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It has been nearly fifty years since the publication of "So Little for the Mind," Hilda Neatby's controversial conservative attack on what she understood as "progressive education." This paper argues that Neatby's book remains important reading despite its limitations and its context. Neatby's work represents what I call a "big dream" in educational thought. It is an educational text that is passionately anti-scientific in its structure and argument; it represents a fundamental liberal humanist critique of educational theory and research. Neatby's work is important for the way in which it initiates contemporary conservative educational critique in Canada, but also because it anticipates post-structural arguments about the radical intrusiveness of a focus on the "whole child" in the context of the modern educational apparatus. Finally, I critique some of Neatby's key assumptions and relate these to an autobiographical account of the educational experience of one small-town Nova Scotian family from the 1920s.

Item Type:	Refereed Article
Keywords:	history of education, Canada, Hilda Neatby, John Dewey
Research Division:	Education
Research Group:	Education systems
Research Field:	Continuing and community education
Objective Division:	Expanding Knowledge
Objective Group:	Expanding knowledge
Objective Field:	Expanding knowledge in education
UTAS Author:	Corbett, M (Professor Michael Corbett)
ID Code:	100571
Year Published:	2004
Deposited By:	Education
Deposited On:	2015-05-20
Last Modified:	2015-09-03
Downloads:	268 View Download Statistics