Education: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

Twain quipped, ‘I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.’

Schools developed a curriculum, wherein important subjects—or at least subjects presumed to be important from this new panoply of riches—were taught. And the curriculum bifurcated, fanned out, and set into shape. In some ways, this broadening was, of course, a good thing. But as expectations about the curriculum hardened, the patterns that were to

The curriculum, seen as solid material to be ‘delivered’ (by contrast with a view of the curriculum stressing the development of understanding), lends itself perfectly to the accountability-testing symbiosis. Indeed, the use of the word ‘delivered’, so often conjoined with ‘curriculum’ in official documents, reveals the way that many politicians ap

None of this is to say that content is irrelevant or meaningless. Rather, it is to say that content becomes a too-easy focus and a lot more thought needs to be given to the ‘how’ as well as the ‘what’ of a curriculum.

Albert Einstein asserted that ‘Education is what remains when we have forgotten everything that has been learned at school.’

Because social science isn’t quite the same as natural science—for the refutation of bad or silly ideas can never be quite as clear cut—some wild goose chases have been pursued in the quest for an understanding of learning and the ways in which it happens in schools.

In Bruner’s work, we see a more direct application of ideas to practice. He discusses teaching content with teaching method, such that something approaching an integrated theory of education seems to be appearing. With Bruner we see an appreciation of the ‘guts’ of a subject conjoined with a sensitivity about the way children learn. Bruner’s first

Philip Jackson, in his 1968 classic Life in Classrooms, asserts that the hidden curriculum goes even deeper than this kind of embedded-but-authoritative message. It lies in ‘the crowds, the praise, and the power’ (p. 33) of the classroom, and learning to live in a classroom is learning to live in a crowd, with all that this entails. Teachers, in or

Why the shibboleth of continually rising school leaving ages and continually expanding higher education? Why not look hard at the half of all school leavers who emerge from high school with very little, and ask why this is the case? Why do we force them to attend school when they don’t want to attend and when there is so little evidence for the suc