Joseph Agassi’s Educational Thoughts in Interchange (1970–1987)

Abstract

For over 50 years, Joseph Agassi has thought and written about education, and published some of his original thinking in the journal Interchange, originally the official journal of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in the University of Toronto and presently a journal in the Springer collection of journals edited out of the Werklund School of Education in the University of Calgary. Joseph joined the editorial board of Interchange in the 1980s, where he also made a vigorous contribution to the improvement of the work of others. In the following pages I will explore Agassi’s use of a presupposition about education that he once offered me, as it weaves its way through three extended pieces of educational writing he published in Interchange in the period 1970–1987. The presupposition was that “a child learns by itself, but with the indispensible aid of a teacher.”