We don't need no education.
Recently, I have been thinking about the purpose of education in society both as part of a working group on teaching and learning at my present school and also in discussions with British educationalist Briar Lipson after reading her article on the skills vs content debate . The latter is an illustration of an age-old contention point amongst educators for thousands of years, as pointed out by a great blog post by Danielle Myburgh (can't wait to read your thesis!). Before governments, parents, teachers, and learners had grappled with the point of school, p hilosophers as diverse as Aristotle, Rousseau and Confucious had written on the role of education (Noddings, 1995; Reed & Johnson, 1996). These early thinkers had varying perspectives on what education should be about, based on their own unique cultural and historical backgrounds. In the 20th century, educational philosophy became dominated by the likes of John Dewey and George Counts ...