Ivan Snook

Educational Neuroscience: A plea for radical scepticism

Neuroscience is a rapidly expanding area of research and it has broadened out into a number of ‘applied’ fields. In particular, educational researchers and teacher educators have embraced it, often with unseemly haste. There is now an international society for Mind, Brain and Education and a new peer-reviewed journal of the same name. Major centres or research networks have been set up in London, Cambridge, Harvard, and Bristol, and there are researchers working on it in departments of psychology and education at many universities. It is frequently argued that teachers in training should be given a healthy does of ‘brain research’. In arguing for radical scepticism about all this, I begin by making a number of disclaimers:

Policy Change in Higher Education: The New Zealand Experience.

For over one hundred years, the structure of the New Zealand education system has been basically stable. After re-election in 1987, however, the Labour government initiated a major ‘reform’ of the system, from early childhood to tertiary. Although the pace of change has been great, most of the changes are only recently in place or, in the case of the tertiary sector, not yet fully operative. It is, then, too early to assess the consequences of the changes except rather intuitively. Nevertheless, this is an opportune moment to begin to document and analyze the changes in the tertiary sector.

Lifelong Education: Some Deweyan Themes

John Dewey’s Pedagogic Creed published in 1897 begins with the stirring words: “I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race. This process begins unconsciously almost at birth, and is continually shaping the individual’s powers, saturating his habits, training his ideas, and arousing his feelings and emotions. Through this unconscious education the individual gradually comes to share in the intellectual and moral resources which humanity has succeeded in getting together.” (Dewey 1971, Vol.5, p.84). A little further on he says: “I believe that education is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.” (Ibid. p.87). This notion of education as a continual process with the potential for growth remained a central part of his philosophy of education. It is interesting, however, that although these words seem a clarion call for what we now call lifelong education, Dewey seemed unable to draw this conclusion from his own philosophy. Thus, for example, the words which immediately follow the creed just quoted are: “I believe that the school must represent present life — life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighbourhood, or on the play-ground.” (loc.cit.). To my knowledge, Dewey wrote nothing on education beyond the formal school years. Thus, despite the implicit significance of his philosophical position, John Dewey was the major philosopher of schooling rather than of education.

Respectability and Relevance: Reflections on Richard Peters and analytic philosophy of education

Abstract I argue that, after Dewey, Peters was the first modern philosopher of education to write material (in English) that was both philosophically respectable and relevant to the day-to-day concerns of teachers. Since then, some philosophers of education have remained (more or less) relevant but not really respectable while others have ‘taken off into the skies’ learning acclaim from the philosophical community but ceasing to produce anything which would be of any relevance to teachers in their work. I suggest that Peters might again point the way towards a form of academic philosophy of education that is both relevant and reasonably respectable.