There are two divergent lines of thought about education:  Should we be telling children facts and ideas and telling them to learn them or should we be encouraging them to discover knowledge for themselves?

How should we view knowledge? Is there a stock of knowledge which we need to record accumulate and pass on to the next generation or is knowledge fluid and transitory made useful when it is personally discovered and acquired?

How should we view learning? Is it demonstrated by the proven acquisition of facts and skills over the demonstration of a faculty with reasoning and solving problems?

And how should we view children? (Rightly or wrongly this is often about children)

do we see them principally as members of the society and participants in an economy for which they need to be prepared as adults in the making? Or is our role in their development to think less about preparation and more about cultivation? 

For the progressives education is about supporting the ability to think critically and should be child-centred and focused on problem-solving for the formalist though it’s a process of importing and acquiring the skills and knowledge necessary for well-being and success in life it’s about instruction and acquisition of information and skills needed for the success of the society in which you live.

For progressives learning is natural it’s happening all the time and it’s what humans are programmed for children learn to talk for example without any teaching at all. For the formalists  learning can be a hard slog. They contend it’s just a fact of life that there are some things you need to learn the hard way. There is complex information that we need to know to which there is no easy route. If you want to learn to write for example you need to understand the ways in which language is put together you need to know the glue that binds sentences the rules for making language work. This is not easy and you don’t “discover” it.

Does Khan academy, Udemy and “mastery” learning say anything about where education may go?

Thoughts on reading (3 mins, FT) Luck Kellaway: What is the point of Schools? Link here.

(3 to 5 hours) Education, A Very Short Introduction by Gary Thomas. Amazon link here.