
11. Lawrence A Cremin
12. John Dewey
13. Donalda Dickie
14. WEB Dubois
15. Emile Durkheim
16. M.K. Gandhi
17. Antonio Gramsci
18. Kurt Hahn
19. Martin Heidigger
20. Susan Isaacs
21. Emile Jaques-Dalcroze
22. Anna Julia Haywood Cooper 23. Bel Kaufman
24. 22. Helen Keller
25. Clark Kerr
26. Melanie Klein
27. Janusz Korczak
28. Charlotte Mason
29. Maria Montessori
30. A.S. Neill
31. Michael Oakeshott
32. Jean Piaget
33. Carl Rogers
34. Bertrand Russell
35. Edward Said
36. Joseph Schwab
37. BF Skinner.
38. Rudolf Steiner
39. Rabindranath Tagore
40. Ralph Winifrid Tyler
41. Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky
42. Booker T. Washington
43. Max Weber
43. Simone Weil
44. Ludwig Wittgensten
45. Jose Ortega Y Gasset
46. Howard Zinn
Section IV. 1970 – Current
1. Cami Anderson
2. Josh Angrist
3. Michael W. Apple
4. James A. Banks
5. David C. Berliner
6. Jo Boaler
7. Derek Curtis Bok
8. Pierre Bordieux
9. Geoffrey Canada
10. Raj Chetty
11. David Coleman
12. David Cooperrider
13. Linda Darling-Hammond
14. Edward De Bono
15. Jeff Duncan-Andrade
16. Angela Duckworth
17. Nell K. Duke
18. Greg J. Duncan
19. Carol Dweck
20. Richard Elmore
21. Michel Foucaut
22. Paulo Freire
23. Howard Gardner
24. Henry Giroux
25. Gene V. Glass
26. John I. Goodlad
27. Bryan Goodwin
28. Maxine Greene
29. Erin Gruewell
30. Eric Hanushek
31. Shaun R. Harper
32. Clara Hemphill
33. Frederick Hess
34. John Holt
35. bell hooks
36. Ivan Illich
37. Baruti Kafele
38. Salman Kahn
39. Lawrence Kohlberg
40. Gloria Ladson-Billings
41. Zeus Leonardo
42. Dennis Littky
43. Bettina Love
44. Angela Maiers
45. Jane Roland Martin
46. Robert J. Marzano
47. Deborah Meier
48. Rich Milner
49. Sugata Mitra
50. Michael Grahame Moore
51. Richard J. Murnane
52. Nel Noddings
53. Pedro Noguera
54. Martha Nussbaum
55. Julius Nyrere
56. Gary Orfield
57. R.S. Peters
58. Robert C. Pianta
59. Diane Ravitch
60. Sean F. Reardon
61. Joeseph Renzulli
62. Sir Ken Robinson
63. Pasi Sahlberg
64. Seymour B. Sarason
65. Lee S. Schulman
66. Jack Pl Shonkoff
67. Theodore Sizer
68. Robert E. Slavin
69. Catherine Snow
70. William G. Tierney
71. Carol A. Tomlinson
72. Beverly Tatum
73. Virginia Uribe
74. Paul Wehman
75. Daniel Willingham
76. Patrick J. Wolf
77. Yong Zhao
78. Estela Bensimon
79. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot
80. Adrianna Caesar
81. Julian Vasquez Heilig
Each name on this list represents a chapter in the ongoing story of educational evolution—a story marked by challenges, innovations, and insights that have, in their own unique ways, reshaped the landscape of learning and teaching.
He then goes on to discuss his personal relationship with several of those on the list, including David Berliner, Pierre Bourdieu, Linda Darling Hammond, Shaun R. Harper, Frederick Hess, bell hooks, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Bettina love, Pedro Noguera, Gary Orfield, me, and Sean Reardon.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
You have to feel good when your name appears with Plato, John o, and Hildegard Von Bingen. Congratulations, Diane.
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But not with David Coleman. David not only created Common Core, he was treasurer of Michelle Rhee’s Students First. He sold his assessment company to McGraw Hill for millions. He is a successful entrepreneur.
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A list that has both Lev Vygotsky and David Coleman is illegitimate.
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IKR? It’s like one containing Ed Witten and Homer Simpson.
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HAHAHAHA!!!
