Philosophy of education
Within the philosophy of education I am primarily concerned with the relationship between academic disciplines and school subjects.
Ethics is a matter of what is right and wrong, how we should act, and how things ought to be. It underpins and permeates everything we do. We can’t rise above ethics or
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I have a longstanding interest in how teachers create meaning from the things that they teach. Indeed, this question was right at the heart of two papers I had published a
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We all should now know that Yeats never said that “education is not the filling of a pail”. The sentiment, however, is true. Various ‘constructivist’ theories of
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As a consequence of a pleasant Twitter thread over the weekend, I am currently revisiting two papers that have heavily influenced how I think about the idea of ‘critical
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In my previous blog post, I argued that one of the reasons we have ended up at the door of very prescriptive approaches to pedagogy – such as scripted lessons – has come
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During my summer holidays, I generally try to learn something new in a more structured way. For example, in the summer of 2016, I attended Cambridge University’s excellent
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Debates about pedagogy are particularly heated at the moment, and one does not need to look hard to find a point of view. Should children be taught via direct instruction?
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Economic liberalism has long exalted the role played by markets, and the notion of consumer choice sits at the heart of this idea. If I want to buy a new computer, I can
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One does not have to look too hard to find examples of where curriculum selection was designed to indoctrinate. The most obvious cases are the totalitarian states of the
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In 1971 the philosopher of education Paul Hirst published a paper titled “What is teaching?” in which he set out, in the style of RS Peters, to conduct an analysis of the
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Arendt’s observation that ‘the most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution’ is pertinent in a number of contexts, and we can see
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One of my aims as a teacher is to get my pupils to cultivate their curiosity. This stems from my belief that the reality we inhabit is full of wonder and beauty and that we,
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I really do understand why people get so frustrated by the idea that there exists a never-ending conflict between two broad philosophies of education, namely
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Some of the more aggressive critics of this blog often make the case that I am arguing here for a ‘return’ to a ‘Victorian’ educational model, perhaps aspiring to
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A few years ago I chortled away at the idea of learning to learn. My colleagues and I sat sullenly through training sessions as we were taught how to get our pupils to
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There has been a bit of chatter on social media recently about whether or not the authority of a teacher or a school ought to be challenged. Words such as ‘fascist’ and
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Curriculum theory is hard, for it asks us to take something very complex (such as an academic discipline) and to define it, give it structure and tease out its properties.
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