ABSTRACT
The Educational Imperative is a defence of Socratic and aesthetic education in a period in which education is neither Socratic, nor predisposed towards the aesthetic. Many of the chapters are attempts, in no way defInitive, to disclose the nature of educational thinking, feeling, sensing and imagining; many of the arguments relate to arguments in the world of educational discussion and academic controversy as also to the actual practice of teaching and learning. Yet it would be misleading to present the book as a piece of distant research. It is, essentially, a work of advocacy, putting forward a notion of education that has become contentious in our time, perhaps even deeply unpopular. In this introduction, therefore, I want to come clean; I want to place the general argument of the book in the current arena of public debate, and to do so without apology and without equivocation. Whatever the reader may make of this consciously polemical opening, I would like to think that he or she would go on and, at least, consider the somewhat more measured educational arguments put forward in the chapters that follow.
