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International Socialism, Autumn 1967

 

Peter Ibbotson

Academics

 

From International Socialism, No.30 (1st series), Autumn 1967, p.32.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

 

The Concept of Education
R.S. Peters (ed.)
Routledge, 30s.

The high-powered academics contributing to Professor Peters’ symposium include Gilbert Ryle and Michael Oakeshott, whose essays are particularly pleasant. Provocative is Geoffrey Vesey on Conditioning and Learning; I would recommend borrowing, though not buying, the book for this essay alone. Largely, however, the contributors tend to divorce (or attempt to divorce) the concept of education from the practice of education except secondary and further. John Passmore makes a very shrewd point, that ‘it is a principal object of teacher-training to turn out teachers who will firmly discourage free critical discussion’ – an observation which certainly sums up the role of the teacher in the English ‘public’ school system. Robert F. Dearden contributes two essays: The Concept of Play and Instruction and Learning by Discovery. In the first, while lengthily critical of various theories of play, he makes no clear distinction between nurseries and nursery schools – a lack which surely vitiates the application of his criticism? In the second he equates being a non-scientist with ignorance of science; a piece of intellectual arrogance of the son about which I have written elsewhere. Nor does he allow for social conditioning as an agency tending to direct the child’s conception of learning in the direction of the teacher’s.

 
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