‘The Great Educators’

Abstract

MOST people concerned in education will tell you that there is no such creature as a ‘Great Educator’ nowadays; some will contend there never was. The concept is seen as part of the hero myth, now widely and enthusiastically discredited, the fantasy that an individual with a message is capable of changing the course of human affairs. In a world of ‘superpowers’ and international combines, it has become increasingly difficult to imagine an individual exercising any significant influence at all. The hero has been converted into an abstraction, an image required by ordinary men and women to see them through the confused, messy business of daily living. In war he is Douglas Haig, Foch, ‘Monty’, Rommel; in politics Churchill, Stalin, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara; in education the ‘Great Educators’. The image exists because we want it to exist. We live in chaos, but continue to believe that somewhere someone holds the key to order. We are all educational alchemists, in quest of the Educator’s Stone.