ABSTRACT
The charge of Pink Floyd that pupils are regarded as no more than bricks in a wall and that teachers are engaged in a process of mind control over their pupils may be written off as extreme adolescent-like protest. Yet the charge echoes much earlier ones which are illustrated by the work of many distinguished educationists. One, Krishnamurti (1953), claimed that the system of education, whilst perhaps doing something to awaken the intellect, also makes people subservient, mechanical and deeply thoughtless, and leaves the individual incomplete, stultified and uncreative. Furthermore, Torrance (1962) argued that teachers are actually punitive towards pupils who show creative potential. And from a Marxist perspective Bowles and Gintis (1976) have asserted that by serving the needs of capitalism for a stratified, compliant workforce, schools inhibit and distort personal development and prevent the achievement of that very social equality which they purport to serve. Thus, while the relationship between schooling and personal development has usually been associated with an optimistic public view that education is concerned with maximizing that development in intellectual, physical and social/emotional terms, the arguments of critical educationists and some sociologists have run counter to that view: for them contemporary schooling is essentially anti-creative and inega-litarian in nature.
