Don Carter
Dr Don Carter is currently senior lecturer in English education at the University of Technology Sydney. Previously, he was senior lecturer in English and literacy education at the Australian Catholic University and has held the positions of Inspector, English and Inspector, Registration & Accreditation at the NSW Education Standards Authority. He has taught English in government & non-government schools throughout NSW as a classroom and head teacher and has worked as an ESL/Multicultural Education consultant for the Department of Education (NSW).
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However, the education of children continued to be a contested site, with the “rationalist tradition as codified in the Edgeworth’s Practical Education and the Romantic reaction as set forth in The Prelude” (Richardson, 2004, p. 56) setting the scene for vigorous debate regarding the role of imaginative literature, abstract language and creative play in education.
A ‘re-reading’ of the rationalist tradition and Romantic notions of education and associated ideas such as a child’s ‘self-possession’, ‘self-government’ and ‘selfhood’ helps to illuminate discourses and practices that have been re-read, reinscribed, institutionalised and naturalised to various degrees in educational curriculum, particularly the school-based curriculum of subject English .
This paper ‘re-reads’ the often contradictory but sometimes confluent educational ideas of the rationalist and Romantic reactions to education from a contemporary perspective, seeking to shed light on how education, particularly in subject English, attended, and attends to the notion of the child as “psychic system”, one whose “education remains a very unpredictable effort” (Houswitscka, 2006, p. 82).