Liberating Learning
About this book
Throughout the history of our civilization, education has been seen both by philosophers and national leaders and by educators to be essential for social cohesion and for economic development. Added to this is the fact that a good experience of education greatly enhances the quality of life of students not only during periods of formal education, but also throughout their lives. There is, however, inevitably a certain tension between the (proper) interest of governments in ensuring that education will prepare all young people to be good and effective citizens and the desire of educators to ensure that the learning experience of each individual student is as rich and personally developmental as possible. It is, of course, important to have comparable standards within a single country and as far as possible between countries. However, this does not apply, we would argue, when it comes to issues of curriculum, where standardisation leads all too swiftly to constraint and over-heavy regulation. The liberal tradition in education places great emphasis on individual freedom and its emphasis goes well beyond promoting 'freedom from...', rather positioning and promoting education as 'freedom to...' It is this commitment to education s emancipatory potential that underpins all the essays in this book. We focus on three key the curriculum; pedagogy; and the role of secondary education in widening participation in higher education. We invited authoritative thinkers and practitioners to address these issues from different perspectives in order to generate a debate around how we can translate our shared vision of education as authentically enabling and emancipatory into a transformational reality for all young people. The world of schools and universities is changing rapidly, as globalisation expands all possibilities of communication and mobility. New and emerging technologies are changing the ways that teaching and learning occur, and especially as social networking technologies evolve, the public and the private blur and merge; learning and socialising become closer and intertwined; hierarchies mutate and dissolve as students learn better to interrogate and to research, and take the opportunity to be part of the process of the creation and management of knowledge rather than simply the recipients of it. Exciting and pioneering work is taking place across the UK, as is evidenced from the essays in this volume. Significantly, there is increasing awareness of the need to share ideas and exchange good practice not only between different parts of the secondary schools sector, but also between the schools sector and the University and the FE sector and between educators and policy-makers. This book presents a variety of different pioneering initiatives with a series of commentaries from different perspectives on where education is and where it is going. We hope the often challenging insights of our distinguished contributors will serve as sign-posts to an educational landscape of greater diversity and greater autonomy for learners and teachers alike. We hope also that they will serve as catalysts for further debate on how we can work and think together truly to liberate learning and to widen participation in a lifelong adventure of learning.