The Evolution of Education: Change and Reform

Abstract

This chapter focuses on education and the courses it considers cultural entities. Using three different evolutionary analogies, it explains how education can emerge, evolve or change in response to external factors. The emphasis is on the emergence of Science, Technology and Society (STS) courses in tertiary and secondary education in Britain. The discussion begins by focusing on education as a cultural artefact and how educational change is influenced by culture. The chapter then examines the phases of deevelopment of the STS curriculum in British education and the application of evolutionary thinking to the major trends in educational reform that have affected Britain and other countries during the last century, citing some of the later writings by Donald Campbell. It also highlights the imporance of identifying both the organisms whose evolution was being tampered with, and the ‘habitat’ in which they had to exist, in order to understand the extreme and damaging educational changes of the 1990s in Britain. Finally, it considers trends in STS education in the post-Thatcher era.