Education: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

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

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

Aside from the straightforwardly visible curriculum there is the hidden curriculum. This exists in the wider set of beliefs and values pupils acquire because of the way that a school is run and its teaching organized. It is about the behaviour of the teachers, the textbooks chosen, the school rules. Does the school, for example, through the way tha

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

If funding for your school depends on the results of assessment, or if your continued employment as a teacher depends upon a set of tests, then you have to be a pretty strong-willed teacher to avoid the temptation to ‘teach to the test’, rather than engaging in a form of education that will not so readily meet the outcomes, usually measured against

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

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

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

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.’