Freedom and Authority in Education

"Although I don’t agree with everything the author Bantock writes, I find his work very interesting. In Freedom and Authority, he makes an interesting attempt to link together issues to do with philosophy, pedagogy, politics and psychology, locating education in its wider cultural setting. What he’s really arguing in the book is that schools need to have a more purposeful intellectual mission. The book actually raises more questions than it answers, but it then helped me to go my own way, to think and come up with my own solutions to these problems. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In Freedom and Authority, Bantock looks at a lot of old debates that have occurred in the past, over the purpose of university, for example, or the pursuit of the truth. The past is important, not to give you a model for what to do in the present but because often the key debates of the moment have been had before, and things were said in these debates which might be relevant for today. If you look back 2000 years to Ancient Greece for example, Socrates raised the question: can virtue be taught? This is basically the question we are asking when we discuss whether we can teach a child how they should feel and relate to other people. Looking at the past can help us understand our own situation better."