ABSTRACT
It is only since 1971 that the term ‘deschooling’ has become an accepted part of the language of educators. As this term has become popularised, its meaning has become increasingly diffuse. So which writers and which ideas can with justification be included in this discussion? It could be argued that the common element to these writers and ideas is that in some sense they can be regarded as ‘radical’ 1 , but that simply changes the task of definition to an analysis of what one means by radical. In this essay I shall review and evaluate the literature by making a distinction between deschoolers and what have been termed New Romantics. My first task, therefore, is to clarify these two ‘schools of thought’, specifying what they have in common and in what ways they are to be differentiated.