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And, Good God, Chetty!!! [shakes head]
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yes, my understanding is that Chetty’s contributions to education are more harmful then constructive. Am I under the wrong impression? I thought his central contribution was extrapolating findings from agricultural studies to legitimize test and punish/reward schemes?
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The agricultural studies were done not by Raj Chetty but by William Sanders. He began in agricultural studies, then transferred his method to teachers and test scores.
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Steve, you are right!
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What a wonderful list of interesting, great thinkers, even if some of us may not agree with a couple on the list!
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James Comer. Margaret Wheatley. Carter G. Woodson. R. Buckminster Fuller. Peter Senge. Thomas Popkewitz.
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Wittgenstein was dismissed from his teaching post in Trattenbach, in rural Austria, for beating his students severely. Yeah, he belongs in a list of people who revolutionized education. OK, he did tell people not simply to think about things but actually to go and look and see. Wow. What an insight.
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Here’s to the hundreds of thousands of teachers who have made discoveries and applied them to the benefit of their students and taught them to other teachers who never appeared on a list of great contributors to education.
BTW, I created what I believe to be the first Critical Thinking strand in an American textbook series that carried this name. The text I did this for became enormously successful, and the following year, every textbook program in America, just about, had a Critical Thinking strand, and every educational conference had workshops on Critical Thinking. That same series, which sold so well, popularized the Writing Process approach to teaching writing. Then, a few years later, I created what I believe to be the first model-papers-and-rubrics assessment program for a grammar and composition program in this country. Again, the textbook series I created this for was a best-seller, and this method for grading compositions became the default. I and a few people working with me wrote a program that sold extraordinarily well and introduced hundreds of thousands of English teachers to the concept of Bellwork.
Over the years, I edited a great many literature programs, and I often introduced to these selections that became STANDARD in all the major lit programs–that became PART OF THE CANON. For example, I was the first to put “A Tree Telling of Orpheus,” that great poem by Denise Levertov, in a K-12 literature program.
I don’t see my name on this list, though these contributions surely made enormous changes in how English was taught in America. Why? Almost all this work was done anonymously, for pay, under contract with educational publishers.
Here’s to the anonymous developers!
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Bob, you remind us of all those unsung worker bees that create, contribute and work often behind the scenes. I wish we had more people dedicated to writing textbooks today. Too many schools are operating without text or books in general, and students are being shortchanged and at a loss without them. The tech moguls have convinced many school districts to go “paperless.” It is a tremendous mistake IMO. I believe students can learn more effectively by having a text to read, reread and reconsider. Computers are great tools, but no replacement for books, texts and teachers.
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I have led and worked with many extraordinarily effective older teachers, true professionals. The micromanagement of teaching and reliance on Common Cored Curricula has led to a massive deprofessionalization of teaching. It’s criminal. The old days of department heads having actual power and teachers teaching teachers are, sadly, almost gone. I wish I were up to writing the definitive book about the disaster that Common [sic] Core [sic] has been–about how destructive it has been, but alas, no. There are other things I want to do with the time that remains to me.
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cx: have led
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Retired and Bob: I was talking to a parent of one my grandchildren’s friends who wondered about my reference to my messy bookshelves. He said something like this: Well, you don’t need books any more. If you want to know something, you can just look it up on Google.
I was eons aware of what he was missing, and a firehose was let loose in my mind, but I was at a loss for words that might help him “get it.” I had to wonder where he was educated, so to speak, but distractions took the conversation another way.
I do hope that’s not as generalizable a situation as I think it might be. CBK
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Alas, one of my daughters said as much to me recently.
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1970 – Current…
Larry Cuban
Lisa Delpit
Alfie Kohn
Vanessa Rodriguez
Peter Senge
W. Edwards Deming
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GREAT LIST!!!!
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Juran, Shewart, Deming–all the great pioneers of Quality Control–were all about teaching people how to learn and how to teach. Any COMPETENT list of great educational thinkers would include them. Clearly, whoever made this list a) wanted to impress by putting in names of famous ancients and b) did not do his or her homework (homework that would have to be crowd sourced and THEN vetted by a committee of learned educators).
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Juran, of course. I forget. Shewart comes with Deming.
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I own a copy of that vast compendium of Quality Control technique Juran’s Quality Handbook–an essential work for teaching me what I was doing when I worked as a business consultant. An endlessly fascinating work!
