Teachers Without Goals; Students Without Purposes

This is a short, beautifully written treatise that challenges the prevailing theory of knowledge that supports contemporary educational practice. This theory holds that schools and teachers should be responsible for transmitting to students a fixed body of knowledge (educational goals) . Perkinson challenges this theory with another one 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 student's heads but to help them expand and correct their existing knowledge. This alternative view of teaching can be accomplished by using a 3-step (presentation-critique-rebuttal) model of teaching.