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

Pestalozzi kept to Rousseau’s ideas about the significance of exploration and observation but wrapped this in a holistic view of the child—one which integrated heart and head—and which placed tenderness and respect for children at the centre of education.

Another reaction to the regimentation of school has been in the home-schooling movement, which isn’t as new as you might imagine. In the late 18th century, ‘domestic education’ became fashionable among the more affluent middle classes and gentry, partly in response to John Locke and others having inveighed against the segregation of children at

The differences between these schools of thought can perhaps be summed up in a further set of questions, the answers to which reveal that there are not only different understandings about knowledge and learning held by the protagonists of each position, but also different views about children—who they are and how they develop. Those questions can

Dewey’s disciple and successor in that post, William Kilpatrick, continued the tradition. Dewey’s protégé noted that schools should produce ‘better citizens, alert, able to think and act, too intelligently critical to be easily hoodwinked either by politicians or patent-medicines, self-reliant, ready of adaptation to the new social conditions that

Piagetian theory had an important corollary for teaching. It suggested a certain fixity in the way that thinking develops, with its view that the stages through which children passed were genetically determined and unvarying. It cautioned that children had to pass through these stages in sequence; if a stage hadn’t been traversed, then children

Teachers did, though, tend for most of the time to abide by one style in preference to another. Following observation, the researchers sifted teachers into categories they called ‘group instructors’, ‘individual monitors’, ‘class enquirers’, and ‘style changers’. Children were also categorized into the styles they predominantly adopted: ‘attention

Later in the Middle Ages, but before the invention of printing, other kinds of schools began to emerge. The American educator Neil Postman suggests that these were principally associated with apprenticeship and the learning of particular trades. Learning was predominantly undertaken by doing, and helped along by spoken rather than written words. As

A fine example of the non-transfer of skill exists in chess playing. It’s one of the most studied skills by psychologists, because its need for sequencing ideas, using memory, and developing projection in thinking ought to fire up the neurons like nothing else: top chess players should be top-notch problem solvers, with all the practice they get.