The Concept of Progress in Marxist Educational Theories

All who advocate educational ideas claim that their adoption would result in progress, improvement or development, and would constitute reform. Even those dubbed utterly reactionary by their enemies prove on inspection to be, like Plato, seeking a version of progress/improvement/development/reform, albeit by seeking to return to a lost golden age. No voices proclaim that they seek to achieve regression or deterioration in education. The point is then to determine just what it is that is meant by progress or reform in an educational theory and how it is to be detected or measured. The host of educational ideas competing with each other in the past and today may be grouped into four clusters: the instrumental, the radical reconstructionist, the child-centred and the liberal. These categories are not entirely watertight, but they are by no means arbitrary and have potential heuristic value as Weberian ideal-types. On the surface the concept of progress within each cluster seems easily identifiable: instrumentalist theories should focus on the goodness of fit between educational provision and the supposed needs of the particular society; radical theories should use as their yardstick the extent to which educational provision contributes to the type of social transformation desired; child-centred theories should concern themselves with the degree to which curriculum and pedagogy approximate to the needs, interests and experiences attributed to individual children; liberal theories should look to the depth of initiation into knowledge deemed most significant for the development of mind. Yet closer inspection reveals progress and development to be, in Gallie's sense (1968 pp. 161 ff), not only contested but also necessarily contestable concepts, within as well as between each of the four clusters of theories.