Education Quotes

“Aside from the straightforwardly visible curriculum, there is the hidden curriculum. This exists in the wider set of beliefs and values pupils acquire because of the way that a school is run and its teaching organized. It is about the behaviour of the teachers, the textbooks chosen, the school rules.”
― Gary Thomas, Education: A Very Short Introduction

“Albert Einstein asserted that ‘Education is what remains when we have forgotten everything that has been learned at school.”
― Gary Thomas, Education: A Very Short Introduction

“One of the most significant consequences of the proliferation of tests over the last decades of the 20th century and the first of the 21th has been this tendency of assessment to direct the curriculum. Like a huge magnet, assessment drags curriculum toward it. It should, of course, even if we accept the need for tests, be the other way round: the curriculum should be shaped independent of any consideration of tests: tests should be constructed and administered in another space, both literally and metaphorically, hermetically sealed not only form the teacher’s gaze but also – and even more importantly – from the teacher’s consideration.
In practice, though, this never happens. It is inevitable that if you decide regularly to test children's performance on the curriculum, and if, furthermore, you make teacher’s careers and school’s futures depend on the result, the tests will very quickly come to dominate what is taught. Not only the content, but also the style and manner of the teaching will be influenced by the tests. Teaching will be about getting the right answer, irrespective of understanding.”
― Gary Thomas, Education: A Very Short Introduction

“The curriculum is not, in practical terms, simply about knowledge being transmitted, but about how that knowledge is handled – or even how it is transcended – by teachers to enable understanding in their charges. The subject matter itself, the knowledge, while important, is less important than the opportunities it offers for the development of thinking. Knowledge, Stenhouse suggested, should principally be seen in the curriculum as a medium for thinking.
His point is perhaps doubly true today, when knowledge pure and simple – facts, information – is so easily located. [...] what can now be found in seconds may have taken days or weeks to find, so the more that could be stored in the head, the better equipped a person was for life. The world of knowledge has been turned on its head in a period of only two decades or so by the Internet, and in our thinking about the curriculum we haven’t yet worked out the consequences.”
― Gary Thomas, Education: A Very Short Introduction