Summary
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history and the modern purpose of education. Nobody - would argue with the fact that education is of central importance to the people we are. And there seems to be no doubt at all that fine skills, flexible life-long learning and cultivated intelligence are the keys to all our futures. So how do we tackle what was until recently - just two hundred years ago - a unique preserve of the few, the privileged or the plucked out exceptions? Plato made his priorities in education plain when he inscribed over the entrance to the Academy “Let no one ignorant of mathematics enter here”. He prized learning that revealed what he called “eternal reality, the realm unaffected by the vicissitudes of change and decay”, and this became the objective of education in Europe for thousands of years - vocational education, concrete skills, was hardly dreamed of. But was he right? What is education for: is its role to teach us the nature of reality, or to give us the tools to deal with it?With Mary Warnock, philosopher and educationalist; Ted Wragg, Professor of Education, University of Exeter.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thanks for down learning the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uk. |
| 0:09.0 | I hope you enjoy the program. |
| 0:12.0 | Hello, Plato made his priorities in education plain when he inscribed over the entrance to the academy |
| 0:17.4 | let no one ignorant of mathematics enter here. |
| 0:21.1 | He prized learning that revealed what he called |
| 0:23.3 | eternal reality, the realm unaffected by the vicissitudes of change and decay, |
| 0:28.5 | and this became the objective of education in Europe for thousands of years, vocational education, concrete |
| 0:35.1 | skills were hardly dreamed of. But was he right? What's education for? Is its role to teach |
| 0:40.9 | us the nature of reality or to give us the tools to deal with it. |
| 0:44.5 | With me is Mary Warnock, the philosopher and educationalist, an author of many publications |
| 0:48.2 | on the subject of learning, and Ted Ragg, professor of education at the University of Exeter, an author of several books including the cubic curriculum. |
| 0:56.2 | Briefly to begin, Mary, what was the philosophy behind Plato's emphasis on abstract ideas in education? |
| 1:02.2 | Plato, I think, believed that you couldn't really know anything except |
| 1:09.0 | changeless truth, and this was represented by mathematics and astronomy and music up to a point, but what |
| 1:17.8 | he was totally uninterested in was the actual world we live in. |
| 1:22.4 | For instance he had no idea whatever of history or historical |
| 1:26.2 | studies. They were completely absent from his idea of education. So you had to work away from being quite a young child through to the aim of education, |
| 1:37.9 | which was to understand the nature of number and the reality that lay behind the world. The world itself |
| 1:46.3 | was really beneath contempt. So of course you didn't want to stick on learning how |
| 1:51.4 | to be a carpenter or something with real objects because it was not worth anything. |
| 1:56.0 | So no mechanical education that would be mostly mechanical at that time, no particular concrete education, |
| 2:02.0 | you use concrete skills |
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