5. Analysts and theorists

Abstract

‘Analysis and theorists’ studies how changes in the style of school — in the ways that teachers teach — came from a new genre of observers and analysts: the social scientists. Psychologists exerted their influence on education through their ideas about the ways children learn. Theirs is a child-centred view of education. An interesting branch of education philosophy is psychometrics, or the measurement of human abilities, which proved to have a profound influence on how education would develop. Meanwhile, sociologists have looked at gender, race, class, and disability to examine how and why school maintains or even exaggerates differences between children, how it creates stigma, or how it incorrectly identifies as ‘problems’ children from certain backgrounds.