The central aims of this book

This book set out with some very specific goals in mind, even if it has not necessarily achieved them all. The first is to address the issue of mass education in ways that have something to offer a range of different readers. This book is not aimed specifically at undergraduates, any more than it is at practising teachers, or university academics. Each chapter has been organised with a progressive layering of complexity and density, such that readers with differing levels of knowledge and expertise should still be able to get something out of it. This has not been written as a textbook, with bite-sized pieces tailor-made for tutorial digestion. The book was put together for a range of reasons: it is a summary of the current state of play within Australian (and global) theories of education; it is a resource book for those interesting in assessing the weight of different conceptual approaches to mass schooling; it is an analysis of various issues within contemporary society, as they relate to education; it is a (relatively) gentle critique of reductionist analyses of our schooling institutions and their outcomes; and it is a call for us not to forget the value of philosophy within the broader play of the social sciences.