ABSTRACT
How can teachers expect students to take an increasing responsibility for their own learning when they are often given so few opportunities to do so? Shouldn’t schools be encouraging students to interpret and solve the mysteries of the world unmediated, at least in part, by teachers? This chapter faces up to what Dewy criticised the teachers of his time of doing: passing on to students the cultural product of societies that assumed that the future would be much like the past and as a result continued to use that unquestioned past as educational food even though the society in which the learners live is a society where change is the rule, not the exception. Schools need to discuss ‘learned helplessness’ – what it looks like and its dangers. What should successful learners look like, and how they might encourage social, speculative and strategic independence? What does the concept ‘desirable difficulty’ mean and how important can it be in our thinking about the more able?
