ABSTRACT
It has been convincingly argued that by definition ‘education’ involves ‘initiation into worthwhile activities’. And, at any rate, I take it as axiomatic that anybody who feels a commitment to education, anybody who wants to teach or who regards the business of education as important, must be concerned in principle to ensure that children come to engage in worthwhile activities. What activities are worthwhile is of course another question, and one about which there may be widespread disagreement, but one cannot conceive of someone who believed that education was important and yet who believed at the same time that children should, or quite acceptably could, devote all their time at school to worthless pursuits. If what is happening is altogether worthless, then, by definition, it is not important.
