Rich source of ideas
The Routledge Falmer Guide to Key Debates in Education

Dennis Hayes (ed)
226pp
Routledge Falmer
ISBN 0 415 33244 3

This is a comprehensive, stimulating and challenging collection of essays. The contributors are informed and often passionate about education.

The brevity of each essay is generally positive. The thematic structure provides a guide to reading, and headings like 'the diminished academy' reflect a desire to question trends.

Familiar issues - like the role of the market in education, the nature of literacy, the role of citizenship and environmentalism in education - receive interesting and often novel treatment. Each chapter includes questions for discussion and the references are a rich source of readings for further investigation.

What I found most interesting about this collection is that its arguments raise a fundamental question: what do current practices and ideas tell us about our view of each other, of humanity and of education? In exploring this, the contributors consider how prevailing social preoccupations with 'risk' and 'trust' are expressed in educational trends.

One interesting and fruitful line of enquiry is based on the idea that today we view ourselves and others as vulnerable and in need of protection from ourselves, from life and from each other.

Kathryn Ecclestone argues that the preoccupation in education with 'self-esteem' expresses a therapeutic view of education; it leads to a view of education from the perspective of minimising the difficulties that children and students may face in learning and encourages a diminished view of individual capacity and of human potential. This she sees as the demoralisation of education.

Dennis Hayes explores this trend in different educational settings, and James Panton sees it reflected in the drive to reduce pressures on Oxbridge students.

Lynn Revell and Simon Knight suggest that essentially therapeutic interventions, like 'circle time' and anti-bullying strategies, are counter-productive and undermine children's independence and development as individuals.

In the final section contributors provide useful stimuli to theoretical debate. Shirley Lawes argues that 'reflective practice', the guiding principle of teacher training, has in effect become a substitute for educational theory. Ray Godfrey raises important questions about the nature of educational research.

This text is a rich source of ideas and argument to stimulate debate in education departments, and for anyone concerned with the future of education.

Gina Owens
Bath Spa University College

This review was originally published in the May 2005 issue of The Lecturer.