Educating the teachers

Abstract

It is as a result of the artificial separation into academic, intellectual and employer, on the one hand, and practical, manual worker on the other, and the exploitation of the lower classes by the upper, that education today falls into two main areas — that for the upper and upper‐middle classes who will be the property owners, the employers, and the rulers of our society, and that for the lower classes, with an increasing area of overlap as education becomes increasingly necessary for a technical society. The separation in social function and in education creates large problems of communication and of social strife, as Basil Bernstein so clearly shows. The children of the higher social classes (some 30 per cent) have a rich infant experience of play and language that enables them to profit from education, while the restricted experience and languages of the lower classes (some 30–40 per cent) denies them this possibility and ensures that they will continue to act as beasts of burden without serious complaint. They form the bulk of our ‘Newsom’ children, passive, apathetic, untouched by many of teacher's values, often completely lost in an academic fog, and conditioned only to accept authority without question.

Citation

Duane, M. (1968), "Educating the teachers", Education + Training, Vol. 10 No. 6, pp. 250-251. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb015981