The New Classical Schooling

Peter J. Leithart

In September 1974, the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott delivered the Abbott Memorial Lecture at Colorado College. Entitled “A Place for Learning,” Oakeshott’s lecture attacked the dominant model of education, a model predicated on the theories of the American educationist John Dewey. Learning, Oakeshott observed, should take place under “conditions of direction and restraint designed to provoke habits of attention, concentration, exactness, courage, patience, and discrimination”; but schools shaped by Dewey had instead become arenas of “childish self-indulgence,” “experimental activity,” “discovery,” and “group discussions.” Oakeshott was especially scornful of the notion that education’s purpose was “socialization,” which could only turn the child into a compliant little cog in the machine of commerce and industry. “The design to substitute ‘socialization’ for education,” he argued, was “the momentous occurrence of this century, the greatest of the adversaries to have overtaken our culture, the beginning of a dark age devoted to barbaric affluence.”


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