Summary
Contents
About the SeriesThe SAGE Key Concepts series provides students with accessible and authoritative knowledge of the essential topics in a variety of disciplines. Cross-referenced throughout, the format encourages critical evaluation through understanding. Written by experienced and respected academics, the books are indispensable study aids and guides to comprehension.Key Concepts in Education provides students with over 100 essential themes, topics and expressions that Education students are likely to encounter, both during their courses and beyond in professional practice. Co-authored to draw on experiences of working within academia, local authorities and the classroom, the entries provide:a definition of the concepta description of the historical and practical contextan explanation of how the concept is appliedan evaluation of the concepthelpful references and suggested further readingThis book will be essential reading for students of Education, and an invaluable reference tool for their professional careers. About the AuthorsFred Inglis is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Sheffield. Lesley Aers is a senior member of a local authority school improvement service and an Ofsted inspector. Both authors are former schoolteachers.
Idea
Idea
There are rather too many senses of this word in the language of classrooms, and it would be as well to ration them. Back at the beginning of philosophy, Plato suggested that the ideas (or ‘the Forms’) existed apart from any conscious beings, and were those defining entities of mind which, without any location, provided the perfect shapes of thought and being towards which human beings aspired but of which they could only see the flickering and unstable shadows. (This is Plato's famous metaphor of ‘the cave’.)
With the more or less modern theories of psychology and knowledge which begin in the seventeenth century, Plato's ideas were turned into something mental, and ‘idea’ was the name for any object of which one was conscious; this ...