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In general, these lists annoy TF out of me. They are like the comments made by teenagers about this guy or that guy being “the greatest guitarist ever.” The fact is that most famous rock and roll guitarists know a few chords and a couple of scales (major and minor Pentatonic) and doodle on these for their entire careers. Many of them can’t even read music. THROW A STICK AT ANY GUITAR PROGRAM IN THE WORLD AT ANY CONSERVATORY AND YOU WILL HIT A KID WHO CAN PLAY VASTLY BETTER THAN DO THESE PEOPLE–can read music, can play in a wide variety of styles, and run rings around the rock idols and blow them off the stage.
And Virgil? WTF is Virgil’s great contribution to education? Yes, he wrote some didactic stuff, but he didn’t, to my knowledge, make ANY major contribution to educational theory or practice. And Abelard? His warmed-over Sophist practice of having kids argue both sides? That’s some sort of major contribution?
I am pleased to see Diane on it. And several others. But Virgil? Seriously? And people like Skinner and Chetty, who have done such damage? And not E. D. Hirsch, Jr.?
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Seriously, this CHILD is a far, far more accomplished guitarist than Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page ever thought about being, but hardly anyone knows her:
Catalina Pires – Guajiras de Lucía (Paco de Lucía) (youtube.com)
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Or imagine one of these inept, barely competent rock guitarists trying to do this:
Clair de lune – Debussy (guitare) (youtube.com)
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Well, at 900 dollars a pop, this book will be bought, perhaps, by the reference departments of a few libraries, and it will provide the future with a distortion, as such lists of “the greatest” inevitably do.
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That David Coleman is on this list after the enormous destruction that he has wrought in K-12 education is unconscionable, disgusting, horrifying. It’s like putting John Wayne Gacy on a list of great childcare providers.
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The Common [sic] Core [sic] was doubtless well-intentioned, but it led to a vast devolution of ELA instruction in the United States, which became all about exercises on particular vague, content-free “standards” in preparation for the all-important tests, as well as to debilitating deemphasis on other essential parts of the total K-12 school curriculum. An utter disaster. And one that continues in the form of state “standards” that are basically Common [sic] Core [sic] warmed over.
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To his credit, this is not what Coleman meant to do. But he simply did not recognize what he was doing. He was so ignorant of U.S. education that he made a call for a great return to teaching canonical, substantive texts, totally unaware that almost every English program in every school in the United States was using a literature program that consisted of anthologies of canonical, substantive texts. And he was so unaware that he called for the teaching in English classes of foundational texts of American history when those same literature texts, used in every school, all had those foundational texts already in them. And he was so unaware that he called for the teaching of these American history texts in Grades 11 and 12, without understanding that in almost every high school in America, Grade 11 was devoted to American literature and Grade 12 to British literature. In other words, he had no idea what he was doing. And he certainly did not foresee what would happen based on his almost entirely content-free national list, even though THIS WAS INEVITABLE. I wrote about that very inevitability when the accursed puerile CCSS bullet list first appeared.
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If Coleman had actually bothered to talk to any English teachers, who would have found that all across the country, 11th-grade English teachers were doing American lit and were already teaching such foundational documents as Common Sense, the Declaration, the Constitution, selections the Federalist Papers, and so on AND coordinating their instruction with their colleagues who were teaching 11th-grade American History. But Coleman made this call for teaching foundational documents AS THOUGH IT WEREN”T BEING DONE, and oligarchs, as ignorant of U.S. educational practice as Coleman himself, ate it up. Oh yeah. SO IMPORTANT TO MAKE THIS CHANGE.
It’s as though someone 20 years ago suggested that we start using cars instead of horses and buggies. Clueless.
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The thing that shocks me is that this joker (and Gates along with him) wasn’t laughed off the educational stage when Gates first appointed him the Decider for the Rest of Us. That he wasn’t shows the power of clueless oligarchs over our practice. It’s obscene. It needs to stop. My suggestion: whatever Gates suggests with regard to education, run, run, run as fast as you can in the opposite direction.
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What was Heidegger’s great contribution to the theory and practice of education? Fire all the Jews? Egads.
