This essay offers an extensive rehabilitation and reappraisal of the concept of childhood innocence as a means of testing the boundaries of some prevailing constructions of childhood. It excavates in detail some of the lost histories of innocence in order to show that these are more diverse and more complex than established and pejorative assessments of them conventionally suggest. Recovering, in particular, the forgotten pedigree of the Romantic account of the innocence of childhood underlines its depth and furnishes an enriched (...) understanding of its critical role in the coming of mass education––both as a catalyst of social change and as an alternative measure of the child-centeredness of the institutions of public education. Now largely and residually confined to the inheritance of nursery education, the concept of childhood innocence, and the wider Romantic project of which it is an element, can help question the assumptions underpinning modern, competence-centred philosophies of childhood. (shrink)

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel developed the concept of institutionalized education, which reflected public schooling and its legitimacy in the context of rapid transformation of European feudal societies to modern societies. The concept of school reflects the Hegelian theory of Bildung and the concept of modern society. What makes Hegel’s philosophy interesting is his conviction that the processes of Bildung can take place only in the context of social institutions and in the highly organized forms of human interaction regulated by those (...) institutions. Hence the development of an individual, according to Hegel, depends exclusively on institutionalized forms of interaction. In modern society, pedagogical institutions have a specific function: on the one hand, schooling is essentially an institutional form of initiating the process of Bildung in which an individual acquires culture and applies it to life—a life which consequently becomes consciously led by an individual self; on the other, schooling is essentially a way for modern society to ensure its self-preservation by preparing the individual to respond to the demands of civic society so that she or he can take part in the economic production and reproduction of modern society. (shrink)

Education cannot mean that the young are the product of the activities of their teachers. At the same time, we do not speak of education if students would simply learn something irrespective of the activities of their teachers. In this paper we focus on the question: How is education possible? Our aim is to contribute to a social theory of education, a theory that does not reduce our understanding of educational processes and practices to underlying 'constituting elements' but rather tries (...) to understand the social nature of education as a reality sui generis. (shrink)

This paper has two main foci: the history of curriculum design, and implications from the new sciences of chaos and complexity for the development of new forms of curriculum design and teaching implementation. Regarding the first focus, the paper posits that there exist—to use Wittgenstein's phrase—‘family resemblances’ between Peter Ramus’ 16th century curriculum design and that of Ralph Tyler in the 20th century. While this 400‐year linkage is by no means linear, there are overlapping strands from Ramus to Comenius to (...) the Puritans to colonial New England to Horace Mann to Ralph Tyler. What unites these strands, all belonging to the Protestant Methodization movement that swept across northern Europe into colonial America and the USA, is the concept of Method. Taylor's ‘time and motion’ studies set the stage for Tyler's Basic Principles of curriculum design—those starting with set goals and concluding with measured assessment. The second focus draws on the new sciences of chaos and complexity to develop a different sense of curriculum and instruction—open, dynamic, relational, creative, and systems oriented. The paper concludes with an integration of the rational/scientific with the aesthetic/spiritual into a view of education and curriculum informed by complexity. (shrink)