Formalism In Developing Countries

Abstract

The progressive values incorporated in the end point of Beeby's stages still remain active as a misguided direction for reforms that attempt to change formalistic teachers to other styles rather than upgrade their formalism. Chapter 2 describes the model of stages and its widespread acceptance in the educational literature in the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, there has been only limited acceptance of the formal properties of the stages model, except in some curriculum work derived from the World Bank, and little in the way of empirical research based on it. However, the progressive education values implicit in the model have persevered in quite different schools of educational thought. Some country-based research provides examples of classroom formalism giving a fuller picture of formalism in practice as well as six key findings that illustrate in some depth the nature of formalistic teaching and the merit of not making premature assumptions about it in any particular context.