2 - Life in schools
from Part A - Introduction – Changing Education
Summary
Overview
This chapter characterises three different kinds of educational experience – didactic, authentic and transformative.
Didactic education is relatively old, with roots as old as writing. However, it comes to global and near-universal prominence as the primary mode of learning in the mass-institutionalised education that emerged almost everywhere in the world in the 19th and 20th centuries. The experience of didactic education is still common today, for a variety of social, cultural and, at times, practical reasons. Mass, institutionalised education allowed parents to work while schools took care of children, imparting the basics of reading and writing, but perhaps more importantly inculcating in children a sense of discipline and order. Didactic teaching had teachers and textbooks telling, and learners getting their lessons right or wrong. In the didactic classroom, the teacher established a pattern of relationships in which students learnt to accept received facts and moral truths, to comply with commands given by the teacher and to absorb the knowledge authority of the curriculum. In these classroom settings, they learnt to get used to a balance of agency in which they were relatively powerless to act autonomously or to make knowledge themselves.
Authentic education movements emerged in the 20th century, in part as a reaction to the culture of order and control characteristic of didactic education. The major principles of authentic education are that learners should take a more active part in their learning, and that this learning should be closely and practically connected to their life experiences.
- Type
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- Information
- New LearningElements of a Science of Education, pp. 17 - 46Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008