ABSTRACT
The author of the passage below is a leading intellectual proponent of ‘educational conservatism’ which views the ‘business’ of education as the transmission of culture, and the curriculum as the repository of worthwile activities and values into which the young have to be initiated (p. 77). Bantock uses his extensive knowledge of the history of educational ideas to contrast the underlying principles of ‘traditional, “liberalizing” education’ and those of progressivism (or liberal romanticism). He argues that whereas the former was informed by conceptions of excellence, the latter is guided by the immediately useful or the temporarily relevant. He asserts that in ‘the modern British primary school in its more progressive guise’, temporary interest and immediate need are guiding principles and too easily foster ‘a magpie curriculum of bits and pieces, unrelated and ephemeral. In the interests of a temporary relevance a more permanent and deeper comprehension is often sacrificed’. He concludes that principles which favour the exploitation of the immediate and the everyday in order to provide stimulation and interest may be more appropriate with younger children but that ‘even at this stage, such principles governing the content of education should be treated with some caution as at best limited guides’. The importance Bantock attaches to confronting the young with the achievements of others in the past and to getting them inside the concepts and developments of various subject fields finds echoes in the arguments of Peters and Dearden reproduced elsewhere in this section (pp. 146-51 and 156-61).
