ABSTRACT
This book grew out of a common and deep-seated concern. As colleagues on the same faculty, we discovered that we were both using parallel and complementary materials while caught up in a flurry of talks, speeches, and workshops with educators who were worried about some of the trendlines in school reform, about the way young people think of their own future, and about some of the relatively simplistic educational reforms being advocated, often by people with scant comprehension of modern educational practices. Schools as institutions, schooling patterns, the curriculum and teachers were criticised, quite trenchantly and unfairly at times, throughout the 1980s, to such an extent in fact that the reform agenda appeared to have been taken out of the hands of the providers. Economic factors and how ‘useful’ education is - instrumentalism, it has been called - seemed to be driving the reformers, especially the policy makers and the politicians.
