This is an argument for a new public education for England, but not for a new public school. The focus should be on aims, not structures. We should ensure that all schools (community schools, private schools, academies and religious schools) are working to realise the same nationally determined aims. The national set of aims should be determined…

Until recently teacher education in England has always contained a 'philosophical' element -- to do with what education is for in the light of human nature. The paper traces its history since 1839, through inspirational approaches -- based first on religion and later on psychology -- to the critical approach of R S Peters and his colleagues in the…

Education in frugality is less important for young people in the climate emergency than pressurising governments to act. Schools can help in this directly, as well as indirectly by passing on the necessary understanding. This understanding is interdisciplinary as well as disciplinary, but schools in England at least have always been too attached…

The article consists of a general section looking at changes since the 1960s in the links between philosophy of education and policy-making, followed by a specific section engaging in topical policy critique. The historical argument claims that policy involvement was far more widespread in our subject before the mid-1980s than it has been since…

The UK's new Coalition Government looks as if it will make the narrow, traditional school curriculum we have now even narrower and more rooted in the past. The Labour government made timid moves to improve the National Curriculum, not least by equipping it with a few general aims, even though these meshed poorly on to intra-subject aims. Michael…

This book examines the question of ideal educational aims in a democratic society. Using the 1988 National Curriculum mandated for English and Welsh schools as a concrete point of departure, the book calls attention to: the high degree of specificity of the large list of objectives and attainment targets; the massive structure built for the…

I take up recent remarks by Teruhisa Horio about school student disaffection in Japan and see echoes of this in Britain. In that country the traditional school curriculum of discrete largely academic subjects is often taken to be one cause of the problem. I review justifications for it but no sound ones appear to be available. We need to…