ABSTRACT
The process of education, for all its centrality to the civilized mode of living, is but imperfectly understood. Yet if teaching is to be efficient, the preconditions for and means of learning must assuredly be appreciated; and to this end educationists have started to unravel the awesome complexities of how learning takes place – philosophers identifying the different forms of knowledge, the psychologists the different mental activities involved and the sociologists the different contexts in which learning can take place. As a consequence revolutionary changes have been effected in the syllabus-content and teaching methods of, for example, mathematics and the sciences. However, the amount of research effort that has been deployed on the various traditional school subjects varies considerably. But even the task of surveying an established school subject most patchily investigated would be more straightforward than an examination of the work carried out in the field of international studies.
