ABSTRACT
THE STORY OF authenticity’s rise to consciousness in the minds of educational theorists, and its pervasiveness in theories and models of learning generally, has gone untold in the literature of education. This is so for good reason; with few exceptions, direct appeals to the “authentic” or the “real world” in education are rare until the latter half of the nineteenth century (and even then, we might question their actual significance). In classical treatises on education, it seems that the relationship between school learning and work-a-day activity was not problematized on any level. The notion of authenticity in education is the creation of a mostly twentieth century sensibility that has arisen in response to twentieth century theories of learning and knowledge. As such, authenticity almost certainly has significance for us in a way that we could not expect it to have had for educational reformers such as Isocrates, Ramus, or Pestalozzi.
