Following the 20th-century philosopher Michael Oakeshott, though, we might conclude that arguments for the instrumentally based curricula of today’s commentators are misplaced. For Oakeshott, the subjects of the curriculum—history, mathematics, science, and so on—offer ways of capturing and understanding the world; they are a precious legacy passed

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

While there is a range of thinkers who have encouraged us in the progressive direction, there is no equivalent cadre of big-hitting thinkers linked with the formal position. It’s as if the formal has always been there, for it is the commonsense foil against which the progressive position emerged to question and contest. If there is a core theme to

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

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.’

While the progressives think of education involving discovery and play, the formalists say that to put the emphasis on discovery is to ignore the tapestry of established ideas, rules, and traditions that have been handed down to us from countless earlier generations. It’s such a rich picture, developed painfully with false starts and dead ends over

Notwithstanding the belief in education, though, there has been an accumulating body of evidence to show that in fact there is no simple equation relating benefits such as economic growth or individuals’ life prospects to schooling. In reality, school seems to do little to transform people’s opportunities or social mobility in general. As early as

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

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