I love bookshops. I love all kinds of bookshops but I have a special liking for stores that sell secondhand books. I do buy a lot of new books, from both physical and online stores, but for me the market in books that have been owned by others before me is, for some reason I would […]
Continue reading →This is the third in an occasional series of posts highlighting some of the books that led me into education or that have greatly influenced me as an educator over the years. Previous posts can be found here and here. For those of a progressive bent in education, the ‘golden age’ of radical educational thought is usually considered to be the period […]
Continue reading →BBC Radio Four offers a number of fine programmes about books, writing and reading. I regularly enjoy A Good Read in which the host and two guests each specify a book that all three have to read and then comment on. It is a great antidote to anyone who doubts that literary taste is entirely subjective. […]
Continue reading →Each new week brings with it the publication of yet another book telling us how technological developments will damage, or are already damaging, humankind. We are becoming more stupid and less sociable; we are abandoning literature and we are eroding our attention span; we are sabotaging our privacy and we are relinquishing our right to […]
Continue reading →Way way back in the dark ages, in the pre-history of the Web – around 1991, to be more precise – I wrote a paper for what was then the Scottish Council for Educational Technology, or SCET, long since swallowed up by Learning & Teaching Scotland, and itself now merged with Scotland’s schools inspectorate to become Education Scotland. […]
Continue reading →Anxiety sells! So says The Economist this week in an excellent piece showing just how long we have had to listen to the oft-heard announcements of the terminal decline of written English…..since at least 1387! In that year, Ranulph Higden, a Benedictine monk bemoaned the influx of words from Norman French, Anglo-Saxon and Danish. We know today that it […]
Continue reading →This is the second in an occasional series of posts highlighting some of the books that led me into education or that have greatly influenced me as an educator over the years. The first in the series can be found here. In 1971, Ivan Illich published Deschooling Society, and then two years later Tools for Conviviality. I read both books […]
Continue reading →This is the first of an occasional series of posts highlighting some of the books that led me into education or that have greatly influenced me as an educator over the years. Letter to a Teacher, by The School of Barbiana was first published in 1967 in Italian, and then in English translation, in a thin Penguin paperback, in […]
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