Brian Simon

The challenge for the comprehensive school : culture, curriculum, and community

The main argument of this book is that a fairer society can only be achieved by a fundamental reordering of the comprehensive school curriculum and of the educational establishment as a whole.

Education Answers Back: Critical Responses to Government Policy

Brings together essays and other documents from a cross-section of the education establishment who unite in their criticism of current education policy. Together they make a powerful critique of the governments adherence to dogma at the expense of our childrens future.

The study of education as a university subject in Britain

ABSTRACT The first chairs in education were established in Scotland in 1876. But it was only from the late 1890s that education departments were founded in English universities. The study of education in Britain can be periodised into four stages, but it is in the last of these, from the 1960s, that the subject really ‘took off˚s, based on a paradigm originally defined by the new philosophers who applied the techniques of linguistic analysis to the subject. The massive expansion of colleges of education and the establishment of new universities greatly increased the number of academic staff engaged on theoretical study at this time. As a result education has developed as a multi-disciplinary study and is now much more closely related to the mainstream of university studies than it ever was in the past.

The Search for enlightenment : the working class and adult education in the twentieth century

Contents Foreword Jack Jones Introduction Brian Simon Part 1. 1909 - 1945 The struggle for hegemony, 1920-1926 Brian Simon The spark of independent working class education Edmund and Ruth Frow The Labour College movement between the wars: national and north-west developments Margaret Cohen Revolutionary education revived: the communist challenge to the Labour Colleges, 1925-1944 Margaret Cohen Bouts of suspicion: political controversies in adult education, 1925-1944 Roger Fieldhouse Part 2. 1945-1988 The demise of the national council of Labour Colleges John McIlroy The triumph of technical training? John McIlroy Trade union education for a change John McIlroy The challenge to working class education Bob Fryer Notes on contributors Index

EDUCATION AND CITIZENSHIP IN ENGLAND

The author stresses the fact that the English educational system has perpetuated or exacerbated already existing social differences. According to him, the English school system is still denying the possibility of a true and active citizenship. Looking at the basic principles of Education Acts and reform ‘campaigns’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and at the re‐structuring processes of English education, he states (pointing at his own work and that of Shrosbree and Allsobrook) that differentiation once and again took place along social class lines.

The politics of comprehensive reorganization: a retrospective analysis∗

∗ Lecture delivered to the History of Education Society, Spring Conference, Birmingham University, on ‘Comprehensive Education Revisited’, May 1992.