What is education for? June 8, 2008
Posted by drdennis in Uncategorized.trackback
This has been something that has been moving around my mind over the last year and really came to prominence after reading Ken Booth’s ‘Theory of World Security’. In it, he tries to create a different way of thinking about human security that dispenses with the past. One of the things that really struck me was his assertion that a medieval peasant could not even contemplate the level of democracy that we have now and the powerful would have suggested it was ludicrous. Yet we take democracy (in this country) to be common sense. How has education changed over this period of time, and most importantly, who is it for?
Linked to my own subject, what is History education for and who is it for? Rob Phillips has written on this from a nationalist point of view but I can’t recall an extensive discussion in terms of education generally. Yes, we have newspaper articles of superficial analysis giving easy ways to change the system, but they always seem so limited. We seem in the education world to follow the newest paradigm in terms of teaching and learning without examining the fundamentals and as a result, the project looks like rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic. Doug Belshaw’s thesis on digital literacy has also got me thinking about the theme. I think some more reading is in order…
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