The PROCESS of EDUCATION Revisited.

Ten years have passed since The Process of Education was pub lished ? a decade of enormous change in the perspective and emphasis of educational reform. I am torn be tween beginning my account as an archaeologist reconstructing that peri od by its products, or beginning with a message of revolutionary import. I shall moderate both impulses, begin with a bit of archaeology, and show how my excavations lead me to a certain revolutionary zeal. Let me reconstruct the period in which The Process of Education came into being. Nineteen fifty-nine was a time of great concern over the intellec tual aimlessness of our schools. Great strides had been made in many fields of knowledge and these advances were not being reflected in what was taught in our schools. A huge gap had grown between what might be called the head and the tail of the academic proces sion. There was great fear, particularly, that we were not producing enough scientists and engineers. It was the period shortly after Sputnik I. The great problem faced by some of my colleagues in Cambridge at the time was that modern physics and mathematics were not represented in the curriculum, yet many of the deci sions that society had to make were premised on being able to understand modern science. Something had to be done to assure that the ordinary deci sion maker within the society would have a sound basis for decision. The