ABSTRACT
The popular view is that the modern school as we have known it has been remarkably resistant to change. Forthe whole of the twentieth century at least, the school took children at age 5 or 6, put them into class groups composed of children of the same age, put each class in charge of one teacher, and allocated students and teacher to a self-contained classroom. There the pupils were led through a curriculum based on the notion that human knowledge is divided into ‘subjects’. The curriculum has been graded from the elementary (or rudimentary) through to the very complex, and the children advance ‘upwards’ through it in lockstep over twelve years of study. The schools are ranked according to this upward progression by being labelled kindergarten or preparatory, elementary or primary, junior secondary or middle school, senior secondary, and then tertiary or higher or post-secondary. In all cases, too, the staff ‘teach’, implying that they are transferring knowledge in which they have special expertise to ‘learners’ who are relatively ignorant. Schooling has therefore been concerned with a systematic and progressive transfer of knowledge from expert to novice.
