Response to Mark Fettes’ Review of The New Significance of Learning: Imagination’s Heartwork

I’m grateful to Mark Fettes for taking the time to review my book in an essay length piece. Yet I’m quite surprised to discover that the review largely bypasses the book’s central theme. That theme is an exploration of the claim that education is a practice in its own right. Far from being a ‘familiar complaint’, this claim is a rarely-made one, even by today’s more forceful critics of bureaucratic control of education. Far from being the plea of a well-meaning moderate moreover, it is a radical idea on any historical appraisal; as unwelcome to many of today’s Western governments as were the claims of previous times for extending the electoral franchise to non-land holders, religious dissenters, women, or diverse ethnic groups. For these reasons the historical-philosophical account of the colonisation of education in the book’s Introduction and opening chapter is crucial