ABSTRACT
We shall discuss 13 shifts in emphasis that have occurred in education in the past few years, all of which will be familiar to most providers of learning opportunities. These are not, of course, all the changes which have occurred, and readers may well be able to list others. As we progress through this chapter, we shall also see that there is considerable overlap between them. Each of these 13 listed below takes the form of continuum along which the change has taken place, so that it does not mean that those on the left-hand side of the continuum have ceased to exist, merely that education has spread along each of them with the new developments being placed on the right-hand side. They are listed below in the order that they are going to be discussed, and readers will recognize that while there is a certain logic in this order it does not indicate any causal connotations. The changes are from:
• childhood to adult to lifelong; • the few to the many;
• education and training to learning; • learning as a process to learning as an institutional phenomenon; • teacher-centred to student-centred; • liberal to vocational and human resource development; • theoretical to practical; • single discipline knowledge to multidisciplinary knowledge to
integrated knowledge; • knowledge as truth to knowledge as relative/information/ narrative/
discourse; • rote learning to reflective learning; • welfare provision (needs) to market demand (wants); • classical curriculum to romantic curriculum to programme; • face-to-face to distance to e-learning.
