ABSTRACT
Educational theory has long been bedevilled by false dualisms-Nature versus Nurture, liberal studies versus technical training, discipline-centred versus child-centred approaches to teaching, elitist versus egalitarian policies, and so on. Environmental influences are now seen to be of crucial importance in deciding the learner’s school performance. Throughout the nineteenth century literacy was the first priority in the education of the masses. In the twentieth this heavy premium placed on reading and writing has been offset by the growing demand for numeracy. Name-dropping is a contemptible habit. As A. V. Judges noted in The Function of Teaching, ‘the vital impulses sustaining discussions about the role of education spring up in places quite remote from the usual debating grounds of the professional educators’. In the USA the ‘return to learning’, as it has been called, was a necessary corrective in view of the low levels of scholastic attainment during the slap-happy era of Life Adjustment courses and the twilight of the ‘progressive’ movement.
