About

‘Educando’ is Spanish for ‘the act of educating’ and it comes from the old Latin verb ‘Educare’, meaning ‘to educate’.

We preferred ‘educando’ for our website, because we see education as a lifelong activity. Also, the word conceals the famous ‘can-do’ slogan of the new American president Barack Obama.

A story worth telling

We see ‘education’ as a can-do philosophy which can help to solve many of the problems and right many of the wrongs of the current age.

The first part of the website will be a continuous blog on social problems of the day – from the Haringey child protection scandal, to the breakdown of the exam system, and onwards to the great recession and global warming.

Education is not only a way of mitigating the effects of these challenges and potential disasters, but also discovering a way out of the holes we find ourselves in.

A classic example of how this could be done was the way education came to Britain’s help at the height of the Second World War, with the passing of the 1944 Education Act. This set up a can-do system of public education which not only helped the shattered country reconstruct itself, but put a whole new generation of young people on the road to personal freedom and achievement.

Who we are

It is time now to introduce ourselves – the Educando team. I am George Low, a retired educational journalist, and my two colleagues are Michael Harrison, a retired chief education officer from Sheffield, and John Mann, a retired chief education officer of Harrow and former chief executive of the Schools Council.

All three of us are historians and much of the second part of the website will be devoted to the history of the LEAs in British education, 1944 – 88. This will be based on the written and oral memories of those who took part in this vital period when the structure of State education was rolled out after the war and then developed over time at local and national level.

Can we learn from the past?

The word ‘history’ comes from a Greek word meaning ‘inquiry’ and the subject for the earliest historians was an inquiry into the successes and failures of wars and peace in the Greek States like Athens and Sparta.

History was a lesson to politicians not to make the same mistakes again. In more recent times the philosopher Bertrand Russell was taught by his grandfather, a Whig statesman, that history was to be spelled and understood to mean ‘Hiss-Tory’.

And the great feminist Germaine Greer spells it as ‘his story’ – the tale of male dominance. She grew up to believe that geography was all about maps, and history all about chaps. But history as a curriculum subject in schools has been steadily reduced in quality and importance: today more English history is taught to immigrants than to primary or secondary students.

Reminiscences and reminders

Much of the latter half of the website will be devoted to the history of local education authorities. We hope that those who remember the heyday of the LEAs in England, Wales and Scotland, will join in with their reminiscences. As Joyce Morris, a 77 year old adult education teacher, wrote recently in the Independent newspaper: ‘My subject is reminiscence. A couple of hours of reminiscence, which include music, poetry, prose, reading, singing and sharing anecdotes from our lives, revives older people, even those with dementia, and restores self-esteem.’ Education through history can also shed light on, and offer some answers to, present-day problems.

Of course, the LEAs who ran British education are all history now. But we hope that readers and contributors to Educando may still find they leave many a good story behind them. We can’t change history, can we? ‘Yeah’, the new US president would say, ‘we sure can do’.