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The Tractatus Comico-Philosophicus: Martin Heidegger | Bob Shepherd | Praxis (wordpress.com)
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There are people on this list who actually did make major contributions to the theory and practice of teaching. Erasmus. Mann. Montessori. But a great many of them are just famous thinkers whose ideas someone else might extrapolate from to make some weird suggestion about how or what to teach. St. Augustine and Nietzsche the great educational theorists? GIVE ME A BREAK. Including the names of such people in a list of greatest thinkers on education is simply pretentiousness.
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Vasquez Heilig belongs on any list of great education thinkers and should be called on to take Secretary Cardona’s place at the start of the president’s second term. Begin the process of rooting out Gates and DeVos’ corrupting influence by appointing Julian to head the U.S. Department of Education. Let him instruct the Department to close the revolving door to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Toss aside greed and let intellect lead.
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close the revolving door to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Amen to that!
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👍🏽
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Glad to see Lawrence Kolhberg on the list whose theories of moral development greatly influenced me since when I went to get my Master’s degree in the late 70’s, I was put into a special cohort studying moral education. Few people seem to remember him today.
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He did really important work, but the challenge to that work by Carol Gilligan is also important and instructive. You probably know her great book In a Different Voice.
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Also important in this area is the early work of Johnathan Haidt, before he went off the rails.
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John Calivin, of all freaking people, is on this list, but Malala Yousafzai isn’t?
Give. Me. a. Break
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Calvin
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No Fuller or Wilson???
I guess they were/are too iconoclastic, eh!
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The list has some dubious omissions and peculiar entries.
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As all such lists do, eh.
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It’s obvious that one can’t name all of the teachers in the world as they are the true thinkers. . . and doers of the daily chore of teaching and learning.
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I’ve read a LOT of Heidegger. The only two places I am aware of where he addresses education directly are in his speech “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” the required Inaugural Address that he gave when he was appointed Rector of the University of Frieberg and his speech to the Student Association of the University of Heidelberg. Heidegger was a member of the Nazi Party throughout the war. In the first of these speeches, in a hall festooned with Nazi flags and enlivened by singing of the Nazi anthem the ”Horst-Wessel-Leid,” Heidegger gave a speech in which he said work in a university is about theory but that theory must serve science and that science as about recovering the “essence” of the people, which was rooted in blood and soil, so that the university could produce leaders for the state who would realize the fated greatness of the nation. In other words, it was an embrace and articulation of the nationalist mysticism on which National Socialism was based and of the goals of that National Socialism–assertion of the dominance and will of the German people over inferior peoples. The second speech is all about the university as a place for producing soldiers and leaders for the state. In it, said writes, “We have the new Reich and the university that is to receive its tasks from the Reich’s will to existence.”
Yeah. Let’s have this guy on a list of great contributors to educational theory and practice.
You. Have. to. Be. Kidding. Me.
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cx: Freiburg
Heidegger owed his fame and career entirely to his mentor, Husserl, who championed Heidegger’s book Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), as well as his academic appointments. When he became rector, Heidegger the Nazi repaid this mentorship by banning the Jewish Husserl from the Freiburg library. Gotta keep the Jews out! Gotta please the Nazis.
In other words, Heidegger was an evil, toadying f–k. He’s my go-to example of the genetic fallacy, that you can’t dismiss all of a person’s ideas because he or she is an awful person. Heidegger was an awful person. And a terrible writer. He had some interesting and influential philosophical ideas, but I cannot think of a single positive contribution that he made to educational theory and practice. Oh, BTW, he slept with his young student Hannah Arendt. Yeah, great. Perhaps Palgrave should have added Jeffrey Epstein to its list of great educators.
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Explaining how to align education to Fascist mysticism. Wow. Yeah. Great contribution to educational theory and practice. Aie yie yie.
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Where is Cleanth Brooks on this list? The book Understanding Poetry, which he wrote with Robert Penn Warren, is one of the most important pedagogical models ever produced and was explicitly created for that purpose. And where is William Strong (the sentence-combining guy) and Diane McGuiness (the phonics scholar and researcher) and Herbert Simon and George Polya (the heuristics guys) and Morris Kline and Sylvanius P. Thompson (who were all about discovering means to teach complex mathematics simply) or Sydney Pressey (the guy who introduced programmed learning, which had such powerful consequences for almost all future pedagogical practice and theory)? One could go on and on.
CLEARLY, the job of putting this together should have been done with input from an enormous group of scholars. This teacher gives the list a D.
