Education: A Very Short Introduction

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Few people know very much about why schools exist as they do today; the intellectual traditions that have shaped education seem to be invisible to most observers. This is a strange gap in the knowledge of the public. With physics, most informed laypeople could write a coherent sentence or two about Einstein and Newton. For biology, a page might be forthcoming on Darwin. Even for economics most could probably say something sensible about Keynes and Marx. But for education, most, I think, would struggle to offer anything at all about Dewey or Piaget. It is perhaps this gap in awareness and understanding about what education is and how it has developed that has contributed to the dearth of creativity about how to improve it.

Maybe this gap in knowledge says something about the way we view education in the West. It’s telling, for example, that when the American philosopher John Dewey — arguably the greatest thinker about education in modern times — visited China in 1928 to collect an honorary degree from the National University at Peking, its rector hailed him as ‘the second Confucius’. I don’t think this was hyperbole, and nor was it a joke: this was in China, after all, and comparisons with Confucius in China are surely made judiciously. There could be no greater praise for Dewey.

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