Teachers Without Goals; Students Without Purposes

This is a short treatise that challenges the theory of knowledge supporting contemporary educational practice. This prevailing theory of knowledge holds that schools and teachers should be responsible for transmiting to students a fixed body of knowledge (educational goals). Perkinson challenges this theory with another developed by Karl Popper entitled evolutionary epistemology. This view holds that the teacher's job should not be to force predetermined knowledge (learning goals) into students' heads, but to help them expand and correct their existing knowledge. This alternative view of teaching should be accomplished using a three-step model of teaching. This model involves: presenting information to students; eliciting their responses to the information; using these responses as a basis for correcting and extending their existing knowledge. In the book's final section three scholars critique Perkinson's theory. He then makes a rebuttal to their critiques, thereby correcting and extending his theory. Thus the book aims to model the three-step theory he advocates.