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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As the British prime minister William Gladstone put it at the time in the Edinburgh Review, speaking of the remarkable Prussian success in the Franco-Prussian War: ‘Undoubtedly, the conduct of the campaign, on the German side, has given a marked triumph to the cause of systematic popular education.’

These psychologists were influential for European education in the middle of the 20th century, but the mood was changing in the USA too. In America, though, the provenance of the change in mood was rather different. The post-war period and the 1960s had brought with them a yearning for greater freedoms and for self-expression, as had been the case