ABSTRACT
Richard Pring's lack of clarity about the kind of education to be provided in common schools and, especially, about the desirability or otherwise of differentiated provision for students with different aptitudes. In The Life and Death of Secondary Education for All, Pring argues that our ultimate aim should be 'making our children more human', to which end should be 'helping them acquire the appropriate dispositions, intellectual and moral'. Pring stresses that the language we use in talking about education makes a material difference to the practice it gives rise to. 'Unexamined language bewitches policy and practice in many ways'. Pring urges us to widen our conception of education to go beyond the 'narrow conception of standards' currently in vogue and the conflation of those standards with a limited repertoire of performance indicators. Pring is correct in his observation that in the past people wrongly assumed that intellectual ability, which was confounded with IQ, was a fixed innate quality.
