Description
What do leading Head Masters and Head Mistresses think about the state of education? These are some of their opinions. Seventy years ago, Kegan Paul published two influential volumes: The Headmaster Speaks and The Headmistress Speaks. The editor of each volume invited twelve of the most influential head teachers of the day to contribute an essay which outlined his or her vision of education. The results were often surprising. Who, for example, would have thought that the girls’ schools of the 1930s were hotbeds of progressive educational thought? And who realised that then, as now, common complaint was that the curriculum was being driven by examinations, to the detriment of real learning? But each contribution displayed a real grasp of the practicalities of running a school – so that the visions were visions of the possible – in contrast to the nonsense which so often masquerades as educational theory. Seventy years on, the University of Buckingham Press is repeating the exercise, inviting the current head teachers of those schools represented in 1936 and 1937 to contribute to a new volume and to offer their take on the challenges faced by those in education today and on the way forward for our schools.
