I’ve been reading Kieran Egan’s text on education, Getting it Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget (Yale University Press, 2002).  What a great, thought provoking book.  It describes in part the career and pedagogy of Herbert Spencer, who believed that a classical education was only “ornamental” and promoted instead a kind of utilitarian viewpoint, focused on the practical and on meeting the needs of the time.   I once worked in the same department Egan teaches in, at S.F.U. (I tutored E.S.L. graduate students, his position there had rather more leverage). … Continue reading “Getting it wrong from the beginning”