The Conservative Case for Education: Against the Current

The Conservative Case for Education argues that educational thinking in English-speaking countries over the last fifty years has been massively influenced by a dominant liberal ideology based on unchallenged assumptions. Conservative voices pushing against the current of this ideology have been few, but powerful and drawn from across the political spectrum. The book shows how these twentieth-century voices remain highly relevant today, using them to make a conservative case for education. Written by a former government adviser and head teacher, the book focuses on four of the most powerful of these conservative voices: the poet and social critic T. S. Eliot, the philosopher Michael Oakeshott, the political thinker Hannah Arendt and the educationist E D Hirsch. In the case of each thinker, the book shows how their ideas throw fresh light on contemporary educational issues. These issues range widely across current educational practice and include: creativity, cultural literacy, mindfulness, the place of religion in schools, education for citizenship, the teaching of history and Classics, the authority of the teacher, the arguments for and against a national curriculum, the educational response to cultural diversity, and more. A concluding chapter sums up the conservative case for education in a set of Principles that would be acceptable to many from the Left, as well as the Right of the political spectrum. The book should be of particular interest to educators and educational policy makers at a time when ‘conservative’ governments are in power in the UK and the USA, as well as to researchers, academics and postgraduate students engaged in the study of educational policy, or those studying educational issues from an ethical, philosophical and cultural standpoint.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Confronting education’s group think Part One: T S Eliot 1. Eliot as student and teacher 2. Changing definitions of culture and society - Eliot as social and cultural critic 3. Education for wisdom, happiness and ‘getting on’ - in that order 4. Educating the Few and the Many 5. Compulsion versus choice 6. How we forgot about the nation state: education for identity and citizenship 7. Educating for prejudice (and against it) 8. Whatever happened to education for a Christian society? 9. Is there any future for Classics?Chapter Ten. Creativity depends on transmission 10. Creativity depends on transmission Part Two: Michael Oakeshott 11. Michael Oakeshott: philosopher and educator 12. School as a place apart 13. The project to abolish ‘School’ 14. Moral, historical and political education 15. The decline of the University: from Cardinal Newman to the 2015 Higher Education Green Paper Part Three: Hannah Arendt 16. Radical objectives and conservative pedagogy 17. The need to stop and think Part Four: E D Hirsch 18. The pariah strikes back: teaching for cultural literacy Conclusion The Fifteen Principles of a conservative case for education