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Basically, the entire profession of the teaching of English in the United States learned how to teach literature either directly from Brooks and Warren or from someone who learned how to do it from Brooks and Warren. So, as a practical matter, they had more influence on teaching in the U.S. than almost anybody on this list did. Plutarch often wrote of the formation of character based on philosophical training, and character education pops up from time to time throughout educational history, but it’s rarely linked to Plutarch per se. A recent foray into character education was made by former Secretary of Education with a gambling habit Bill Bennett.
To my knowledge, the most important thing Plutarch ever said about education is this, from the Moralia, Vol. 1:
“For the correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting—no more—and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth. Suppose someone were to go and ask his neighbours for fire and find a substantial blaze there, and just stay there continually warming himself: that is no different from someone who goes to someone else to get some of his rationality, and fails to realize that he ought to ignite his innate flame, his own intellect.”
This quotation has been shortened over time in the telephone game of the oral tradition to “Teaching is not filling a vessel but lighting a flame,” or some variation thereof. And, ofc, on the Internet, it is attributed to anyone and everyone–Shaw and Yeats are common.
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Great comment, explaining the correct attribution of a line often repeated. Thank you! Only you could do this!
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A few personal misses are: Christopher Lash – Culture of Narcissism, etc., Joyce E. King, “Culture Centered Knowledge’ and “DisConscious Racism” and John Steinbeck – his social-psychological & historical work and influence on HS literature.
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This list is out of control. Everyone who ever had an original thought could have that thought applied in some way to education by someone via some stretch of imagination, but that does not make everyone who every had an original thought about anything a great contributor to educational theory and practice. There are a LOT of people who should NOT be on this list but are, and there are many who should be who aren’t. If we started putting every writer regularly read in schools on the list, it would have tens of thousands of names. ROFL.
What the list needs is a dramatic PRUNING. And then a few additions of people who were dedicated thinkers about educational theory and/or practice who actually, themselves, made differences in who is schooled in what and how.
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It appears to me that Bob Sheperd has jumped out of his skin with an insult on “original thought.” Although I’m certainly NOT a recognized name in Educational Literature, these are not simply “original thoughts” out of context. The comments would best be directed at Dr. Julian Vaquez-Heilig, not me. I followed and commented on his BLOG “Cloaking Inequity” years back when he was at UT and the topics were expansive and important. By Bob Sheperd’s criteria I’ll stick with Dr. Joyce E. King (for sure) in that RACISM and “culture” or culture wars and banned books grip American political society. Also, I’m going to add more to the list! (1) Robert Coles “Presidential Medal of Freedom” and his series on “Children of Crises” including Ruby Bridges, and Sheldon Berman on “Teaching for Social Responsibility” founder of Educators for Social Responsibility and his work that contributed greatly to America’s peace eduction movement in the the 1980s and 1990s. A movement that helped move the Clinton Administration to the Safe and Drug Free Schools legislation. That history, BTW, is included in my dissertation: “School-Wide Discipline in Urban High Schools” and contextualized in “Searching for Social Justice” in the SJ/EDL International Handbook (Springer). NOT an “original thought.”
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I was referring to the list of names in the original post, above.
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So, my comment was directed toward the editors who came up with the list in the original post. The only comment I made regarding your post, Mr. Thornburg, is that I don’t think simply being read commonly in schools is reason enough to go on a list of great educators.
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Thank you for the clarification, Mr.? or Dr.? Sheperd. I agree with you about Literature found in schools, and I include Steinbeck because one of his books is on the common banned list. Many others come to mind. Most of my career was as a classroom teacher. Classroom teaching is THE most important aspect of education in my view and good literature is more important to teachers than theory, whilst important, also. Dr. Thornburg.
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Thank you very much, Dr. Thornburg. You certainly have a lot of important experience, and this goes to my point, that the very idea of it being possible to make an accurate list of great educators is questionable. There are many such people, like you and me and innumerable innovative classroom teachers, whose significant contributions are typically unheralded. Many years ago, I used to subscribe to The English Journal, and every issue ran several articles by classroom practitioners with great ideas for instruction or assessment.
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And I agree about classroom teaching. This is why, after a 25-year career as a textbook writer and editor, I closed out my career with a few years back in the classroom–to apply in practice what I had developed over the decades.
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