Why the Hell are we Here?: Who needs a curriculum?

by Anthony Barton, David Stansfield

The second book in the series 'Free the Children!' in which two famous educational innovators, David Stansfield and Anthony Barton, describe the present state of schooling, based in part upon a plan by Napoleon to produce malleable young people of limited education to sing patriotic songs and fight battles for their country, and suggest new and exciting ideas more appropriate for the Age of the Internet. This is a book about the efforts made by two reformers, David Stansfield and Anthony Barton, who, in the late Twentieth and early Twenty-First centuries, have worked hard to help teachers, students and administrators escape from the confines of a public education system devised largely by the Jesuits in the Eighteenth century, and then promoted in the Nineteenth by Napoleon as part of his wide program of societal reform. Stansfield and Barton have reason to believe that our present-day school architecture was intended from the outset to drum into the heads of peasant children just enough literacy and numeration to make them obedient to the dictates of Church and State. Colonialism spread this form of public education to many parts of the world, and then Independence led such schools and their middle-class government-employed teachers to become part of the apparatus of the modern nation. Parents are made to work in factories while the State brings up their children to be obedient to the Government and to fight wars on the Government’s behalf. Stansfield and Barton think this hardly fair on the children or their teachers. Stansfield and Barton have worked all their lives to broaden opportunities for children and teachers, looking ahead to universal access to the Internet, and advocating hopeful tactics to enrich the lives and comprehension of both young and old. It may be that the days of the madrasa and the seminary are at last ending and that something less blinkered is taking shape to help the young become truly educated and not merely literate and compliant with authority. Stansfield and Barton have divided this account of their work into three books dealing with the questions that haunt us Who the Hell are We? Why the Hell are We Here? and Where the Hell are we Going? They hope this simple arrangement will make their experiments easier to understand and more fun to emulate.

79 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 26, 2020