What causes such disparities? Surely it cannot simply be the quality of education on offer at different schools. One general answer to this question was proposed by the sociologist Basil Bernstein, who came up with an interesting insight on the consequences of differences between the cultures of school and home, and in particular the kinds of langu

‘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

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).

‘Now, what I want is, Facts,’ said Mr Gradgrind. And the nice thing about facts, both for Gradgrind and for audit-minded politicians, is that you can so easily test their retention in students’ minds. You can’t slice up and measure students’ understanding nearly as easily as you can measure those same students’ retention of facts: it is much easier

There’s no shame or intellectual dishonesty in doing this, say the formalists. It’s all very well to say that we learn things best when we discover them for ourselves, but this is to deny the heritage of ideas that go to constitute just about every understanding of contemporary life. If you ‘discover’ how light is broken into the colours of the rai

With some beautiful insights, Holt said what many already knew instinctively about school, merely by having passed through it themselves. His method was to reflect upon his own experience of teaching in his Boston classroom, by giving vignettes—diary entries of his work with children. He mused on the things children said and did in response to his

Once upon a time, things had been so simple: young people learned all the stuff they needed to learn for a trade or calling; there was a clear purpose involved. Then the Renaissance had come along and offered a cornucopia of learning for the delectation of the already learned. Learning to think for oneself, so valued by Plato, became buried beneath

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 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