Description

“Why Educate?”
The Learning Skills Foundation is an independent not-for-profit organisation. Our independent status enables the Foundation to offer leading academics in this country opportunities through either lectures or Debates to put forward views and opinions about the state of education and how it could be in the future. “Why Educate?” was a series of four thought-provoking lectures given in 2008 by four eminent professors in education. The lectures were recorded and have been edited to produce this book. Each lecture appears in essay form with questions from the audience at the end of each.
Professor David Hargreaves (Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge) asked the question “Who runs and who should run our schools?”. Taking as his starting point the origins of Wikipedia he showed how the site had exploded the myth that information was in the hands of the few. He argued passionately that the business of running schools should be in the hands of those who understand the possibilities and potential of the Wikipedia model and technology in general: the Y Generation.
Professor Simon Baron-Cohen (Director of the Autism Research Centre, Cambridge) addressed the issue of Aspergers Syndrome in schools and whether those on the autistic spectrum should be expected to follow the National Curriculum. His detailed and fascinating exposition of the scope and nature of autism highlighted what a mismatch the curriculum is to the needs of those on the autistic spectrum and how we are doing them a disservice.
Professor David Hopkins (inaugural HSBC Chair in International Leadership, Professorial Fellow at the Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne) looked at the fundamental question ‘Are schools still relevant?’ In his lecture he looked at whether schools allowed children to reach their ‘maximum potential’ and reviewed the different teaching approaches to tackle this core objective over the past four decades. Many fascinating insights into the role and workings of the government as well as many thought-provoking questions were explained and examined along the way.
Professor Alison Wolf ( Sir Roy Griffiths Professor of public sector management at King’s College London) talked on whether the National Curriculum is ‘fit for purpose’. It was a wide-ranging analysis of the origins and nature of the National Curriculum in which Alison highlighted the point that the speed with which the curriculum was conceived, constructed and implemented and its monolithic proportions have effectively stifled public debate about what education should be for the past twenty years. We have been more concerned with measuring outcomes and implementing initiatives than re-addressing this fundamental question: why educate? Fittingly this was precisely the question which prompted the Learning Skills Foundation to put on the lecture series in the first place.