Liberals, Libertarians and Educational Theory

Abstract

The utopianism of the new right concerning markets certainly has influenced their views about how to organise the governance of education, ever since Milton Friedman's 1955 essay "The role of government in education". But privatisation of the kind that Friedman wanted has rarely in fact been tried, the notable exception being the attempt in Chile under Pinochet, and even there fewer than one half of students were in private schools one decade after the reforms (Friedman, 1955; Ladd, 2002; Hsieh and Urquiola, 2002). So this essay concentrates on a less commonly discussed utopian feature of the new right attitude to education. Student-centred education is usually thought of as a utopia of the left. But it is also, less obviously, a utopia of the right, one which has become remarkably successful in ways that are little acknowledged. Its dominance not only threatens the coherence of anything we might reasonably call an "education", but threatens also the scope for students to acquire from their education the capacity to think critically. Student-centred Education The key ideas may be summed up from John Darling's lucid account (Darling, 1994; Entwistle, 1970). Student-centred education is characterised by: an appreciation of children as individuals; an awareness of children's growth and development; and children's growth is not to be thought of teleologically, childhood not being a defective version of adulthood; the teacher is no more than a "facilitator". Hence the curriculum is based on freedom, discovery, experience and creativity, as opposed to engaging with a pre-existing body of knowledge to which the teacher is an authoritative and wise guide.