Education

Education by W. O. Lester Smith, published by Pelican in 1961, comes from that wonderfully earnest period when people still appeared to believe that education was something that could be examined, organised, improved and perhaps even understood if only enough sensible people in tweed jackets sat down and thought about it properly.

This is a vintage Pelican study of education and the ideas, institutions and purposes surrounding it, written at a time when Britain was busy reconsidering what schools were actually for, who should have access to what sort of education, and whether the whole population might conceivably benefit from being taught things. Radical stuff.

As with many Pelicans of the period, this was not intended as a decorative object for a fashionable coffee table. It was cheap, serious, accessible publishing for people who wanted to know something about the world without first enrolling at Oxford. The famous blue-spined Pelican series cheerfully tackled economics, politics, psychology, science, sociology and practically anything else that could be explained in a few hundred densely printed pages. Education is very much part of that tradition.

Read today, a 1961 book on education inevitably has another layer of interest. It comes from a Britain of grammar schools, secondary moderns, expanding universities, post-war optimism and formidable committees producing reports about the nation’s children. Some ideas will feel surprisingly familiar; others may remind the reader that sixty-five years is quite a long time in educational policy, even if governments continue enthusiastically rediscovering many of the same problems.

There is also something rather appealing about an era in which Penguin apparently assumed ordinary members of the public might voluntarily buy a paperback called Education, take it home, read it, and form considered opinions. Today we would presumably require a six-part podcast, an accompanying TikTok controversy and someone shouting about it on television.

A good piece of social and educational history, therefore, as well as a useful example of classic Pelican publishing. Ideal for teachers, educational historians, collectors of old Penguins and Pelicans, students of post-war Britain, or anyone who enjoys discovering what intelligent people were worrying about in 1961.

Condition: Fair. This is an old working paperback rather than a pristine collector’s trophy. Expect the normal evidence that it has survived since 1961: wear, ageing and the assorted indignities inflicted upon inexpensive paperbacks over more than six decades. It remains, however, a perfectly respectable survivor and has achieved something many educational theories have not: it is still here.

No ISBN, because in 1961 books were apparently expected to manage without one.

Sold by Crappy Old Books — rescuing perfectly good old books from a world increasingly convinced that everything worth knowing was invented last Tuesday.

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