meta beliefs

The Great Education Debate

2017-04-18T17:29:04+01:00April 12th, 2017|Featured|

Freedom is hammered out on the anvil of discussion, dissent, and debate. Hubert H. Humphrey With increasing frequency, someone will pop up on social media to announce to the world that debating the best way to approach the project of education is a waste of time. These are the reasons I'm typically presented with when I demur: 1. It's boringly repetitive and nothing new is ever contributed. 2. It's just a bun fight rather than an actual debate and no one ever changes their minds. 3. Real teachers in real schools don't know anything about it so it obviously can't be [...]

Romanticism & the Enlightenment: Meta-beliefs in education

2016-03-02T08:38:12+00:00February 6th, 2016|myths|

"Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one’s beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses." James Baldwin Before claiming, as so many seem wont to do, that the dichotomy between progress and tradition is a false one, it’s worth exploring how our beliefs about education have been shaped. In the early 18th century the ideals of the Enlightenment – scientific method, logic and reason – were in full swing. Everything could be counted, weighed, measured and objective truths about the world discovered, quantified and neatly labelled. As always, whenever the pendulum [...]

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