Chapter 2 - Why not the best?

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Why not the best?	103

  The traditional British approach to schooling has always been based on the "essentialist" view: that a truly liberal education can best be produced through certain selected subjects. To that the great British universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and the great "public schools" such as Eton and Rugby, also added the responsibility for the moral training of future members of Britain's political and administrative classes, and those that would guide the British Empire.
  Despite improvements in recent years, the hierarchy of Britain's class society has been inextricably linked with its streaming of education: "public schools" and Oxbridge for the "leaders", "industrial training" for tradesmen, and elementary "three Rs training" for the 50 percent who until recently ended up as farm or general laborers.
  Elsewhere in Western Europe a different approach has predominated since the Moravian-born Czech bishop and educator John Comenius effectively introduced the modern textbook in 1658.
  Some call this approach encyclopedism: the premise that the content of education should include all human knowledge, with illustrated "textbooks" on each subject.
  Comenius also argued strongly that good education should flow from "natural laws"; and since learning takes place first through the senses, his curriculum was designed to develop these first.
  Comenius's theories have strongly influenced some aspects of French education since the revolution there in the late 18th century: that, as all are created equal, society should not be divided into rulers and the ruled.
  Since the 19th century, when Napoleon Bonaparte created a system of national education, France has concentrated on a curriculum of more than 10 compulsory subjects. Even today every child in France, in whatever school, is expected to be learning exactly the same body of information as other children of the same age, on the same day.
  Germany has used many of Comenius's theories, but added them to its own Lutheran Protestant work ethic. Hence the continuing large percentage of Germans who undergo apprenticeships, linking together practical training with academic education.
  Another European movement also owes its beginnings to Comenius and to Aristotle's philosophy that there is nothing in the intellect that does not first exist in the senses. The 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau took this further, proposing that the key to learn lies with developing each child's senses, starting with concrete experiences.

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