Book review
Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education
(From Piaget to the Present)
Editor: Joy A. Palmer
Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (November 9, 2001)
Review by Donald Clark, Epic
Let’s start with Palmer’s list of the
fifty modern thinkers:
1. A.S. Neill
2. Susan Isaacs
3. Harold Rugg
4. Ludwig Wittgenstein
5. Martin Heidegger
6. Herbert Edward Read
7. Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky
8. Jean Piaget
9. Michael Oakeshott
10. Carl Rogers
11. Ralph Winifred Tyler
12. Burrhus Frederic Skinner
13. Harry Broudy
14. Simone Weil
15. Joseph J. Schwab
16. Clark Kerr
17. Benjamin S. Bloom
18. Jerome S. Bruner
19. Torsten Husen
20. Lee J. Cronbach
21. Donald Thomas Campbell
22. Maxine Greer
23. R.S. Peters
24. John I. Goodlad
25. Paulo Friere
26. Seymour B. Sarason
27. Israel Scheffler
28. Jean-Francois Lyotard
29. Lawrence A. Cremin
30. Basil Bernstein
31. Michel Foucoult
32. Margaret Donaldson
33. Ivan Illich
34. Lawrence Kohlberg
35. Paul H. Hirst
36. Philip Wesley Jackson
37. Jane Roland Martin
38. Nel Noddings
39. Jurgen Habermas
40. Carl Bereiter
41. Pierre Bourdieu
42. Neil Postman
43. Theodore R. Sizer
44. Elliot Eisner
45. John White
46. Lee S. Shulman
47. Michael W. Apple
48. Howard Gardner
49. Henry Giroux
50. Lind Darling-Hammond
Unlike the first shaky volume ‘Fifty Major Thinkers in Education’
(see earlier review), this, at least, is better edited. The editor
of the series must have laid down the law on the choice of contributor
as, unlike the previous volume, there’s only one from the
University of Durham, and no students! The quality of the contributions
is therefore much higher.
On a positive note, these contributions are largely secular and
scientific. Psychology and evidence-based theory is often cited,
although many armchair theorists are still there. Politics, sociology
and educational theory all emerge as forces that influence educational
thought but if truth be told, we have seen more progress in psychology
and educational theory through evidence-based theory in the last
century than in all that came before.
Only four philosophers this time with Wittgenstein, Heidegger,
Habermas and Foucoult but psychologists abound. Unfortunately, it
loads up the list up with far too many rather obscure German philosophers,
then tries to counter this with one Chinese, two Islamic scholars
and an Indian. The result is a sort of tokenism. I applaud them
for the effort, but it still falls short on balance.
Unfortunately, despite many excellent entries, the book ends on
a truly false note with an article on the famously discredited Sir
Cyril Burt, who falsified his results, published his own work in
the journal he edited without peer review, and was responsible for
the insidious 11 plus system. It is truly perverse to include a
cheating civil servant with some of the world’s greatest thinkers.
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On style, all entries bar one, which is co-written by a journalist,
are written by academics, and it tells. The style is often flat
and does little to inspire the reader. This isn’t helped by
the volume of biographical detail, which is easier to research and
write, so on the whole, it’s hard work. In general, the content
is weak, high on biographical detail, low on educational thinking.
Where there is critical analysis it is often on the thinker’s
philosophical or political thought, not on their educational theory.
This is the book’s biggest weakness. There’s actually
more written on non-educational detail and thought than on education
itself.
In one sense, the book has an unintended consequence. It shows
that education is an odd and fragmented field. There is a feeling
that it is not an entirely legitimate academic enterprise, really
just a collection of thoughts and reflections on practice, and that
the real work is being done in psychology departments. To ignore
William James and Ebbinghaus is a symptom of this educational wooliness.
Would we be worse off if universities scrapped their education departments?
Discuss.
Interestingly, many of the works of these authors are now freely
available on the internet. If there’s a 51st major thinker
in education it should go to the world wide web.
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