Education: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

For Locke, openness and intellectual interchange would help to counter the overweening influence on politics of the Church and the aristocracy. His ideas were to have a profound influence on political life in general and on the shaping of the American constitution in particular. In a way, Locke is emblematic of the deeper connection between educati

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

‘Now, all this study of reckoning and geometry…must be presented to them while still young, not in the form of compulsory instruction.’ ‘Why so?’ ‘Because,’ said I, ‘a free soul ought not to pursue any study slavishly; for while bodily labours performed under constraint do not harm the body, nothing that is learned under compulsion stays with the m

This emphasis on criticality is crucial: it’s the nub of Dewey’s philosophy of education. Like Locke in the 17th century, Dewey was stressing the need for the cultivation of critical thinking for the making of a fair, open-minded citizenry—one which is able to think independently to contest bad ideas and question leaders. And it is raised again and

The contemporary saying among young people, ‘Talk to the hand’ (meaning ‘I’m not going to listen’), sums up the attitude of large numbers of children at school. A substantial proportion of schools’ inhabitants hear little of what is said to them at school and care less. This is borne out both by casual observation and by official statistics: in the

Even more worryingly, analysis over time indicated that any immediate benefits which might have accrued from the use of the technique were ultimately lost, and on leaving school those children who were part of a Direct Instruction curriculum were significantly more likely to have been involved in crime, were less well adjusted, and engaged in fewer

In one of his later works, Experience and Education, Dewey regretted the slipping into camps that had come out of the vituperative discussion of progressive versus formal education. He said that we ‘should think in terms of Education itself rather than in terms of some ’ism about education, even such an ’ism as “progressivism” ’ (p. 6). Allegiance

The committee asked: ‘Has “finding out” proved to be better than “being told”? Have methods been worked out through which discovery can be stimulated and guided, and children develop from it a coherent body of knowledge?’ (p. 2).

Diane Ravitch in her magisterial review, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education.