I hope I have produced a list of books, displayed here in alphabetical order, that are held to be important by today’s teachers. I make no apology for including the book I wrote with Kathryn Ecclestone, The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education because it is an influential critical work that has produced considerable controversy. If you disagree with this, or any other of my choices, please add your alternative “canonical” books on education.
Michael W. Apple – Official Knowledge: Democratic Education in a Conservative Age (1993)
Hannah Arendt – Between Past and Future (1961), for the essay “The Crisis in Education” (1958)
Matthew Arnold – Culture and Anarchy (1867-9)
Robin Barrow – Giving Teaching Back to the Teachers (1984)
Tom Bentley – Learning Beyond The Classroom: Education for a Changing World (1998)
Allan Bloom – The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (1987)
Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron – Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (1977)
Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis – Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (1976)
Jerome Bruner – The Process of Education (1960)
John Dewey – Democracy and Education (1916)
Margaret Donaldson – Children’s Minds (1978)