In a few weeks I expect to be releasing the manuscript of my
book on this website, in the Articles section. The title of the book is: Education:
as if our lives depended on it.

The book sets out the work that I have been engaged upon for
over thirty years; the attempt to give us a clear and effective account of what
I believe to be the true purpose of education. That purpose is to equip people
through learning to develop for themselves their own lives as worthwhile,
according to the best understanding that they are able to achieve. I have
already said elsewhere that if education isn’t about enabling learners to live
good lives, then we should be against it, because if it isn’t about this, it
will almost certainly be an exploitation of the learner, and represent a lack
of respect for them.

What we have conventionally come to think of as education –
universal, compulsory State schooling – quite patently isn’t about equipping
learners to develop their own Good Lives. This isn’t just a personal opinion of
mine, it is the unavoidable conclusion of an abundance of scholarly research
over many decades, and a good deal of educational commentary. Schools are
factories, and they engage in social engineering designed to produce an
intellectually dependent and docile workforce, and compliant citizens who will
fall in line with the agendas of the State. It is not to produce
self-determining and ethically or intellectually self-determining individuals,
or the citizens of true democracies. Abundant evidence of the failure of our
so-called “education” systems is everywhere around us today, from our
political failures at the national and local levels, to the numerous social
problems that Western countries wrestle with continually as people struggle to
find purpose and value in their lives. We are paying a very high price.

The idea that we should be responsible for the good of our
own lives, and be our own authorities as to what should be made of them, was
born in the European Enlightenment, and is now second nature to us, even if the
rights that it entails have yet to be fully achieved in our social systems. But
it does not take much of an historical investigation to see that, though the
idea was born three hundred years ago, and has become central in us all, there
never has been an attempt to develop the educational practices and systems that
such responsibility would require.

Forty years ago, as a student, I looked for an account of
what we should be doing in education; what its purpose really was supposed to
be. There must, I thought, be a book somewhere that would explain all this; a
book that would justify whatever it was that I was supposed to be doing as a
teacher and would-be educator. It took me a number of years to realize that
there was no such book. All of those that were available seemed too weak. They
were not the sorts of things that would show how that requirement that was
brought into being three hundred years ago could be met. They were not books
that would encourage us to stand up for education.

This left me deeply perplexed. I just could not understand
why nothing that I read really spoke to the fundamental educational question.
What should we be doing to create a good human being, as we now understand
that, and so far as that is a thing to be learned or enabled? Why wasn’t there
an educational justification that took our equal intrinsic worth to each other
and ourselves, as human beings, as its first value, and that showed what we would
be obliged to do if we were to live up to such a commitment?

This is, I hope, the book I was looking for.

My plan is to put it up on this website at the rate of two
chapters per week, if I can. At the same time, I will be attempting to assemble
it into an epub version that I will make available as a free download. The web
version, and the epub version will not be developed any further than this.

The next step will be to have a version edited, and then
make it available as a Kindle book on Amazon, and finally a POD version for
those who would like a hard copy. I may also read a version into MP3 files, so
that an audio book is available.

I hope that you enjoy the book, and that you will send me
comments. I would particularly like editorial suggestions, and requests for
further information.

If you do like it, please spread the word.

And please respect the copyright of this material.