ABSTRACT
The drive towards independence described in the last chapter has affected not only the organization of the education system but also educational theory. The autonomy given to schools and colleges in the 1920s and later shattered the vision, as yet not fully realized, of a system united in its major purposes. Traditional purposes held it together for a time, the elementary-secondary pattern persisting into the era of secondary modern and grammar schools. But in the last twenty years this older tradition has been severely eroded, and incoherences in the system have become more and more plain. One of the parts which have come adrift is educational theory. In a unified system this could have a well-defined role, helping to formulate and criticize the major aims and sub-aims of the system, the means to these ends and the obstacles to their attainment. In an autonomous system it can have no such role. Its only global function could be to provide a rationale, and a suitable pedagogy, for the autonomous system itself. Hence the persisting influence of libertarian or progressive ideologies in the last half century. But apart from this, the world of educational theory has fragmented in the same way as the larger world of educational practice. Its constituent disciplines, psychology, sociology, philosophy and the rest, have become independent principalities, each on constant guard to repel incursions from the others. But it is not as though one found a unity of purpose even in each discipline. Here and there, for a while perhaps, one may do so; but there is often as much ideological separatism within disciplines as there is between them, perhaps especially in psychology. Educational theorists are also divided in their attitudes to educational practice itself. Some wish to get in gear with it. They propose their panaceas and their utopias—Marxist, romantic, Freudian or whatever—but all except those who content themselves with rationalizing the status quo half believe au fond that their projects can never be any more than idle dreams, at least beyond a small circle of enthusiasts. Others have no hope of influencing a system which dispenses with large-scale theoretical structures, and turn towards some form of educational study for its own sake, whether it be the analytic philosopher teasing out the meaning of 'teaching' or the historian of education bottoming the grammar schools of Lincolnshire in the sixteenth century.
