TEACHING THINKING IN CHILE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: SINCE THE NEW SCHOOL UNTIL CONSTRUCTIVISM

Abstract

Chile, throughout  its history, has been open to the pedagogical ideas particularly from European and North American countries. In the colony different religious congregations from Spain arrived in the country with the idea of teaching. During the Chilean Republican period in the nineteenth century, this country was influenced mainly by the European pedagogy such as German and French and in the last century by the pedagogical principles of the New School of  the American representative John Dewey and European representatives from the school of the old world. The main objective of this paper is to describe the thinking of the New School in Chile expressed especially in different transformations and/ or educational reforms: Education Congress Reform (1912), Compulsory Primary Education Act, (1920), Education Reform 1927, Education Reform 1945, The Transformation in 1953, the Education Reform (1965) and Education Reform (1996). Improvements in terms of “How do we think?” from Dewey to the constructivism of Piaget, Bruner, Gardner and the pedagogical psychology of Vygotsky will be visualized through this descriptive analysis. At the same time, some questions will be presented to find out ifrearrangements and contributions to this thinking in Chile have appeared or if they have been assumed literally.