At 83, Philip W. Jackson has authored dozens of books on education philosophy, including the 1968 classic Life in Classrooms, still used by education majors around the globe.

What Is Education? marks his return to the basic questions he pondered half a century ago, beginning with his initial fascination with seminal American education theorist, John Dewey.

How has your philosophy of education evolved since you first encountered Dewey?

I read Dewey’s 1938 (What Is Education?) speech when I was training to become a teacher. It puzzled me because he was addressing professional educators, and he implored them to consider that basic question.

I started to look at Dewey’s early training as a philosopher. He was a Hegelian. So I tried to take Hegel seriously, and I eventually became more of a Hegelian than Dewey.

We hear a lot about the United States falling behind other countries in education.

The comparisons that are made – which place us unfavourably, according to some, on the international yardstick – do so only in subjects that are very easily measurable. It’s in those subjects that the other nations are beating us, as it were. But we’ve been worried about that recurrently.

I feel that’s unfortunate. It’s shortsighted. Are we really helping our students become more thoughtful, better civic citizens? Are we helping them to become wiser, rather than just full of information? Those are more interesting questions.