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Description.
A Little History of Education was inspired by E.H. Gombrich's A Little History of the World, setting out to tell the story of education from the Ancient World to the Present World, in a way that can be enjoyed by a general audience. It tracks cultural ebbs and flows, pedagogical emphases, religious allegiances, major authors and thinkers, and the consequences of ideas. It walks the reader from one historical period to another, showing how education moves from its cradle days in ancient civilizations to what it has become today. This little book takes the daring and Chestertonian step of asking what it is, in each age, we have dared to teach children. As Chesterton states, "…Mr. Shaw and such people are especially shrinking from that awful and ancestral responsibility to which our fathers committed us when they took the wild step of becoming men. I mean the responsibility of affirming the truth of our human tradition and handing it on with a voice of authority, an unshaken voice. That is the one eternal education; to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.” Whether you are a graduate or undergraduate student studying education, a veteran teacher, a lover of history, or just plain curious about what has come upstream from our present educational landscape, this book is for you! Containing a Conflagration (from the Introduction). "Plutarch supposedly said, 'The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled,' and Yeats, though no one really knows anymore, supposedly said 'Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.' If this is true, and it assuredly is, then the history of education is the continuation of a fire, the perpetuation of a conflagration. And anyone who has glared into a humble campfire for even a minute or two knows that passing on a flame, from one burning log to another, is an intricate, profoundly beautiful, and extraordinarily poetic endeavor. This little book is about harnessing a bonfire (a multitude of bonfires) to light a single candle; it is about consolidating the expansive river of educational history into a single and shallow cup from which one could be deeply hydrated...The history of education belongs to all of us, most especially those who want to be specialists, of any kind, in any field of study or industry. If we want better engineers, better doctors, better athletes, better artists, better chefs and mothers and fathers and executives, we must get education right. Adler is again helpful: 'We need specialists for our economic prosperity, for our national welfare and security, for continued progress in all the arts and sciences, and in all fields of scholarship. But for the sake of our cultural traditions, our democratic institutions, and our individual well-being, our specialists must also be generalists; that is, generally educated human beings.'" |