Education as the Power of Independent Thought

Abstract

eiews EDUCATION AS THE POWER OF INDEPENDENT THOUGHT William Bruneau Educational Studies / U. of British Columbia Vancouver, bc, Canada v6t 1z4 william.bruneau@shaw.ca Chris Shute. Bertrand Russell: “Education as the Power of Independent Thought”. Bramcote Hills, Nottingham, uk: Educational Heretics P., 2002. Pp. viii + 71.£8.50. o read Chris Shute on education is to be carried back to the late 1960s and Tthe free-school movement. John Holt, Paul Goodman, A. S. Neill, George Dennison, and Ivan Illich helped to build the case against compulsory statecontrolled systems of mis-education. State schools prized uniformity and conformity and thus denied the creative impulse, all that is most “natural” and “human” in good teaching and happy learning. Free-school advocates therefore recommended revolt, either through student strikes and uprisings, or wholesale retreat into the regions of private schooling, based in the home if necessary. Recent studies suggest that although the movement’s life was short, lasting from about 1966 to 1973, its mystique has survived into the twenty-first century .1 In publicity for home schooling, “charter” schooling, and private education in the 1990s and early 2000s—and in popular arguments against state control and national or international testing—the language of the 1960s has been revived. A small minority of parents and educationists talk this way, but it is a vocal minority. All this is pertinent to a review of Shute’s book, since he offers his readers an adaptation of Russell’s educational theory of the 1920s and early 1930s. Shute’s prior commitment to free education has led him to make additions to and subtractions from Russell’s thought. He tells us about the additions, but not the subtractions. Shute wants to demonstrate the educational and “humanistic” 1 See W. J. Reese, ed., “American Education in the Twentieth Century: Progressive Legacies”, special issue of Paedagogica Historica, 39 (Aug. 2003), passim; and Ron Miller, Free Schools, Free People. Education and Democracy after the 1960s (Albany: State U. of New York P., 2002). russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. 23 (summer 2003): 69–94 The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn 0036-01631 70 Reviews merit of Russell’s ideas, but as part of a campaign for “free” home schooling, and possibly to promote his publisher’s schemes and plans. Bertrand Russell: “Education as the Power of Independent Thought” is one of 28 titles published by Educational Heretics Press, on natural learning, the evils of rules and regimentation, the compulsory schooling “disease”, and the democratic advantages inherent in the organization of small, private schools. This is a press with a purpose, as the publisher’s foreword to Chris Shute’s book makes plain. Among its current titles are biographical studies of a select group of earlier reformers, mostly British, and who flourished between 1910 and 1930. They include Henry Morris, Margaret McMillan, Charlotte Mason, Edmond Holmes, and Bertrand Russell. The Educational Heretics Press quite rightly understands that the free school movement of the 1960s was not the first, nor perhaps the last of its kind. Shute’s book might not survive in a North American court, as its questions and argument would be thought to lead the witness. Yet on a short list of important educational questions, it is a moderately useful introduction to Russell’s ideas (although not his practice as a parent after 1921, or as co-director of Beacon Hill School, 1927–32). In Shute’s view, Russell considered that (1) education is a life-long work-inprogress ; (2) education and indoctrination are logically inconsistent; (3) educational thought should lead to practice, a linkage too often absent from largescale state or private schooling—that is, one should practise what one preaches; and (4) compulsive and compulsory “head-stuffing” has impoverished the State system (p. 5), that is, children need teaching far less than they need exposure to interesting new knowledge, and the opportunity to interact with it freely.… “It is by what we do ourselves (and for our own reasons, C.R.S. [sic]) that we learn.” (P. 17; this last a quotation from Russell’s On Education, p. 65) To the first three on the list, Russell...