Student-Centred: Education, Freedom and the Idea of Audience

Debates around education tend to be constructed through a series of oppositions, the student-centred against the didactic, the innovative against the traditional, the free against the controlled. Rather than attempting to resolve such conflicts, this book analyses the extent to which the various sides can be read as sharing a range of assumptions about pedagogical purpose and process. In charting the various ways in which the student's desires are claimed to be known, its independence guaranteed, and its growth optimised, the book makes a plea for the role of close textual analysis in any engagement with educational discourse. It is argued that until the student is read as a construction, rather than observed as a fact, the various sides in education theory will not be able to address the consensus their work is dependent upon.